THE CONSORTIUM
WESSLING Hungary Ltd.
WESSLING, with its immense expertise, offers a wide range of services and complex solutions in the areas of consulting, analyses and planning. As part of the WESSLING group, WESSLING Hungary Kft was founded in 1992. Its Environmental Business Unit offers a wide range of accredited analyses for water, soil, air, waste, wastewater, etc, as well as consulting. With more than 1200 m2 of laboratory area, we have 70 experienced colleagues working precisely with state of the art and well automatized technology to prepare, analyse and evaluate the results of more than 100.000 environmental samples per year. With two other similar sized business units (Food Safety and Pharmaceutical) we help each other in strong cooperation to develop interdisciplinary solutions. To be always on the cutting edge, it is vital for us to be a learning organization and improve our services like sampling and analysis. Thus, we always play a key role to develop and help the standardization of new methods, and identify novel pollutants. High scale remediation and water quality monitoring programs were also conducted under our supervision. One of our main specific objectives is to implement fast, cost effective, reliable and replicable analysis techniques for microplastics. In the last years, we gained significant experience regarding freshwater samplings of microplastics in the Central and Eastern European Region.
Role and Commitment of key persons
(including supervisors)
Zoltan Palotai finished his studies as a chemist in 1993 at Eotvos Lorand Unversity. He is the leader of the Environmental Analysis Business Unit at WESSLING Hungary Ltd., and has more than 25 years of experience in the field of environmental analysis. He built up the quality management system and he supervised the continuous implementation as a laboratory head for more than 10 years. He is a registered expert in the field of water-, soil-, air quality and waste management. He participated in several remediation projects also on international level.
Gabor Bordos has extensively working on the plastic issue since 2011 when he finished his BSc with a paper on plastic biodegradation. He continued this research during his MSc. After 2 years at a multinational company acting as HSE coordinator, he started at WESSLING Hungry as a project manager and beyond other projects started to work on the microplastic issue. In parallel, in the past 3 years he has utilised this expertise as a PhD student of Szent Istvan University. A well known microplastic expert in Central and Eastern European region, he has patented a freshwater sampling system. With his colleagues they are hardly working on to improve microplastic sampling and sample preparation in cost effective, reliable, replicable and fast manner.
Key Research Facilities, Infrastructure and Equipment
Several piece of different type large instruments: ICP-MS, GC-MS, HPLC-MS. General laboratory devices and equipment.
Wide range of sampling equipment for different environmental media.
Previous and current involvement in Research and Training Programmes
Amongst several national and international projects we have participated as consortium leader in the ”Development of a new risk management model system in order to increase water and food safety in the fish product area” and coordinator in the “Development of freshwater microplastic sampling and sample preparation” national funded projects. Consortium member of “Reducing mineral fertilisers and chemicals use in agriculture by recycling treated organic waste as compost and bio-char products (FP7 289785 REFERTIL).
Relevant Publications and/or Research / Innovation Product
Bordós, G., et al., (2019): Identification of microplastics in fish ponds and natural freshwater environments of the Carpathian basin, Europe. Chemosphere 216 pp. 110-116. doi.org/10.1016/j.chemosphere.2018.10.110, Q1, IF:4,42
Bordós G., Reiber, J. (2016): Microplastics in the environment and the food chain. Journal of Food Investigation (62) 2 pp. 1038-1045. (ISSN 0422-9576)
Bordós, G., et al., 2018, MICRO 2018. Fate and Impact of Microplastics: Knowledge, Actions and Solutions. 414 pp. MSFS-RBLZ. ISBN 978-84-09-06477-9. CC-BY-NC-SA.