Planet Protectors Assemble!

Michael Gonsior: Deciphering the marine organic carbon cycle is a missing link in truly understanding our oceans ability to store and sequester carbon. We need to find ways to predict the half-life of individual carbon molecules in the deep ocean to better define the marine carbon reactivity continuum and to give guidance. To date, not a single molecule is known in the rather vaguely defined refractory or recalcitrant deep-ocean DOM pool. This is critical to evaluate if marine carbon dioxide removal (marine CDR) ideas are effective or counterproductive. Unfortunately, it seems that numerous marine CDR projects are likely based on doubtful assumptions about the true age of deep ocean DOM.

Teresa Rocha Santos: Analytical science plays an important role in all environmental issues. For me, one critical current environmental issue is microplastic pollution. Dealing with particles from different polymers with different physicochemical properties (e.g. shape, color, size) and the lack of rapid screening devices make the fast determination of microplastics in environmental matrices difficult. Therefore, further developments in the analytical science field are needed to overcome this environmental issue. 

Torsten Schmidt: Analytical science is a necessary component of all endeavors tackling environmental issues to help prioritize the many tasks on the agenda, identify and track trends over space and time, and monitor efficacy of measures. Some of the issues that require expertise and further development in analytical science are outlined below.

Juliane Hollander: Analytical scientists should support necessary changes due to climate change, such as the energy transition, so that they are efficient and do not create new problems.

Emma Schymanski: Interestingly, I was asked 5 years ago to ponder the future of non-target screening (NTS) in 100 or even 25 years’ time and I remember thinking at the time “I hope by then the main challenges of NTS are solved and we can move onto other topics” (which would have been a very short review article so I wrote about something else instead). Reflecting on this now, perhaps I was a little optimistic. Today I feel we have made a lot of progress but we still have a number of issues to overcome before NTS moves into truly routine applications, but I certainly hope that this is now achievable within the next decade. Moving NTS into routine applications will enable (more broad) real-time monitoring of the environment and thus the establishment of early warning systems to better prevent or mitigate environmental catastrophes, or large-scale chemical contamination of human (or other) populations as seen in Dark Water and other films, through to earlier recognition and prevention of regrettable substitutions. I believe we have many of the “puzzle pieces” already available and the general awareness, willingness and know-how – a concerted community effort at harmonizing and transforming NTS into a routine effort could really revolutionize environmental but also personal health monitoring. I believe analytical science can help us achieve this in the next 10 years if we focus our efforts well. It will be interesting to revisit this in 10 years and see if we managed!

Stefan van Leeuwen: I believe society needs to re-think on what basis chemicals are allowed on the market. The speed of designing new chemicals is enormous, and environmental scientists cannot keep up with that. We’re still investigating problems from the past (PCBs, BFRs, etc) while at the same time new pollutant issues rise. PFAS are an explicit example of that. With such challenges ahead, analytical scientists can develop smart and comprehensive approaches to address the ever expanding chemical space.

Janusz Pawliszyn: Pollution. Develop sustainable portable technologies to monitor pollution and its effect on human health (exposome).

Susan Richardson: Identifying chemicals in water that no one yet knows about could be impacting human and ecological health. Our work on DBPs in drinking water is an example of this, and another notable recent example is the work that Katherine Peter, Ed Kolodziej, Jen McIntyre, and Nat Scholz did in identifying 6ppd-quinone as the tire wear chemical killing coho salmon in the Northwest. There are many compounds left to discover!

Diana Aga: Identification and quantification of currently “unknown” contaminants and their transformation products that are toxic, even at trace levels, are highly challenging especially when they occur in complex mixtures. There are still many pollutants that remain unaccounted for in the environment, which are causing deleterious effects on humans and wildlife. Analytical science can help answer many of these environmental mysteries if we use complementary techniques so that we can detect both polar and nonpolar, volatile and non-volatile, organic and inorganic pollutants.