ZeroPM

The Zero Pollution of Persistent, Mobile substances (ZeroPM) project aims to protect water from contamination with persistent, mobile substances. The consortium of 15 institutions from the fields of higher education, research and technology started work on this project in October 2021. ZEROPM is scheduled to be completed in September 2026.

Persistent mobile substances (in short: PM) and PFAS (a group of industrial chemicals comprising thousands of substances) have been used for a long time in various industrial and household applications. There is concern not only because these substances are highly persistent and durable (they accumulate in oceans and in the groundwater) but also because there is increasing evidence that they have adverse effects on human health. PM and PFAS can reach the human body via the food chain and remain in the body for a long time. 

This project aims at 

•    gaining a better understanding of how the stakeholders involved (i.e. industry, regulators and the public) perceive the risks and benefits;
•    improving predictions about the readiness for and possible responses to change;
•    identifying products and applications that are important enough that we accept PM chemicals in their manufacture ('essential use items');
•    gaining a better understanding of the impact of labels, which are designed according to psychological guidelines, on people's willingness to buy a product. The aim is to develop best-practice examples of communicating via warning labels.
•    The central task of Sabine Pahl, Mathew White and postdoctoral researcher Ellise Suffill in the project is to bring in an environmental psychology perspective while investigating risk perception, risk communication and behavioural change.

ZeroPM will be a groundbreaking project enabling the ambitions of the European Union's Green Deal strategy so that zero pollution through persistent and mobile substances becomes a reality. 
ZeroPM will interlink and create synergies between three strategies to protect the environment and human health from persistent, mobile substances: 

•    As a strategy to prevent, ZeroPM will develop scientific, policy and market tools for the substitution and mitigation of prioritised persistent and mobile substances to develop safer and sustainable alternatives.
•    as a strategy to prioritise, ZeroPM will identify the groups of persistent and mobile substances that require action most urgently while considering the sustainability aspects of removing these substances.
•    as a strategy to remove, ZeroPM will explore real-word scale remediation solutions and explore the limits of their sustainability.

ZeroPM will integrate these three strategies through an evidence-based multilevel framework. The framework will guide policy, technological and market incentives to minimise the use of and the emissions and pollution caused by entire groups of persistent and mobile substances. Through this systemic approach to chemical pollution, the EU will be better able to avoid regrettable substitution (substituting one problematic chemical for another) and regrettable remediation (investing in remediation efforts that cause more damage than the substance itself).
The methods used during the project include a quantitative survey carried out in Sweden, Germany and the Netherlands as well as interviews and surveys conducted with experts and non-experts. Various experiments will investigate different communication strategies and labelling.

ZeroPM is financed by the EU Horizon 2020 research framework programme as part of the Societal Challenges Programme (H2020-EU.3.5. - SOCIETAL CHALLENGES - Climate action, Environment, Resource Efficiency and Raw Materials), which includes a commitment to a zero-pollution ambition for a toxic-free environment (https://cordis.europa.eu/programme/id/H2020_LC-GD-8-1-2020/en). The research volume of ZeroPM amounts to about EUR 11.6 million, of which about EUR 600,000 are allocated to the Environmental Psychology Group at University of Vienna.

Duration: 1 October 2021 to 30 September 2026
Funding: Horizon 2020, EU
ZeroPM-Website