How much will it cost? Over the course of their year-long investigation, the 46 journalists of the Forever Lobbying Project, coordinated by Le Monde, came to the conclusion that the massive pollution of Europe by PFAS (per- and polyfluoroalkylated substances), a large family of chemical substances, the scope of which was revealed in 2023 under the banner of the Forever Pollution Project, calls for an equally colossal decontamination.
Read more Subscribers only PFAS: The astronomical cost of depolluting Europe
They needed figures. A continent-wide invoice for a Europe already under treatment with pollution control technologies. Whether in Belgium, the Netherlands, Norway or elsewhere, the first “remediation” projects – the term coined by the scientists and authorities involved – are sprouting up like mushrooms, in the heart of the contamination “hotspots” mapped a year earlier.
The consortium’s immediate reaction was to collect data in the field, in 16 European countries. Cleaning up the soil of a Brussels fire station, contaminated by PFAS-laden fire-fighting foam? A cost of €710,000. Creating a new drinking water catchment far from sources contaminated by the Ronneby military base in Sweden? A total of €3.5 million. Distributing PFAS-free water to users in Italy’s Acque del Chiampo network, contaminated by discharges from the Miteni plant? That’s €37 million over 16 years.
However, Le Monde and its partners came up against some major obstacles. The few figures collected were difficult to compare and, above all, impossible to extrapolate. What kind of material? Water? Soil? Plants? What volumes? How long? Which techniques? For which PFAS – since the large group of chemicals requires different treatments depending on the size of the targeted substances?
Worse still, the initial feedback has given way to silence. The silence of the white zones: regions, even entire countries, barely aware of the scale of this crisis, simply unable to provide estimates.
An unprecedented collaborative investigation on ‘forever chemicals’
The Forever Lobbying Project is a collaborative investigation into the true cost of PFAS pollution in Europe and into industrials’ lobbying and disinformation campaigns to avoid their banning.
Coordinated by Le Monde, the investigation involves 46 journalists and 29 media partners in 16 countries: RTBF and De Tijd (Belgium); Denik Referendum (Czech Republic); Investigative Reporting Denmark (Denmark); Yle (Finland); France Télévisions (France); MIT Technology Review Germany, NDR, WDR and Süddeutsche Zeitung (Germany); Reporters United (Greece); L’Espresso, Radar Magazine, Facta.eu and La Via libera (Italy); Investico, De Groene Amsterdammer and Het Financieele Dagblad (Netherlands); Klassekampen (Norway); Ostro (Slovenia); DATADISTA/eldiario.es (Spain); Sveriges Radio and Dagens ETC (Sweden); SRF (Switzerland); The Black Sea (Turkey); Watershed Investigations/The Guardian (United Kingdom), with an editorial partnership with Arena for Journalism in Europe, and in collaboration with Corporate Europe Observatory, a Brussels-based lobby watchdog organization.
The investigation is based on more than 14,000 unpublished documents on “forever chemicals,” including 184 freedom of information requests, 66 of which were filed and shared by Corporate Europe Observatory.
The investigation was assisted by an expert group of 18 international academics and lawyers, extending the pioneering expert-reviewed journalism experiment of the Forever Pollution Project, our first investigation on PFAS, published in 2023.
The project received financial support from the Pulitzer Center, the Broad Reach Foundation, Journalismfund Europe and IJ4EU.
There’s a website dedicated to the project: foreverpollution.eu.
See more See less Working with universities to combat silence
As with the 2023 investigation, the solution lay in collaboration with the academic world. Ali Ling, an assistant professor at the University of St. Thomas in Minnesota, who was behind an assessment of decontamination costs in this American state heavily affected by PFAS pollution, accepted the challenge. Ling was then joined by Hans Peter Arp, an environmental chemist at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology. The group set about developing a robust methodology.
In an article published in 2024 in the review Science of the Total Environment, Ling wrote that there probably isn’t enough money on Earth to decontaminate the environment at the rate of current emissions. Based on this premise, the team focused on strategic sites, primary sources or vectors of pollution, that it would make sense to treat as a priority: contaminated soils, landfills, drinking water production units and wastewater treatment plants.
Read more PFAS, a family of 10,000 ‘forever chemicals’ contaminating all of humanity
The information reported at the European level by member states – as required by directives on urban wastewater treatment, drinking water and more – was supplemented by spreadsheets from Eurostat, the European Union’s statistical office, and by national inventories. This enabled the development of a comparable overview of the systems to be equipped on a European scale. For the soils to be treated, the Forever Pollution Project database provided a – conservative – number of presumed contaminated sites per country, including factories producing and using PFAS, airports and military bases.
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Benchmark costs depend on the type of site. For wastewater treatment plants and drinking water production plants, Ling applied models developed in the United States that are applicable in Europe for macroscopic calculations. For soil, Arp deduced median costs by type of contaminated site, based on academic and local data gathered by the project’s journalists.
Low and high ranges
Two scenarios were selected. For the low range, that meant estimating the minimum necessary to meet current regulations, defined by the Water Framework Directive – not exceeding 100 nanograms per liter of drinking water for a sum of 20 PFAS deemed of concern. Cleaning up the most contaminated soils is essential to prevent PFAS runoff into water, which would increase the need for drinking water treatment, estimated here at just 5% of supply zones. The economically efficient treatment of PFAS in landfill leachate is also included in this estimate.
The already considerable sum of €4.8 billion per year is based on highly optimistic, even unrealistic assumptions: “On an early conception from 20 years ago that only PFOS [Perfluorooctanesulfonic acid] and other long-chain PFAS, historically used by industry, are a problem to humans and the environment,” summarized Arp.
The so-called “emerging” short- and ultra-short-chain PFAS have prompted experts to envisage a second, much darker scenario. Now in the sights of legislators, these as yet little-studied substances raise fears of an even more serious crisis. Trifluoroacetic acid (TFA), the smallest of the PFAS is currently the most widespread in the environment – and its concentrations are only increasing. Early studies point to effects on mammal liver and reproduction. “This could have serious consequences for the health and environment of future generations,” warned Arp.
TFA regulation is in limbo
French regulations set “limit values” for per- and polyfluoroalkylated substances (PFAS) in water and food. This rule prohibits their distribution if a certain concentration of PFAS is reached, in the name of protecting consumers. Not all PFAS are equally toxic at the same concentrations, but one thing is certain, according to experts: Current regulations are too lax to protect health.
At this stage, the rules concerning trifluoroacetic acid (TFA) are still unclear in France. It is not one of the 20 “preoccupying” PFAS whose concentration is limited by regulation to 100 nanograms per liter (ng/l) of drinking water.
Only a few European countries have set specific limit values for TFA. The Netherlands has set, on health grounds, a guideline value of 2,200 ng/l of water.
But because of its multiple origins (pesticides, fluorinated gases…), TFA could be affected by other standards, even in France. Since September 2024, flufenacet, a herbicide widely used in Europe that degrades to TFA, has been recognized as an endocrine disruptor by the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA). This classification automatically entails the categorization of TFA as a “relevant metabolite,” which would mean limiting it to 100 ng/l of water.
The strong probability that these “emerging” PFAS will one day be regulated influenced the choice to evaluate, for the high range, the cost of eliminating these ubiquitous compounds, even more mobile than their long-chain cousins. Their treatment at the selected sites would cost a staggering €100 billion a year in Europe. Not to mention the logistical headaches and environmental consequences this would entail. According to experts in the field, the scale of the costs and the seriousness of the contamination underline the urgency of banning the use of all PFAS.
Each of the scenarios in our assessment is based on a series of conservative choices, which means that the costs are almost certainly underestimated. For example, some additional infrastructure requirements to complete the destruction of PFAS are not included in these sums. The data and full methodology, reviewed and improved by several experts, are available on the project website Foreverpollution.eu.
Read our first investigation, from 2023 Revealed: The massive contamination of Europe by PFAS ‘forever chemicals’
Translation of an original article published in French on lemonde.fr; the publisher may only be liable for the French version.
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Publish date : 2025-01-13 22:02:00
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