“Forever chemicals,” or perfluoroalkyl and polyfluoroalkul substances (PFAS), are synthetic chemicals produced to be used in a variety of modern things like non-stick cookware and cosmetics due to their ability to repel water and oil. However, they are also linked to various health issues including elevating cholesterol, liver damage, and increasing risk of certain cancers such as kidney or testicular.
Unfortunately, PFAS are poorly regulated, if at all, by governments leading contamination all over the world, including the arctic and Himalayan mountain tops. That leech into the environment through many ways including leaking from landfills or from wastewater through their manufacturing. As a result they can end up in foods that are grown and fish people eat. In addition, they are able to get into the atmosphere causing them to be rained or snowed to other places in the world far from their place of origin.
New study published in Environmental Science & Technology, researchers from Stockholm University, from that the amount of PFAS in rainwater both exceeded what is safe according to US’s EPA Lifetime Drinking Water Health Advisory Level and the Environmental Quality Standard for Inland Euorpean Union Surface Water.
“We can only clean the drinking water in the treatment plants using advanced treatment technologies which are very expensive. We cannot remove PFAS from the environment. We just have to wait, and it will take a very long time — of the order of decades to centuries — for PFAS to gradually dilute into the deep oceans,” in a statement from one of the study’s authors, Dr. Ian Cousins.
“Persistent chemicals are particularly problematic because their persistence allows them to become globally distributed and it means that they are impossible to remove once they are globally ubiquitous. If one then discovers effects associated with these chemicals then you have a serious environmental problem,” he further stated.
Our environment, which is also our children’s future environment that they depend on to nourish them, is under assault from our bad behavior in wanting things like convenience and luxury, as well as government officials who are not tough enough on pollution and what should be allowed to be produced.
IT Cousins et al. Outside the safe operating space of a new planetary boundary for per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS). Environmental Science & Technology (2022). https://doi.org/10.1021/acs.est.2c02765
