Teresa Rocha-Santos, researcher at CESAM/DQ and deputy director of CESAM, was invited by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) and the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) to serve as an expert and advisor during the closed meeting “Consultancy Meeting on Advances and Challenges in Monitoring and Controlling Microplastics in Food and Agriculture.”
The meeting aimed to summarise the state of the art, review monitoring technologies for food and soils, identify research and development needs, and issue recommendations for Member States under the Peaceful Uses Initiative project, dedicated to strengthening monitoring and control capacities for microplastics in food and agriculture.
Key scientific gaps identified included the need for robust monitoring of microplastic occurrence in food and agricultural soils, the uptake of microplastics by crops from soil and their transfer along the food chain, as well as the vectorisation of toxic additives and other contaminants by microplastics.
On the editorial front, Teresa Rocha-Santos serves as one of the two Editors-in-Chief of the new journal Journal of Hazardous Materials: Plastics, alongside Jun Wang (South China Agricultural University, College of Marine Sciences, Guangzhou). This new journal is launched as a partner journal of the Journal of Hazardous Materials and upholds equivalent editorial standards.