• Symposium​ in Bordeaux, already took place in June 2025.
• Summer school in Groningen from 29th June to 2nd July 2026 focusing on human health aspects of plastic pollution.
• Summer school in Galway in 2027 focusing on plastic pollution in the terrestrial and aquatic environments.

The summer schools are targeted to early career researchers involved in plastic research, from the macro and micro to the nano scales. Summer schools offer an immersive learning experience for early career researchers, enabling them to explore the topic from an interdisciplinary perspective while collaborating with peers from diverse cultural backgrounds. The program will balance theory, practice and networking opportunities: participants will attend a week of lectures, group works, workshops, hands-on activities, excursions and social events. The objective of these summer schools is two-fold: to share advanced knowledge on plastics fate and impacts, and to establish a dialogue with stakeholders to define common strategies to reduce plastic pollution.

These activities aim to strengthen interdisciplinary connections among participants from different scientific backgrounds and European countries, facilitating collaboration across the ENLIGHT university network. They also contribute to the three main goals of the project.

Outreach activities will involve citizens in macroplastic monitoring. Thus, social engagement will be boosted through educational digital content production and macroplastic sampling on soils, rivers and beaches. All collected litter will be classified based on a predefined and provided classification system by the researchers, based on the European Union’s Joint List for Beach Litter (Joint List of Litter Categories Manual) and an adapted version for soil monitoring from LM Ghent. Data will be analyzed for each country by the representative institute to estimate the quantity of macroplastic litter in soils, rivers or beaches. Besides, to encourage behavioural change, citizens will be provided with exercises and questionnaires about plastic pollution.

In addition, we aim to involve a new generation of secondary school students with this new emerging crisis. For this purpose, secondary school students will be trained in plastic pollution and microplastic sampling and analysis in water and soil ecosystems, supported by the development of specific educational material.

These activities contribute to objective 2 of PLASTIMPACT and will result in the generation of harmonized datasets on macroplastic litter and microplastic contamination across different environments in participating Enlight countries.