Motivation

Due to the increasing entry of microparticles into the environment, sensitivity to the health risk of particles in air, water and soil has increased significantly over the last two decades, both in society and in science. There is now no question that microparticles can also have a harmful effect on living beings through specific mechanisms. However, this environmental risk must be assessed using appropriate methods tailored to these mechanisms.

Challenges

  • The ecotoxicological effect and exposure assessment of particulate pollutants involves significantly more uncertainty factors than that of dissolved chemicals, which makes reliable risk assessment difficult.
  • The potential mechanisms of action of the microparticles are often not clear, involving combined direct chemical and mechanical as well as indirect effects (e.g. feed dilution; binding of nutrients) that are difficult to separate.
  • Since organisms in their natural environment are also exposed to organic and mineral microparticles that are similar to particulate pollutants introduced by humans in terms of their physical and chemical properties as well as their ecotoxicological behavior, it is important to distinguish pollutant-specific effects from general particle effects.
  • Through increased knowledge about the effectiveness or effect-relevant properties of natural particles and the use of application-specific, tailor-made natural reference particles in ecotoxicological tests, specific effects of particulate pollutants can be identified.

How NatuReP contribute to solve problems

  • Assessment of natural microparticles, which are similar in their morphological and physical properties to selected particulate pollutants, in terms of their ecotoxicological behavior in various environmental matrices (water, sediment, soil)
  • Evaluation of suitability as reference particles for the ecotoxicological assessment of particulate pollutants.
  • To this end, we apply (1) state-of-the-art analytical methods for characterizing microparticles (chemical, physical, transport), (2) a wide range of ecotoxicological test systems (with organisms of different organizational and trophic levels), (3) and suitable statistical methods for correlating particle properties and –effect.
  • The aim of this project is to identify naturally occurring particles to serve as tailored reference which can be recommended for use in the environmental risk assessment of particulate pollutants in practice.