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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. 

Our SPRINT partner in Denmark has a brand new job oppurtunity!

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The Department of Agroecology at Aarhus University, Denmark, offers an attractive career opportunity for promising and skilled researchers. We invite applications for a position as Tenure Track Assistant Professor focused on strengthening our research in soil spectroscopy and use of remote and proximal sensing for soil characterisation. The position is a career development position with the possibility of transition to a tenured associate professorship and will be available from 01-08-2024 or as soon as possible thereafter.

For more information please check their website

71 factsheet

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. 

 

Copy of 71 factsheet 1

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 Earlier in the year, it also became clear that the proposal for the Sustainable Food system law has been withdrawn from the European Commission work programme for 2024, thus effectively also shutting the initiative down for now.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.