Dr Vera Silva of the SPRINT project recently presented at an event hosted by Pesticide Action Network Europe (PAN Europe) and the European Environmental Bureau (EEB), 'Rooting for healthy soils in Europe'. She presented some of our soil-related findings before participating in a panel discussion. Download the slides here.
We have produced a new summary factsheet based on a new paper led by our PhD researcher, Dennis Knuth, entitled 'Pesticide residues in organic and conventional agricultural soils across Europe: measured and predicted concentrations'.
Find out about other SPRINT publications here.
A new paper has been published by the SPRINT project, entitled 'Assessing pesticide residues occurrence and risks in water systems: A Pan-European and Argentina perspective'. We have produced a short summary factsheet which provides an overview of the key findings of this research - click here to read it.
Find out about other SPRINT publications here.
We were recently delighted to hear that Bruno Dujardin from the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) referred to SPRINT during his presentation at the recent 41st International Conference on Environmental & Food Monitoring in Amsterdam. He recognised our project as one of many research efforts assessing the risks of mixing chemicals outside of EFSA.
On 6 February 2024, the European Commission announced the withdrawal of the proposal for the EU Pesticide Reduction (Sustainable Use Regulation) (SUR), which had a central goal to halve the use and risk of pesticides in the EU by 2030. At the same time, the European Parliament just adopted, by a small margin, a proposal on the deregulation of new genomic techniques. Earlier in the year, it also became clear that the proposal for the Sustainable Food system law has been withdrawn from the European Commission work programme for 2024, thus effectively also shutting the initiative down for now. Effectively, this means that what is currently left on the negotiating table are technological solutions, i.e. new genomic techniques.
With this statement, the Sprint project consortium would like to emphasize the continued and urgent need to reduce the use of and risk from synthetic pesticides, based on our findings:
- A wide range of pesticides was detected in air, soil, water and also in homes near agricultural fields in different crop types in ten EU countries;
- Analysis of blood, urine and faeces from 10 EU countries showed that pesticide residues are taken up via dietary and non-dietary exposure routes;
- There is a concern regarding the potential impact of co-occurrence of pesticides in human and environmental matrices.
