The stakeholder engagement event on microplastics was organized by Fraunhofer UMSICHT and UNESCO-IHP under the LimnoPlast project on “Microplastics In Europe’s Freshwater Ecosystems: from sources to solutions” on 16th of February 2023.

The LimnoPlast project aims to bring environmental, technical, and social sciences together with the vision to transform a new understanding of microplastics to innovative solutions.

The objective of the stakeholder roundtable is to discuss technical, political, societal and behavioural measures on microplastic emission reduction and disseminate these measures to stakeholders, who are involved in the value chain in related sectors. Aimed at translating science into practice, the roundtable will provide a platform to bring together stakeholders to discuss efficiency and effectiveness of these measures, and to identify key actors for each intervention.

For this roundtable, two sectors were selected as sources of microplastic emissions to the environment: tires; synthetic textile clothing; and expanded polystyrene (EPS)-based building insulation materials. 18  participants from producers, researcher, NGO and policy-makers were join into the thematic sessions. The preliminary results from this event were shared at the final “LimnoPlast” conference in Paris in March 2023 and the researchers will continue to draw on the results of the dialogue event within the “LimnoPlast project”.