New equipment donated through a long-time international collaborattion will not only assist the University of the Free State’s (UFS) Centre for Environmental Management (CEM) to strengthen the education of postgraduate students but will also enable the centre to apply advanced methods for hazard identification in water quality assessments.

The equipment, which is used for purifying and concentrating water samples through a solid-phase-extraction process, was donated by the international office of the School of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the Dresden University of Technology (TU Dresden).

Dr Marinda Avenant, Programme Director at CEM, says the equipment was immediately put to use after arriving in South Africa last month when scientists from the CEM and TU Dresden conducted water quality and biomonitoring sampling in the streams around Phuthaditjhaba.

The collaboration between the UFS and TU Dresden started in 2009 and is maintained by the Institute of Hydrobiology (Dr. Dirk Jungmann) and the Institute of Water Chemistry (Dr. Hilmar Börnick), among others.

Read the full article on the website of our partners at UFS here.