International Culture, sciences et société Sciences et recherche
Une conférence intitulée « Safe-and-Sustainable Chemicals : Is Environmental Chemistry Ready for the Challenge ? » aura lieu le vendredi 26 janvier à 11h30 en présentiel & visio (salle affichée dans le programme). Elle sera animée en anglais par Kathrin Fenner.
Résumé :
Ensuring the safety and sustainability of chemicals is a pressing concern in today's world. However, the current state-of-the-art chemical policy falls short in effectively managing hazardous chemicals. Therefore, the European Commission has recently outlined new trajectories for chemicals management in their “Chemicals Strategy for Sustainability Towards a Toxic-Free Environment” and the recently released “Framework for Safe-and-Sustainable by Design Chemicals and Materials”. Delivering on these concepts presents
a formidable challenge for environmental chemistry and (eco-)toxicology research. The talk will first outline the existing chemical policy and highlight its lack of efficacy
to manage hazardous chemicals adequately (Fenner and Scheringer, 2019,
DOI: 10.1021/acs.est.1c04903). Second, it will explain the hazard properties currently used in chemicals assessment and why persistence, which refers to the ability of chemicals
to persist in the environment for a long time, is a key hazard determining the potential harm chemicals to ecosystems and living organisms. The third part of the talk will present the challenges of evaluating chemical persistence, including its inherent environmental variability and the potential for formation of problematic transformation products,
and then introduce the own research on developing "new approach methodologies" (NAMs) for persistence assessment during the development of new chemicals, i.e., high-throughput testing and computer-supported predictions of biotransformation kinetics and pathways. The conference will end by discussing two alternative approaches for a more efficient and future-oriented hazard assessment, namely the P-sufficient approach (Cousins et al., 2019, DOI: 10.1039/c8em00515j) and the CTE/PTE approach (Escher, Fenner et al., 2023, DOI: 10.1007/s00204-023-03485-5).
Un replay sera disponible sur le site internet de la FERED.
