The Norman Network: Europe’s Safety Net 
in Ecotoxicology

An article from carl 03|2025

by Carolin Sage

The NORMAN network is an association of researchers and service providers in environmental analysis. It aims to collect valid international data on environmental chemicals. But how can you collect reliable and comparable information on this throughout Europe and assess where which chemicals occur and in which concentrations in bodies of water and in the soil?

In Europe, there are about thirty thousand registered or approved chemical compounds. The majority of these are organic molecules, which occur in industrial processes, such as in the production of pharmaceuticals, or in the production of cosmetics, biocides or pesticides. Many of these compounds are very stable, some even over decades. It is often not initially clear if they are harmless to people and nature, especially in the case of new substances. Nonetheless, they are released into the environment and can sometimes permanently accumulate in food chains, get into marine depressions through rivers or pollute our groundwater and drinking water reserves. Chemical compounds can also change over time through reactions, if they are exposed to UV light, for example, or are introduced into acidic soils. Furthermore, they can be converted into metabolites through metabolic processes.

For decades, people, especially in industrial nations, have released chemicals into the environment without knowing how they will behave there. Given current knowledge about environmental toxins, this sounds extremely naive, but is a bit easier to understand if you consider that, until the turn of the millennium, environmental analysis only offered methods to analyse a few select substances. You could absolutely determine which substances were contained in an individual sample, but there were no broad screening methods yet. In the early 2000s, high resolution mass spectrometry (HRMS) and the more efficient liquid chromatography (LC) replaced the previously preferred gas chromatography (GC) as the method of choice in environmental analysis. This meant non-target screening for unknown substances was finally possible [1] and formed the basis for a shift in paradigm in environmental policy. Instead of first acting when there was reason for concern, the European Commission began to set up committees and instruments to enable the preventive and systematic.collection of information on substances. The approach of the new chemicals policy was thus to handle pollutants in an international framework that covered all kinds of reagents and uses and extended beyond the current sector-specific regulations.

In light of this, the NORMAN network (Network of reference laboratories, research centres and related organisations for the monitoring of emerging environmental substances) was also founded in 2004 [2]. NORMAN is an association of research institutions, nonovernmental organisations, authorities and reference labs from over a hundred institutions from more than twenty participating countries. Researchers and service providers from multiple disciplines contribute to NORMAN, in order to promote the exchange of data and information on emerging pollutants.

“Our monitoring also includes substances that slip through the net when it comes to regulation,” explains Jan Koschorreck from the Federal Environment Agency in Berlin, who is also a member of the NORMAN steering committee. It’s not just about individual substances that are known to be toxic, but about obtaining a comprehensive picture of which mixtures of substances people and the environment are exposed to. This is an important difference in the consideration, because today, we assume that it can be harmful to be exposed to many substances simultaneously, each of which would not have been problematic on their own.

At present, the NORMAN network comprises eight different working groups, which are looking into contamination of maritime waters, interior pollutant loads and sampling methods, for example. This wasn’t always the case, because NORMAN began as a project of the European Commission for the further development of research and technology. Originally, the programme was focussed on internal waterways, in the context of the Water Framework Directive, but even then as a science-to-Policy project. Additional working groups have gradually been added.
 

Initially, the research initiative started its activities with financial support from the European Commission. But since 2009, NORMAN has been operating independently. “We are financed exclusively through member contributions and have an amount in the low six-digit range available to us each year,” said Koschorreck. In light of the fact that nearly one hundred research institutions, authorities and reference labs are involved in the network and want to be coordinated, that’s a very manageable amount. “Research groups in particular tend to use the funding provided to them by NORMAN as seed money,” he continues. This means they use the money first of all to breathe life into a project idea and then to acquire further financial backers for upscaling. But the results still benefit the network.
 

Those involved in the NORMAN network are using their ecotoxicology analyses to develop an overview of which substances occur where in the environment and in which concentrations. By doing this, they want to create a basis for later risk assessments, forging a bridge between research and political decision-makers [3].

A lot of things have to be regulated in detail: different substances occur in different regions, and both marine water samples and fresh water samples must be analysed, as well as soil samples and samples from furnishings and construction materials. The participating institutions also have different levels of familiarity with the analysis methods, and the measuring infrastructure differs from country to country, sometimes significantly. For a successful cooperation, these different circumstances must be aligned with each other. For Jan Koschorreck, it goes without saying that the NORMAN members have learnt this over the years. He explains that, in the end, it simply isn’t conducive for each lab to use a different measuring strategy. “We must be able to compare our data!” he stresses. A central request by the NORMAN network is therefore to check new measurement methods in lab comparisons and agree on measurement reports, in order to obtain uniform data [4].

If a new, potentially harmful substance is identified, such as during non-target screening, fundamental questions must first be clarified before the actual risk assessment investigation can begin: with which measurement methods and measurement report can the substance be documented? Which methods can be used to provide valid results and also meet the required quality criteria? These are exactly the type of questions being asked by the employees of the NORMAN network. They also speak with environmental authorities and examine research projects that have already been started regarding the new substances. They collect all this data and compile it in their databases. Today, the NORMAN network’s database contains overten million data records on over five hundred different individual substances [3]. It is the largest database of environmental pollutants worldwide.

“When we have gained extensive knowledge of where a substance occurs, in which concentrations and how it behaves in the environment, we can begin to prioritise,” explained Koschorreck. To do this, it is not only important to know whether a substance is acutely toxic to people and the environment. It’s also important to keep an eye on any decomposition products and investigate whether substances accumulate in the environment and how they disperse there. Jan Koschorreck explains this using an example: “Previously, predominantly long chain PFAS were recorded in the environment, having accumulated in soil and fish. Today, we are dealing more with short chain PFAS, which are more mobile and can shift into the groundwater.”

So, over the years, a considerable volume of information on pollutants has been collected at NORMAN. Support was also received from other substance monitoring programmes that already existed in the EU and worldwide. There were also already countless research projects on various substances, but the data was not bundled systematically in one location [6] and was not easily accessible either for other researchers or for political decision-makers. The NORMAN network set itself this task and, alongside the central EMPODAT database [7], also created the NORMAN Database System [8] with special search engines in which data on chemical and biological substances can be found. Researchers can therefore quickly access the desired information, such as via the Ecotoxicology Database, a platform for the systematic recording and evaluation of ecotoxicity studies. And targeted searches are also possible in various lists of substances for screening of suspicious substances (Suspect List Exchange). Even anyone who is explicitly only interested in bacteria that are resistant to antibiotics or chemicals indoors will soon find what they’re looking for in the NORMAN databases, because the network has designed special search engines for this in the Database System.

The employees of the NORMAN initiative are focused, at least in part, on sector-specific substances. Some are contained in furniture or floor coverings, while others are found in waste water. “We are all working in the field of environmental analysis, but there is a wide variety of different areas of expertise within this,” explains Jan Koschorreck. The exchange of information is also guaranteed through workshops and the annual conference. In addition, members can read the NORMAN Bulletin on Emerging Substances to gain an overview of the latest scientific findings, gaps and main research priorities for a variety of issues. Both the databases and the bulletin are publicly accessible, because transparency is central to NORMAN’s mission.

Each year, the network also provides its new data to the European Commission’s information platform for chemical monitoring (IPCheM) [9], so that it can be integrated there. The data collected in the IPCheM later flows into the risk assessment and thus also the possible regulation of substances or groups of substances.

To enable a more effective risk assessment throughout Europe and to network the individual countries more closely together, the European PARC initiative (Partnership for the Assessment of Risks from Chemicals) was invoked in 2022 [10, 11]. NORMAN supports this initiative with its expertise: “One of our common goals is to establish an early warning system,” said Jan Koschorreck. Already today, data from other projects shows how important it is for analyses to be performed internationally: “If colleagues in Basel look at samples from the Rhine during non-target screening and see that a Swiss company has released a substance into the river, then we know today that the wave will reach North-Rhine Westphalia a few days later.”

In the past, we learned that it is not enough to only ever measure and investigate individual substances. Today, we are learning to view individual substances in the context of a mixture of many substances to which we are exposed. This is significantly more complex and can succeed only through international collaboration. It also depends on networking between the actors from environmental analytics and politics. 

[1] M. Krauss et al., 2010, Anal. Bioanal. Chem. 397, 943-951
[2] www.norman-network.net#
[3] V. Dulio et al., 2018, Environ. Sci. Eur. 30, 1-13
[4] J. Hollender et al., 2023, Environ. Sci. Eur. 35, 75
[5] B. Rey et al., 2019, NORMAN Bulletin 6, 7-9
[6] www.norman-network.com/sites/default/files/files/NORMAN_Position_Paper_FINAL.pdf
[7] www.norman-network.com/nds/empodat/ 
[8] www.norman-network.com/nds/
[9] www.ipchem.jrc.ec.europa.eu 
[10] www.eu-parc.eu
[11] V. Dulio et al., 2020, Environ. Sci. Eur. 32, 1-11

Image credits: Adobe Stock, littlewolf1989 / APRONA (Observatoire de la nappe d’Alsace) / Adobe Stock, AlDa.videophoto