PFAS special: 12.5 million Europeans drink water containing “forever chemicals”

“I wanted to get something out and demonstrate this Government’s commitment and seriousness on this issue, and that is what we have done.”

So said Emma Hardy, Minister for Water and Flooding at the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) earlier this month. Hardy, answering questions posed by MPs on the Environmental Audit Committee (EAC), was talking about the new plan she had published on PFAS – the ‘forever chemicals’ in our environmental and food systems.

As I outlined last week, these substances are so widely used for everyday products that they have become a top priority for environmental and food safety regulators. They are in our soils. They are in our water. They are in our food. And they are in us.

The potential fallout from years of production and use is becoming clearer. What this government plans to do about it is less so. This is a “roadmap to nowhere”, said Chloe Alexander, Chemicals Lead at Wildlife and Countryside Link (WCL), England’s largest nature coalition, of the PFAS plan published this month.

The government’s ‘plan’ certainly leans heavily on more monitoring, guidance and future consultations. There are no binding phase-outs of PFAS. No timetable for ending everyday uses for which affordable alternatives are already available. And no commitment to match the EU’s proposed broad ban on the use and manufacture of all PFAS. 

Instead, there will be “a new website to raise the public’s awareness and understanding of PFAS while also improving transparency of action being taken across government”. 

The government will also develop “new guidance for regulators and industries to address legacy PFAS pollution on contaminated land” and “consult on the introduction of a statutory limit for PFAS in England’s public supply regulations to improve the condition of the water the nation drinks”.

There will also be “tests on food packaging, like microwave popcorn bags and pizza boxes, to trace the presence of PFAS and support future regulatory action”.  

This has left some puzzled. Such testing is all well and good, but that needs to come once we turn the tap off, explains Megan Kirton, Senior Project Officer at Fidra, an environmental NGO based in Scotland that has been campaigning on PFAS for a number of years. 

She tells me: “We know PFAS are in our food. We know they can migrate from food packaging. We know they’re used in pesticides sprayed directly onto crops. And we know PFAS are already in our soils and water supplies. Whilst more research and monitoring (as set out in the Government’s recent PFAS plan) are always great to have, this should not be instead of preventing further pollution. This must be the priority.”

Last week’s article detailed some of the research Fidra and others have conducted to highlight the prevalence of these pernicious chemicals along our food chain. 

However, ‘food’ was not mentioned once in almost two hours of discussion at the EAC hearings in early February with the minister and government representatives. There is – perhaps understandably – no desire to spark a food scare. But as the evidence mounts and PFAS continue to pile up in the environment, it has left many wondering why the government continues to watch and wait.

Responding to Hardy’s explanation for the approach set out in her PFAS plan, EAC member and former Defra minister Barry Gardiner, said: “I think it raises a fundamental problem for me, which is that you are looking at where the problem exists rather than looking at how to stop the problem starting.”

The ban plan

The likes of Fidra are calling for a group-based restriction on PFAS use in the UK, including in food packaging materials and pesticides. 

Such a ban is being pushed through in the EU, where a recent study by the European Commission found that societal costs of PFAS pollution could reach €1.7 trillion by 2050, with an immediate halt to production and use the least costly scenario.

Jessika Roswall, Commissioner for Environment, this month said: “Since PFAS remain in human bodies and the environment for decades, even after emissions have ceased; early action is vital to reduce long-term health and environmental costs. Consumers are concerned, and rightly so.”

The EU restrictions are far from a fait accompli, as powerful lobbying groups look to delay and dilute any new laws. Forever chemicals help pesticides work, which means fewer pesticides, claims Crop Life International, which represents the big agro-chemical companies, for example.

The Pesticides Action Network in Europe has just analysed 59 samples of apples for pesticide residues across 13 European countries. They found “nearly systematic contamination of conventional apples with cocktails of pesticides (85%”). Almost two-thirds (64%) of the apples contained at least one PFAS pesticide. Remarkably: if the apples were sold as processed baby food, they would not be allowed.

According to some estimates, 23,000 sites are contaminated by forever chemicals around Europe, while 12.5 million Europeans are living in communities with drinking water polluted with PFAS.

Studies conducted between 2014 and 2021 for example showed that teenagers in Europe face health risks from exposure to these per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances. Of the teenagers who participated in the studies, an average of 14.3% had blood levels above the health-based guidance value, with two countries exceeding 20%.

“Given the large number of PFAS and their widespread use, these results highlight the need for further upstream restrictions of these substances as a group, to limit human exposure to other PFAS substances not yet regulated,” the researchers from the European Environment Agency wrote.

As I explained last week, these problems are already here in the UK, too. But since Brexit, the UK’s regulation of PFAS has fallen behind the EU’s. 

We were warned this would happen given the loss of Europe’s vast expertise and experience and data on chemicals. “There are 27 member states working together, bringing issues, sharing issues,” Begonia Filgueira, an environmental lawyer, told me in 2020. “It’s not about having bad scientists in the UK, the UK has very good scientists, it’s about having large numbers of them,” she added.

At one of the early Environmental Audit Committee hearings in September, one manufacturer of PFAS told the MPs that “the Environment Agency don’t quite know what they should be doing and we’re not quite sure what we therefore should be doing”. The firm had not done any analysis of land contamination around the plant, because the EAC had asked them to “lay off until they have decided what they actually want us to analyse”. 

Wait and seEU

The UK seems to be watching and waiting for the EU to move first on its blanket ban of PFAS. The government in Westminster is openly keen to build a closer relationship with Brussels, so the noises made by Hardy and her team at the EAC sessions this month have given some cause to hope.

Marc Casale, Deputy Director for Chemicals and International, at Defra explained that the general approach “is of seeing what decisions the EU has made and then drawing from them. […] the EU is in the process of making a decision in relation to a universal PFAS restriction. We think we are going to find out later this year what that will involve and then in light of that, we can decide what we are doing here, obviously while retaining full control of that decision. We may well end up in the same position but we are too early to say that just yet,” he added.

That the UK is looking at the system through which any restrictions to PFAS and chemicals have to wind their way through is also encouraging, says Kirton. But all this will take time. And with powerful lobbying groups waiting at every turn, “we are up against it”, a campaigner told me.

Writing in The Guardian last week, following her interview with Sam Hammond, the Lancashire resident who had been told to stop eating eggs from her chickens and ducks following PFAS tests on them, Pippa Neill likened the UK’s approach to PFAS as whac-a-mole – as one chemical is banned, the formula is tweaked to produce something ‘new’ and potentially worse.

“The Environment Agency has itself estimated that there could be as many as 10,000 PFAS hotspots across England. Until these chemicals are banned at the point of production, that number is not going to get smaller,” Neill, the news editor at ENDS Report who has been following this issue closely, wrote.

Sam Hammond has now stopped eating her eggs, Neill explained, but has the damage to her health already been done? “These are the questions she is left to grapple with alone, while the government pledges to take action – once it has spoken with the chemical industry.”

And so the UK’s plan is to drift along, as PFAS continue to seep into the world around us, used on products like grease-proof packaging that can last a matter of seconds but stick around for up to several thousands years.

“The [UK] roadmap leaves nature and consumers exposed to forever chemicals at the expense of environmental and human health, does nothing to make polluters pay, and lets the UK drift even further behind other countries,” said WCL’s Alexander. “Without urgent, precautionary regulation, this plan risks locking in decades of avoidable harm to ecosystems and people alike.”

Read Part One of David Burrows’ report on PFAS