C2TN was recently awarded a project funded by FCT in the 2022 Call for R&D Projects in All Scientific Domains.
Vânia Martins is the Principal Investigator for the winning project iMPact — Investigation of road traffic as a source of microplastics in the environment”.
Airborne microplastics (MPs) have been drawing increasing global attention due to their ubiquity and potential impacts on human health and environment. Vehicle tyre wear has been considered as one of the most dominant sources of MPs in the environment. However, studies focused on determining the contribution of this source to the bulk ambient air MPs concentrations is lacking. To date, few studies have studied the occurrence of MPs in the air, and none of them proceeded to the identification of their sources. To address these knowledge-gaps, the iMPact project aims firstly, to investigate the contribution of the road traffic as a potential vector of plastic pollution in the environment, and secondly, to extend the knowledge on MPs found in the air and to explore their occurrence in order to assess the potential personal exposure.
The project is a joint proposal of C2TN/IST-ID and CESAM/UA, with the support of four international centres of excellence: IDAEA-CSIC (Barcelona, Spain), Sunset Laboratory BV (Amsterdam, The Netherlands), VTI (Linköping, Sweden) and RIVM (Bilthoven, The Netherlands).