The world’s largest scientific society has recognised Professor Kevin Jones’s pioneering work on understanding, monitoring and regulating the spread of dangerous pollutants.

Professor Kevin Jones, one of the founding directors of the Lancaster Environment Centre, has received the American Chemical Society (ACS) Award for Creative Advances in Environmental Science and Technology.

The award celebrates Professor Jones’s work researching persistent organic pollutants (POPs) – chemical compounds that don’t degrade or degrade very slowly over time, and which accumulate in the food chain, posing threats to human health, top predators and the environment.

He said: “The winners are chosen by my peers, so that makes it extra special. The biggest honour is looking at the list of the great and the good who have won it before, and thinking ‘wow, I wouldn’t have thought of myself on that level.’”

The ACS award usually go to North American scientists, so it is an extra honour for a non-American to be chosen.

Professor Jones’s ‘lightbulb moment’ came in 1987 when he attended a session on POPs at a conference in Canada, about work tracking the spread of industrial discharges throughout the Great Lakes and into the food chain.

“I was fascinated by the interconnectivity of it all - how something released thousands of kms away was impacting the health and population of Beluga Whales in the St Laurence River.

“What interested me about them was that they are persistent and they accumulate in food chains, and that you get complicated mixtures of chemicals: you might start off with factory A releasing one chemical and factory B releasing another, and they then combine and accumulate into our body fat or tissues and the combined chemicals can have a different impact from them individually. The effects of these chemicals are often not immediate or acute, they can be subtle and long-term. I like the fact the world is not all black and white: not all chemicals we produce are bad and many are very useful, so a lot of our work has been trying to put them into perspective.”

At the conference, Professor Jones was inspired by how North American chemists, biologists, hydrologists, toxicologists and policy makers were working together on the issue.

“I hadn’t experienced that, in the UK at that time academic groups tended to see themselves as rivals, rather than combining in a team effort. That way of working influenced my whole career, and how we set up the Lancaster Environment Centre 20 years later.”

In the late 1980s there were no British academics and only a handful in Europe researching POPs. Professor Jones changed that, setting up flourishing research groups to investigate the physical, biological and chemical processes that govern how these chemicals spread and work their way up the food chain. In the past 30 years, he has collaborated with colleagues across the world and across disciplines, to deepen our understanding of these processes and to develop tools to measure and monitor them. And he has worked with environmental organisations, chemical companies and policy makers to develop effective ways to regulate the use of new and existing chemicals.

“This way of working forces me and my team to ask very practical questions, to be very grounded in why we need to know the answer, it makes the work quite relevant and applied as well as being fun and scientifically interesting.”

When he started out, the big fear was that a large part of the mass balance of POPs were being concentrated in the Arctic and reaching wildlife and humans there, dispersing via the atmosphere and condensing in the cold Arctic environment. His research was instrumental in putting this in context, showing that POPs were spreading via different routes and that other mechanisms were removing POPs from environmental circulation, or slowly degrading them, or moving large quantities around the world in wastes.

“We found much of the chemical balance was ending up in waste, with lots of European and American waste being exported to the developing world. We’ve done a lot of work in tracking the significance of that.

“Europe was one of first regions to bring in controls and regulations, which is partly why I refocused and worked in China and India, because those countries were coming later with their large-scale chemical manufacture and industrialisation. "

His work on POPs influenced both the Stockholm Convention, the UN’s international agreement to reduce the use of the chemicals, and international conventions on hazardous waste.

His group is now applying their approach to the fate, behaviour and significance of other chemicals, investigating how they are spreading, and their stability and persistence in the environment.

“We continue to do work on techniques for monitoring pollution in the environment, particularly techniques that can be applied quickly and easily, in countries that don’t have much budget for environmental research, monitoring and surveillance’.

His personal focus today is on supporting younger researchers to develop and flourish in the field.

“We’ve had a lot of people through the group, nearly 100 PhD students: that’s powerful because a lot of those are overseas students who come and train with us and then go back and are doing useful work in their own countries. We have visiting scientists from Asia and Africa, all in the lab together, some of whom go on to do projects together.

“Former members of the group now work in chemicals regulation and management, in the European Chemicals Agency and elsewhere. These people trained in Lancaster and are now applying their work in a way that has relevance and application to society. Many others are now leading academics and researchers nationally and internationally or work in important agencies and companies around the world.”

His interest in POPs was stimulated by an international conference: he is now known for hosting some of the most inspiring international get togethers in his field, according to Professor Steven Eisenreich, who nominated him for the ACS Award.

“No one in the field of environmental organic chemistry has forgotten the must attend, stimulating experiences of the bi-annual ‘informal’ workshops organised at Lancaster University on all aspects of POPs and attended by world-wide scientists and students. ‘