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2025-01-14 05:00
The cost of cleaning up toxic forever chemical pollution could reach more than £1.6tn across the UK and Europe over a 20-year period, an annual bill of £84bn, research has found.
The number of British pollution hotspots is also on the rise. If emissions remain unrestricted and uncontrolled, the costs of cleanup will reach £9.9bn a year in the UK, according to the findings of a year-long investigation by the Forever Lobbying Project, a cross-border investigation involving 46 journalists and 18 experts across 16 countries.
PFAS (per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances), commonly referred to as “forever chemicals” are a family of more than 10,000 human-made substances. Manufactured by a handful of companies, they are widely used in consumer products and industrial processes.
They can be found in nonstick pans, pizza boxes, cosmetics, waterproof clothing, firefighting foam and pharmaceuticals, among other places. The properties that make them so useful – heatproof, greaseproof and waterproof – also have fateful downsides. Almost indestructible without human intervention and persistent in living organisms, PFAS have been linked to infertility, cancers, immune and hormone disruption, and other illnesses.
PFAS are ubiquitous and have been detected in drinking water and surface waters across the UK, which makes the task of remediation huge and complex. Hotspots of contamination include landfills, airports, military sites, sewage outfalls, sewage sludge, manufacturers and industrial users of PFAS, and places where large amounts of firefighting foams have been used.
The Drinking Water Inspectorate’s latest sampling found 278 examples where untreated drinking water exceeded maximum guidance levels, and a further 255,610 samples at levels where measures should be taken to reduce PFAS.
Just to clean up existing legacy pollution in the UK, analysis has found it will cost an estimated £428m every year for the next 20 years, based on existing cost data. This would cover remediating contaminated soils, landfill leachate and to treat 5% of the drinking water in large water supply zones for just the two regulated PFAS compounds, PFOS and PFOA. These costs are conservative, as they only include decontamination costs, not socioeconomic costs or potential costs to the health system. It also assumes that PFAS emissions stop immediately.
“The ‘legacy’ cost scenario we developed represents the minimum costs needed to manage environmental health risks from past actions related to PFAS that are currently regulated,” said Ali Ling of the St Thomas School of Engineering.
The UK Environment Agency has identified up to 10,000 high-risk sites in the UK that are contaminated with PFAS. It is reeling at the potential costs involved in simply investigating four problem sites, before even considering cleanup costs, and has told Defra that the associated bill is “frightening” and way beyond its budget.
“Current remediation of PFAS-contaminated samples is predominantly through high temperature incineration, which is very expensive,” said Dave Megson, a PFAS expert at Manchester Metropolitan University. “Our recent research on landfill wastewater treatment plants shows that some facilities actually create banned PFAS, rather than destroy them. More funding towards developing effective lower cost remediation options is desperately needed to tackle this issue.”
According to Ling, the answer lies in restricting the chemical’s use. “As we move forward, it will be more cost-effective to prevent PFAS from entering the environment through use restrictions and emissions reductions than to pay to treat PFAS in the environment.”
This could prove popular: a YouGov survey commissioned by the Royal Society of Chemistry (RSC) found more than three-quarters of respondents said the use of PFAS known to be toxic should be stopped immediately or subject to more effective controls. The most popular control measure the UK public would accept is increased regulation on industries using PFAS, requiring them to reduce and reverse the contamination caused by their processes.
The RSC is calling for public protections from toxic PFAS to be enshrined in the recent water special measures bill, which is now at the committee stage.
“No one chooses the water that comes out of their tap. This bill is a crucial first step, and we also urge government and industry to build upon this change by creating a national inventory of PFAS and enforcing stricter limits on industrial discharges,” said Stephanie Metzger, the RSC’s chemistry policy adviser.
Environmental groups have criticised the government for what they say is a weak chemicals regulatory system.
“These figures show that the cost of regulatory inaction on PFAS pollution is staggering,” said a spokesperson for environmental charity ChemTrust. “The UK government has inherited a toxic legacy and must act now to urgently ban these chemicals to protect people and wildlife from the adverse impacts of these toxic, forever chemicals.”
The Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs told the Guardian it is taking action and has begun investigating whether to restrict PFAS in firefighting foams among other measures. It also pointed to water regulator Ofwat’s 2024 price review, which allows for £2bn of investment to improve water quality, including work on addressing PFAS.
“This government is committed to protecting the environment from the risks posed by chemicals,” it said in a statement. “We are rapidly reviewing the environmental improvement plan to deliver on our legally binding targets to save nature, which includes how to best manage the risks posed by PFAS.”
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