Forever chemicals have been around for decades, but they don’t owe their longevity to chemistry alone. Is their time running out?
The discovery of forever chemicals’ adverse health risks is almost as old as the invention of PFAS chemistry. Considering the decades of research detailing the toxicity of these artificial substances to lab animals and humans, it would be safe to presume that they would’ve gone the way of asbestos by now except they haven’t.
Forever chemicals continue to permeate the planet, leaving everyone’s lives unchecked. These synthetic compounds may be durable by design, but their chemical makeup no longer has anything to do with their persistence.
Suppliers continue to lie about them
PFASs are hard to remove from society because they generally fly under the radar. While the authorities have done an excellent job of informing the public of their dangers, their usual exclusion from ingredient labels and material safety sheets diminishes the effectiveness of awareness drives.
Even sustainability-driven consumer goods manufacturers may inadvertently use forever chemicals. Makers of any product resistant to water, heat and/or stains should assume their facilities are PFAS exposure hot spots.
Activist organisations have to rely on marketing terms such as nonstick, waterproof, greaseproof and stain-resistant to identify potentially PFAS-tainted products for testing to avoid wasting resources.
Fortunately, some significant sources of PFAS pollution, like PFOA, have become public knowledge due to high-profile lawsuits. A 2023 peer-reviewed study analysing 39 internal documents found that DuPont already knew PFOA’s toxicity in 1961 but never shared this information with outsiders.
Deeply understanding how worrying a health threat PFOA is would tell you that the actual scale of the problem could be so much worse when you realise that it’s only one of about 15,000 PFAS chemicals around.
Still, learning about PFOA’s hazards has been a wake-up call for governments to ban products containing it and for engineers to develop advanced water filtration solutions to catch it.
Most forever chemicals remain legal – for now
PFASs have proliferated because of severe underregulation. The chemical interests successfully kept everyone in the dark about these chemicals’ unintended effects. DuPont and 3M, in particular, took a page from the tobacco industry’s playbook to obscure evidence and influence public discourse in their favour for as long as they could.
Regulators are playing catch-up. The policymakers keen on acting against forever chemicals are still determining how bad the situation is, determining how many PFASs are too much and which ones to ban in which products, and evaluating the economic consequences.
The European Union has encouraged member states to monitor how forever chemicals contaminate food from 2022 to 2025, while the European Food Safety Authority has collaborated with stakeholders to conduct risk assessments.
While it may take a while before the EU can modernise and add teeth to its PFAS regulations, the United Kingdom has made headway. The British government has banned fire extinguishers with aqueous film-forming foam or any other material containing PFOA since 4 July 2025, compelling business owners to adopt sustainable alternatives.
Across the pond, some state legislators in the United States have enacted laws prohibiting certain forever chemicals.
In 2021, Maine passed a measure to outlaw PFAS in new consumer goods by 2030. California, Colorado and Hawaii have banned forever chemicals in cosmetics, food packaging, textiles and more. Manufacturers legally challenge such legislation to avert untold financial losses before they can invest enough in R&D to create more sustainable alternatives.
Public information on PFAS contamination is limited
The lack of stringent regulations targeting these synthetic compounds has led to minimal monitoring of contaminated resources. Data scarcity keeps the gravity of PFAS pollution vague, making this health and environmental issue feel less urgent than it should be.
2024 marked a watershed in the fight against forever chemicals when the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) finalised the national primary drinking water regulation (NPDWR). It covers PFOA, PFOS, PFHxS, PFNA, HFPO-DA, and mixtures containing two or more of the last three and PFBS. This guideline establishes the maximum contaminant levels the agency can legally enforce.
The NPDWR requires public water systems to monitor the specified forever chemicals. The initial monitoring period spans three years, and ongoing compliance monitoring starts afterwards.
By then, the public water systems will have to disclose their findings to the public. The rule also mandates that they notify residents and business owners when PFAS concentrations in drinking water exceed the threshold and take action to bring them down to safer levels.
The agency believes this unprecedented measure will protect about 100 million people from PFAS exposure through drinking water and prevent serious illnesses and countless deaths.
Existing water filtration solutions are hit-or-miss
Purification and filtration processes can remove forever chemicals from drinking water. Reverse osmosis (RO) underpins the former, while activated carbon supports the latter.
The problem is that PFAS removal is highly specialised. Only some RO systems and water filters with activated carbon can catch forever chemicals, and those that can only filter out specific compounds.
Unfortunately, water purifiers and filters are barely adequate at best and counterproductive at worst. From June 2017 to March 2019, scientists from Duke University and North Carolina State University tested 76 point-of-use and 13 point-of-entry water filters optimised for forever chemicals to verify their efficacy.
The researchers found that some RO and dual-stage point-of-use products performed exceptionally well. At the same time, most point-of-entry systems based on activated carbon water filtration increased some PFAS levels and removed the disinfectants used by municipal water treatment facilities to discourage bacterial growth.
The Environmental Working Group did a smaller study published in 2023. The nonprofit evaluated 10 water filters marketed for PFAS removal for 25 forever chemicals using SimpleLab’s GenX and PFAS water test. Three point-of-use products demonstrated a 100% PFAS reduction rate, one recorded 98% and the rest removed 22%-79% of pollutants from tap water.
The four best-performing pitcher water filters had downsides. Two had a high initial cost, and another had short-life filters and required frequent replacement. The other one was difficult to operate, especially for people with limited hand or upper body strength. It required pressure priming at the faucet, took more time to filter water and complicated maintenance.
Effective water filtration equipment is a wise investment for businesses with wellness programmes and sustainability goals. Spending top dollar on an independently tested enterprise-grade system to remove most, if not all, notorious PFASs from your facility’s pipework should boost employee morale and gain good press.
The days of forever chemicals are numbered
Solving PFAS pollution is challenging, but not impossible. While those most guilty of creating and spreading these toxic chemicals continue to deny wrongdoing, the regulatory landscape is changing for the better.
Scientists are working just as hard as policymakers. Researchers from various universities are developing novel methods to filter out forever chemicals from water treatment facilities for good and break them down on a molecular level.
Tomorrow couldn’t come sooner, but, in time, today’s experimental and emerging technologies will prove that even forever chemicals are subject to impermanence.
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