Development of High Performance Sensors for Detection of Persistent and Mobile Chemicals in the Environment (SENSE-PMC)

Persistent and mobile chemicals (PMCs) are now found in tens of thousands of everyday products as well as in all relevant media of our natural environment, and their severe negative impacts on human health and global ecology is only now starting to be understood. As a consequence, understanding PMC sources and progressively reducing human and environmental exposure to PMCs has become an urgent challenge. Silos of knowledge have grown to address parts of the problem, including assessment of the effects of individual PMCs, and measurements to assess concentrations of some PMCs in selected environments and regions. Unfortunately, with the very high prevalence of PMCs in the environment and great diversity of sources of introduction, it is not yet possible to apportion impacts to the population-level use of products and release points (source-to-impact pathways), making it very difficult to prioritise response measures (such as regulatory bans, policy changes, substitutions in products most impacting health, understanding PMC intervention points for mitigation, and spatial PMC distribution patterns in the environment for remediation). This lack of scientifically sound source-to-impact knowledge prevents us from reaching maximum effectiveness in efforts for addressing the problem, as we lack knowledge about how exactly PMCs are reaching the environment, and what impacts different PMCs have in different European environments. At present, we have four points of knowledge about PMCs: broadly what impacts PMCs are likely to have on humans and the environment through individual assessment studies, roughly what PMCs are in many European products in common use, roughly how much is found in spot-checks of EU environments (for example, rivers, air, soil), and roughly how much European citizens are being exposed to (the “exposome”) through spot-checks and small-scale studies. What is most urgently lacking is to bring this knowledge together for coordinated and focused action addressing health impacts is accurate, fast, and robust sensing, to establish the pathways between sources and accumulation points and “hot spots” of contamination. The SENSE-PMC project will focus specifically on this aspect: to create new types of sensors customised for PMC detection in on-site environments, strategically placed to disambiguate impacts from possible sources. Data from new sensors will help build and refine assignment and pathway models, allowing product designers, and policy and regulatory personnel to explore the impacts of products in specified environments, enabling an effective and efficient reduction of PMCs in Europe and beyond.