Our PLASYS24 focus

Similarly to climate change, the complexity and multi-faceted nature of plastic pollution makes it often extremely difficult to understand and even more to quantify the underlying mechanisms. In these cases it is imperative to resort to models - abstract simplification of the phenomena involved - to describe what happens and how everything is interconnected. Indeed, in the last decade we have seen a proliferation of novel models covering aspects of plastic pollution, from local to global, from upstream to downstream, from micro to macro. Some are pure and major academic advances - some are embedded in methodologies and toolkits intended to help governments, industry, NGOs and practitioners to assess their practices, formulate action plans, decide and implement policies and engineering interventions or change practices in general.

The landscape of knowledge is exciting but also very confusing - there is urgent need for comparative consideration and application of models, methodologies and toolkits, their validation on the ground with measurable data and stocktaking of lessons learned form their application. Such efforts can contribute to the much needed harmonisation amongst them, eventually all incorporating the best possible science, advancing their interoperability and creating the basis for standardisation in the near future. At PLASYS24 we explore the cutting edge developments of models and their harmonisation. 

Interconnected to the modelling efforts, are the needs to monitor the nature and extent of plastic pollution in all environmental media (water, land, air) and its sources and pathways. Also the progress toward targets set for ending plastic pollution. Monitoring need to be informed by modelling and visa versa, some model aspects and core outcomes have to be able to be calibrated and validated by data obtained form regular routine monitoring. Again the multiplicity of approaches to monitoring makes it of ten challenging to understand what is fit for purpose and how informative it can be. Harmonisation efforts are of paramount importance here as well - with some good progress established already for microplastics, but loads still to be achieved overall: Sensor based AI and satellite techniques are opening great new opportunities to cost-effective monitoring.