Design of chemical reagents for fast and sensitive detection of pesticides in water and food

Nicklas Selander (Organic chemistry)

Anneli Kruve (MMK)

This proposal addresses two focus areas of SUCCeSS: Sustainable food and water systems and Data driven circular and sustainable design. The sustainability goals put forward by the United Nations stress the need for clean and accessible drinking water and keeping the seas clean while still enabling industrial growth.

The focus of this project is on sustainable development of chemical reagents for detection of glyphosate, the most widely used pesticide in the world, which affects the abundance of aquatic life as well as the quality of drinking water for human consumption. We will focus on developing high sensitivity, synthetically easily accessible, non-hazardous reagents for the determination of glyphosate.

To achieve this, we will employ machine learningto generate and evaluate chemical reagents in-silico and allow the algorithms to iteratively learn which structures provide highest sensitivity while having high sustainability index.

The machine learning algorithms will allow evaluation of thousands of chemical reagentswithout producing chemical wasteand the most promising reagents will be synthesized as well as their suitability in the practical analysis of glyphosate will be evaluated. 

Forest materials: opportunities and obstacles for a circular economy in Sweden - FORCES

Mika Sipponen (MMK)

Marlene Ågerstrand (ACES)

Tiina Häyhä (SRC)

FORCES aims to assess opportunities and obstacles for forest materials as enablers of a circular economy. We will  do  this  by  cross-fertilising  three research groups with complementary and highly relevant expertise:

• materials chemistry
• chemical and environmental regulation
• sustainability science

to explore and initiate new interdisciplinary research directions to support the continued development of sustainable and circular forest materials.

Safe water reuse in a changing environment –microbial degradation of contaminants in European rivers

Malte Posselt (ACES)
Florian Roth (Baltic Sea Center)

Increasing water reuse is at the heart of Europe's climate change adaptation strategy to counter water scarcity. Sustainable and safe reuse is hampered by a complex mixture of contaminants that reach recipient waters due to their incomplete elimination in wastewater treatment plants (WWTPs).

Natural biodegradation by microorganisms is a major determinant of the environmental impact of these contaminants and a precondition for safe water reuse. Microbial diversity and availability of natural organic carbon appear to promote degradation (Posselt et al. 2020, Schaper et al. 2019).

However, due to the lack of knowledge onthe interplay of contaminantproperties, microbial activity, background carbon and nitrogen loads, and changing environmental conditions, it is still not possible to reliably estimate current, let alone future, in situ degradation rates.

In this 2-year project, we will consolidate expertise from three research institutes at Stockholm University to investigate the contribution of natural contaminant biodegradation to municipal wastewater purification for water reuse.

Our overall aim is to, combine chemical analytical, biogeochemical and molecular tools togenerate andlink knowledge on the interplay of riverine microbial communities, carbon cycling and contaminant biodegradation -which is a crucial prerequisite for safe and sustainable reuse.