The DCU Water Institute was delighted to co-host an IMPACT workshop webinar on the 10th of May 2022.
We wish to thank all of our informative speakers and attendees who joined us for an incredibly informative and inspiring series of discussions on novel monitoring practices for, and the best available evidence on, the occurrence of contaminants of emerging concern (CECs) in our environment.
The sessions were facilitated by Dr. Blanaid White of the DCU Water Institute who was joined by renowned subject experts from the Catalan Institute for Water Research in Spain, Imperial College London, Trinity College Dublin and the EPA with a number of DCU Water Institute project participants including Prof. Fiona Regan, Dr. Helena Rapp Wright and PhD candidate Imogen Hands.
The broad variety of talks ranged from cutting edge research on the use of rapid and large scale monitoring practices for CEC determination, to investigation of passive sampling to detect CECs, to acute ecotoxicity studies of CECs on invertebrates. The results presented show the breadth and scale of which CECs are present in the aquatic environment, and highlight the importance of taking steps to improve water quality worldwide.
Despite the scale and ubiquity of emerging contaminants in the aquatic environment, it is inspiring to see so many great minds working towards the shared goal of protecting our most precious resources. With the topic of clean, safe water gaining public interest in recent years, dissemination of this research is of ever growing importance.
The webinar closed with a round table discussion on future directions of CEC analysis. This included further advances and next steps in the areas of suspect screening and non-target analysis, as well as employment of ecotoxicity studies and different forms of sample collection such as passive sampling which were investigated through the IMPACT project.
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