The American Chemical Society has just revealed that Professor Frank Wania of UTSC is one of two winners of the 2025 Outstanding Achievements in Environmental Science and Technology Award, an honour he shares this year with Professor David Sedlak from the University of California, Berkeley.
“Professors Sedlak and Wania are richly deserving of this recognition; the story of our community cannot be told without including the outstanding contributions by these colleagues,” read the January 14th announcement by Bryan W. Brooks and Julie B. Zimmerman, available now for reading on the Environmental Science and Technology site.
The Outstanding Achievements in Environmental Science and Technology Award celebrates the work of people who act as agents of change in realizing sustainable solutions to problems like climate change and biodiversity loss, or the intersections of environmental justice and human health. “These issues are global in reach, intricate in their interconnections, and deeply entrenched in social, economic, and political systems,” said the announcement.
Wania said the research recognized by this award strives to support keeping remote regions and the people living in them as free from organic contaminants as possible. “Work on that topic began with my doctoral thesis research, and I have continued to pursue it throughout the past thirty years.”
His goal in maintaining such an intense focus throughout three decades is clear: "What I hope is that our research can inform and support the global regulatory regime, in particular the Stockholm Convention for Persistent Organic Pollutants”, he said.
“One way we do this is by providing theoretical and empirical tools that aid in establishing whether a chemical has the potential to reach remote regions. Another is to provide tools that can be used in the monitoring of the effectiveness of global chemical regulation.”
Persistent organic pollutants (POPs) are toxic chemicals that adversely affect human health and the environment around the world. Because they can be transported by wind and water, most POPs generated in one country affect people and wildlife far from where they are used and released. The chemicals persist for long periods of time in the environment and can accumulate and pass from one species to the next through the food chain.
Some of the best-known POPs are PCBs and DDT, according to the US Environmental Protection agency website, which--like the Stockholm Convention itself--tracks these intensely dangerous substances, infamous or otherwise.
The recognition from ACS was applauded by Derek Muir of Environment and Climate Change Canada, who has an appointment as an adjunct professor at the U of T Department of Chemistry. “Professor Wania’s publications on global modelling are cited in almost all of the (30+) chemical risk profiles prepared by the Stockholm Convention on Persistent Organic Pollutants (POPs). He has led or co-led strong field-oriented sampling programs on organic contaminants, most recently in the St Lawrence Estuary and Salish Sea, investigating the levels of flame retardants in air and water and interpreting the results in terms of the physical-chemical properties of the contaminants.”
In other words, Wania has shaped the language and thinking around tracking and assessing POP movement through planetary ecosystems. He was a contributor to the development of the concept of measuring “Characteristic Travel Distance” (CTD) as a metric for assessment of the long-range transport of contaminants. He also introduced the concept of the “Arctic Contamination Potential” (ACP), now in widespread use, which quantifies the fraction of the globally emitted amount of a chemical that will accumulate in the Arctic.
The ACS announcement celebrated these far-reaching impacts of Wania’s research: “Such contributions are particularly important as we aim to design less hazardous substances and replace organic chemicals that are persistent and likely to be transported at the global scale.”
With so many achievements of note, Dr. Muir concluded it was impossible to briefly encapsulate the impact of Wania’s research. "His work has had a huge influence on the risk and exposure assessment of chemicals globally.”
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