Anders Baun is trained to say no. Not because he wants to be contrary, but because being able to do so is a prerequisite when you leave your field of research to embark on a completely new one. And that is exactly what the DTU professor has done—not just once, but twice in his career.
"Originally, I worked with ecotoxicology and risk assessments in connection with soil and groundwater contamination at landfills. My real expertise is crustaceans and algae and the toxicity of chemicals to them," he explains.
The first radical change of course came in the early 2000s, when he was a first mover in researching the potential environmental impact of nanomaterials at a time when most people thought it was almost silly to consider the subject a potential environmental problem.
"There was simply no one, including me, who had questioned the safety of such small particles," explains the professor, who through his work on the subject has created crucial knowledge about how nanoparticles behave and what potential dangers they pose.
Today, his name appears on more than 100 research articles on the subject. For his work, he received Denmark's largest environmental award worth DKK 250,000 from the Aase and Ejnar Danielsen Foundation in 2008.
"Someone" should do something
Despite his success in the field of nanotechnology, a few years ago he felt a desire to use his skills to tackle a threat from a type of chemicals that the professor had known about for many years but which he—like many others—had misjudged the significance of, namely PFAS.
PFAS is a huge group of man-made "forever chemicals". Their chemical structure means that they degrade very slowly and accumulate in humans, animals and the environment. Over the past 20 years, the evidence of their harmful effects on humans and the environment has grown enormously.
The seriousness of the issue of forever chemicals struck him deeply he watched the after watching the movie "Dark Waters" in 2020. It is about the lawsuit against two chemical manufacturers that for decades polluted the drinking water at their factories in West Virginia, where they produced the PFAS-based product Teflon.
"I thought: Wow – good thing I don't live there! In the section I head, with 50 scientific staff working on environmental chemistry, chemical risk and groundwater pollution, we subsequently discussed the PFAS challenge and how "someone" should do something about it," he says.
