About 20 years ago we were all throwing out bottles and food packaging that contained BPA. The words BPA stand for (bisphenol A) – it’s a chemical used to make hard, clear plastics and protective resin linings inside metal cans. It helps plastics stay strong and heat-resistant, but small amounts can migrate into food and drinks. But the chemical is an endocrine disruptor, hurting our bodies in a number of ways.

We’ve come a lot further since BPA. We now have microplastrics and PFASs to worry about. Forever chemicals, or PFAS, are man-made chemicals and products made to repel water, grease, and stains. They’re in firefighting foams, non-stick cookware, waterproof clothing (yes, they’ve been used by the eco-darling Patagonia), stain-resistant carpets, fast-food packaging that seem like paper but which are water-proof, and many industrial processes.

PFASs don’t break down, and they escape factories, landfills, and training sites into soil and groundwater, eventually reaching our drinking water. Wastewater plants can’t fully remove them, so they circulate in rivers and crops too. Long-term exposure has been linked to immune, hormone, and cancer risks.

This report on Green Prophet explores PFAS in German drinking water.

Consumers can reduce exposure by limiting grease-proof packaging, choosing PFAS-free textiles and cookware, and supporting water testing and filtration in their communities. And now the EU is taking a bold step in making sure all European Union member states worked to monitor and reduce PFAS levels in drinking water. Consider that if you live in Iraq, PFAS are the last thing you need to worry about – European, American and Chinese oil companies are leaking crude oil right into the water, and they know about it.

But those same Europeans who want to make the world a better place, at least where they live, has created a  Drinking Water Directive. Don’t click on that link if you have an aversion to bureaucratic policy speak.

According to a press release sent out, EU countries will need to inform the commission on PFAS in water, including data on exceedances of the limit values. According to the commission, rife with overpaid bureaucrats who engage in political activities against western values,  the new reporting system is reportedly “simpler than under the previous Drinking Water Directive and reduces the amount of data to be reported.

“It is the first time systematic monitoring of PFAS in drinking water is being implemented in the EU,” they write.

What happens if your country exceeds the limits put in place? The EU countries must inform the public, and protect public health. Actions may include closing contaminated wells, adding treatment steps to remove PFAS, or restricting the use of drinking water supplies for as long as the violation continues.

The UE believes that people should have access to safe drinking water.

If you are from a non-EU country and are concerned about PFAS in your drinking water, take these guidelines to your ministry or oversight group in your region or country dealing with water monitoring.

The EU says that the guidelines were developed with member states.

“PFAS pollution is a growing concern for drinking water across Europe. With harmonised limits and mandatory monitoring now in force, Member States have the rules and tools to swiftly detect and address PFAS to protect public health, says Jessika Roswall, Commissioner for Environment, Water Resilience and Competitive Circular Economy.

How to remove PFAS from your tap water at home?

Next question for readers and entrepreneurs? The most common in-home water filters that remove PFAS are activated carbon filters like those found in a Brita Elite jug or Berkey filter, but the best is reverse osmosis and undersink-ROs like Aquafor.

In Canada and the US, the main Berkey-style gravity water filter options people compare are Berkey, ProOne, British Berkefeld, Alexapure, and Waterdrop.

Dual stage filters (activated carbon + reverse osmosis) the best option.

If you are taking minerals out of the water, you do need to put them back in. The  company Mayu developed a novel method to rejuvenate purified water after understanding how “dirty” tap water has become. And on that note, here are 6 ways to soften hard water naturally.

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Along the cold Pacific waters of British Columbia, Canada sea otters float belly-up, cracking shellfish on their chests. They look playful and carefree, yet inside their bodies something far more troubling is happening. A recent study of 11 dead sea otters found along B.C.’s coast revealed that every single one carried high quantities of eight different “forever chemicals” in both liver and muscle tissue.

These PFAS compounds—used in everything from food packaging and cosmetics to non-stick pans, water-repellent outdoor gear, and electronics—do not break down in nature. Over time they accumulate in the food chain, becoming more concentrated as they move from small organisms to fish and ultimately to top predators like otters.

One compound, perfluorooctanesulfonamide (PFOSA), once a key ingredient in Scotchgard, stood out. Its presence in multiple tissues signals long-term environmental exposure and a chemical load that these animals had no way to escape. Sea otters are more than charming coastal icons; they are keystone predators that keep kelp forests alive by controlling sea urchin populations.

When otters become sick or die, entire marine ecosystems begin to unravel. Their contamination is not a side note. It is a warning.

The danger does not end at the tide line. Humans eat the same shellfish and fish, swim in the same waters, and breathe the same coastal air. PFAS chemicals are already linked to fertility problems, hormone disruption, immune system suppression, cancer, and developmental issues in children. If sea otters are saturated with these chemicals, it raises a blunt question: what is happening in our own bodies?

While Canada has taken preliminary steps to regulate PFAS, efforts lag behind those in parts of Europe and the United States, where governments are moving to phase these chemicals out almost entirely. Here, the pace is slower, and monitoring remains limited. Meanwhile, each rainfall carries more PFAS into rivers and coastal ecosystems, and each product we buy that claims to “repel water or stains” brings the problem closer to our homes and oceans.

Saving sea otters is not simply about protecting a beloved species. It is about defending the health of coastal communities, marine food webs, and future generations. The toxins building up in otters are the same ones that build up in us, and their decline is a message we would be foolish to ignore. In the slick sheen of their fur and the stillness of their bodies on the shoreline lies a truth about modern life: we have filled our ocean with chemicals designed never to disappear, and now they are coming back to us through the creatures that depend on those waters to live.

If we want healthy oceans, healthy seafood, and healthy children, we must act before the kelp forests fall silent and the otters vanish from the Pacific coast. Their fate is tied to ours, and time is running out to change course.

Read more on forever chemicals and the sea

Two tons of micro-plastics on Israel’s Mediterranean Sea coast

Microplastics you breathe from dust in the desert

The post Toxic sea otters and the pollution they collect at sea appeared first on Green Prophet.

A simple method for destroying PFAS using hydrogen and UV light

An insidious category of carcinogenic pollutants known as “forever chemicals” or PFAS may not be so permanent after all University of California, Riverside, chemical engineering and environmental scientists recently published new methods to chemically break up these harmful substances found in drinking water into smaller compounds that are essentially harmless.

Theprocess infuses contaminated water with hydrogen, then blasts the water with high-energy, short-wavelength ultraviolet light. The hydrogen polarizes water molecules to make them more reactive, while the light catalyzes chemical reactions that destroy the pollutants, known as PFAS or poly- and per-fluoroalkyl substances.

This one-two punch breaks the strong fluorine-to-carbon chemicals bonds that make these pollutants so persistent and accumulative in the environment. In fact, the molecular destruction of PFAS increased from 10% to nearly 100% when compared to other ultraviolet water-treatment methods, while no other undesirable byproducts or impurities are generated, the UCR scientists reported in a paper recently published in the Journal of Hazardous Materials Letters.

What’s more, the cleanup technology is green.

“After the interaction, hydrogen will become water. The advantage of this technology is that it is very sustainable,” said Haizhou Liu, an associate professor in UCR’s Department of Chemical and Environmental Engineering and the corresponding author of the paper.

PFAS are a family of thousands of chemical compounds characterized by fully fluorinated carbon atoms with stubbornly strong chemical bonds that last indefinitely in the environment – hence the moniker “forever chemicals.”

These compounds came into widespread use in thousands of consumer products starting in the 1940s because of their ability to resist heat, water, and lipids.

Examples of PFAS-containing products include grease-resistant paper wrappers and containers such as microwave popcorn bags, pizza boxes, and candy wrappers; stain and water repellents used on carpets, upholstery, clothing, and other fabrics; cleaning products; non-stick cookware; and paints, varnishes, and sealants, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, or EPA.

Since these compounds persist and accumulate in the environment, dairy products and meat from animals exposed to PFAS are also sources of these compounds. In fact, PFAS are so ubiquitous, scientists have found them in the blood of nearly all people tested, according to a California legislative analysis. Germans find them in their drinking water.

Studies have linked exposure to certain levels of PFAS to many ill health effects, including increased risk for prostate, kidney, and testicular cancers, according to the EPA.

Exposure to these pollutants also may lead to decreased fertility or increased high blood pressure in pregnant women, developmental effects or delays in children, low birth weight, and accelerated puberty. PFAS compounds also have been found to compromise the immune system’s ability to fight infections and to interfere with hormone function.

Because of these health effects, federal and state officials are promulgating new cleanup standards for PFAS in drinking water and in groundwater below or emanating from toxic cleanup sites.

The EPA this fall took public comments on plans to designate two PFAS substances — perfluorooctanoic acid and perfluorooctanesulfonic acid — as hazardous substances under the federal Superfund toxic site cleanup laws. If this regulation is approved, it would hold polluters accountable for cleaning up their contamination.

In California, the State Water Resources Control Board issued an order this year for public drinking water providers to test for PFAS. If the testing exceeds specified levels, the providers must issue public notifications, remove the source or sources, or treat or blend the water.

“We are optimizing it by trying to make this technology versatile for a wide range of PFAS-contaminated source waters,” Liu said. “The technology has shown very promising results in the destruction of PFAS in both drinking water and different types of industrial wastewater.”

The other option entirely is to find clean, fresh springwater and gather water at the source.

The post Killing PFAS forever chemicals with hydrogen and UV light appeared first on Green Prophet.

If Germany has a problem with polluted water and PFAS levels, what could that mean for the rest of the world?

In a landmark study Eco-Environment & Health, researchers screened German drinking water for 26 per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS).

The latest study involved collecting 89 drinking water samples from various locations in Germany, analyzing them for 26 different PFAS using high-performance liquid chromatography with tandem mass spectrometry (HPLC-MS/MS). The findings revealed that while the 20 recently regulated PFAS were below the detection limit, the sum concentrations varied widely, with some samples exceeding the threshold for certain PFAS.

Comprising more than 4,700 chemicals, perfluorinated and polyfluorinated alkyl substances (PFAS) are a group of widely used, man-made chemicals that accumulate over time in humans and in the environment. They are known as ‘forever chemicals’ as they are extremely persistent in our environment and bodies.

They can lead to health problems such as liver damage, thyroid disease, obesity, fertility issues and cancer. More about Emerging chemical risks in Europe – PFAS here.

This effort, notably supported by residents, marks a significant step in understanding PFAS presence in drinking water.This research is pivotal in informing future regulatory decisions and public health guidelines, the researchers note. It highlights the need for ongoing surveillance and stricter controls on PFAS in drinking water.

Dr. Aki Sebastian Ruhl from Berlin emphasizes the importance of this study in providing a comprehensive view of PFAS distribution in drinking water across Germany, a crucial aspect in evaluating environmental and health risks.

The collaborative effort in this study has provided valuable insights into PFAS levels in German drinking water, laying the groundwork for future environmental and public health initiatives, and underscores the necessity for further research to understand the long-term implications of PFAS in drinking water and to develop more efficient removal methods.

Next question for readers and entrepreneurs? The most common in-home water filters that remove PFAS are activated carbon and reverse osmosis. Dual stage filters (activated carbon + reverse osmosis) are also an option.

What filters can remove PFAS from drinking water? Does a Brita do?

The Israeli company Mayu developed a novel method to rejuvenate purified water after understanding how “dirty” tap water has become. Here are 6 ways to soften hard water naturally.

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