For the first time, the TRA Sustainable Futures at the University of Bonn has awarded the Klaus Toepfer Research Prize honoring excellent ideas from sustainability research. "The innovative and transdisciplinary character of a project is the most important prerequisite for being selected for funding," says TRA speaker Prof. Dr. Joachim von Braun. "Melanie Braun's project fits perfectly with our focus on modeling, foresight and risk assessment capacity, as it provides for the first time data on soil pollution by nanoplastics that can later be used for forecasting and other purposes."
The Transdisciplinary Research Area receives support from Klaus Töpfer, who donates his name to the award. A former federal minister for the environment and executive director of the United Nations Environmental Program, he maintains a long-standing friendly relationship with the University of Bonn, where he was, among other things, the first chair of the International Advisory Board of the Center for Development Research (ZEF).
At the award ceremony, he now emphasized: "We are currently experiencing a turning point in time with many crises taking place in parallel. Science has an enormous role to play in finding solutions for overcoming these crises." Innovative science, he said, is about being open to change and not defending yesterday's results to the last. "In the question of how we can still feed the growing world population in the future, research on soil is immensely important," he says.
Determination of very small plastic in the soil
Melanie Braun has been working on the analysis of plastics in soil, ever since she completed her doctorate at the Institute of Crop Sciences and Resource Conservation (INRES) at the University of Bonn. "There has been evidence that soils receive plastic input, mainly by agricultural practices like application of sewage sludge and compost as well as irrigation with wastewater," she explains. "As soils are one of the most important bases of our food production, there is an urgent need to investigate the prevalence of colloidal and nano-sized plastics in soil, to adequately safeguard worlds food production."
Until now, however, it has not been possible to quantify such small pieces of plastic in soil. With the help of the Klaus Töpfer Research Award, Melanie Braun now wants to develop an analytical method for this. In the coming years, fluorescent dyes should make it possible to first identify different types of plastic and then determine their quantity.
Transdisciplinary research at the University of Bonn
No scientific discipline alone can answer major societal challenges and the complex questions they raise. This is an idea that the University of Bonn took as an opportunity to establish six university-wide Transdisciplinary Research Areas (TRA) with different thematic focuses two as part of its excellence strategy. One of these is the Transdisciplinary Research Area “Sustainable Futures". It networks and promotes researchers from different disciplines and faculties in order to jointly work on institutional, science- and technology-based innovations for sustainability.
