‘Forever chemical’ in water far above limits set in future EU water law, NGO finds

4 months ago 20

NGO Pesticide Action Network Europe found that a ‘forever chemical’ present in 94% of surface water and 63% of bottled water samples far exceeds limits set in the revised drinking water directive.

PFAS (Per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances) chemicals are known because of their persistent properties “and their toxicity is under the spotlight”, said PAN Europe’s head of science and policy, Angeliki Lyssimachou.

In May 2024, after detecting contamination of rivers, lakes, and groundwater by TFA (Trifluoroacetic acid), a highly persistent degradation product of PFAS pesticides and F-gases, PAN Europe proceeded to further analysis.

“While there were different origins of TFA, the two biggest sources are PFAS pesticides and F-gases [containing fluorine],” explained Salomé Roynel, policy officer at PAN Europe.

PAN Europe found that tap water samples were TFA-contaminated on average by 740 ng/L, with values ranging from “below the detection limit” of 20ng/L to 4,100 ng/L, whereas the bottled mineral and spring waters had it “in concentrations between ‘below the detection limit’ and 3,200 ng/L, with an average load of 278 ng/L”.

Legal limit

As of today, there is no legal limit in the EU for TFA. It remains “an ‘invisible’ chemical” from a legal perspective, said Sara Johansson, senior policy officer for water pollution prevention at European Environmental Bureau.

A new parameter, coming into effect in 2026 with the recast of the Drinking Water Directive, will start monitoring ‘total PFAS’, which includes TFA. However, the analyses in the report show that the maximum threshold was already exceeded in half of the tap waters tested.

At the same time as the Directive was recast in 2020, EFSA, the European Food Safety Authority, issued guidelines setting “a maximum intake of PFAS that accumulate in the body. However, these guidelines came too late to be incorporated in the Drinking Water Directive,” Johansson said.

“Several member states based their national drinking water legislation on the EFSA guidelines, including Denmark, Sweden, Flanders in Belgium, and Germany” she added.

She said this has resulted in a “scattered approach across the EU in how PFAS in drinking water is regulated.”

NGOs ask for urgent

Helmut Burtscher-Schaden, environmental chemist from Friends of the Earth, Austria, stressed it was “really high time to act”.

“And we cannot wait for the normal processes in the European Union to ban these pesticides that will take ten years, maybe 20 years. Therefore, we need an immediate ban on pesticides based on the precautionary principle,” he said.

Several NGOs have urged legislators to take decisive action and implement a full-scale ban on PFAS, establish an EU-wide safe drinking water limit for TFA.

NGOs also warned that the negative environmental costs of removing PFAS should not fall on citizens, but should instead be borne by the producers, in complete application of the ‘Polluter pays’ principle.

[Edited by Zoran Radosavljevic]