Recap of our Kick-off event

At our Kick-off event of the Belgian Plastic Pollution Research Community, we had the pleasure and the honor to welcome 40 people from 13 Belgian institutes. A broad range of research fields were represented ranging from ecotoxicological effect studies, to monitoring of plastic in diverse environmental matrices, to interactions between sedimentary rocks and microplastics.

Our common goal, to understand and tackle plastic pollution, is complex and multifaceted, and requires a multifaceted, interdisciplinary and collaborative approach to tackle it. Amongst our participants we clearly felt the enthousiasm and drive to reach our goal!

An interactive discussion to get to know each other

We started our interactive program with a discussion in 5 thematic focus groups with the aim to map the Belgian expertise, identify strenghts and challenges and explore how our future research community could look like.

Inspiring keynote presentation on successfull research communities

We had the honor to welcome Frank Pierik (ZonMW) and Juliette Legler (Utrecht University) from the MOMENTUM research community. They elaborately explained their trajectory from the start of the breakthrough projects up until the MOMENTUM 3.0 consortium.

Pieter Rondou, coordinator of CRIG, the Cancer Research Institute Ghent, explained their bottom-up approach to start a research community, initiated by scientists and now celebrating their 10th anniversary in October.

Two great examples with a lot of lessons to be learned!

Future perspectives

Following a wonderful lunch, we had a second discussion group in the garden focussing on the goals of plastic pollution within Belgium linked to monitoring, ecotoxicological effects and human health effect assessment. Within this discussion we pinpointed steps to reach the goal, defined challenges and explored how the research community could support in these steps and challenges. We brainstormed on possible ways forward for this research community. The main points to take into account, based on our discussion, are to have a formal setting or mandate and including all stakeholders to enrich the value of the community.

We ended this inspiring day with a wonderful reception at the Botanical Garden of Ghent University.

An inspiring and engaging day! Thanks to everyone present! Thanks to all people supporting behind the scences!