Addressing Urgent Questions for PFAS in the 21st Century

Investor logo
Investor logo
Investor logo

Warning

This publication doesn't include Faculty of Arts. It includes Faculty of Science. Official publication website can be found on muni.cz.
Authors

NG Carla COUSINS Ian T. DEWITT Jamie C. GLUGE Juliane GOLDENMAN Gretta HERZKE Dorte LOHMANN Rainer MILLER Mark PATTON Sharyle SCHERINGER Martin TRIER Xenia WANG Zhanyun

Year of publication 2021
Type Article in Periodical
Magazine / Source Environmental Science & Technology
MU Faculty or unit

Faculty of Science

Citation
Web https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.est.1c03386
Doi http://dx.doi.org/10.1021/acs.est.1c03386
Keywords PFAS; global; health; environment; policy; equity
Description Despite decades of research on per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS), fundamental obstacles remain to addressing worldwide contamination by these chemicals and their associated impacts on environmental quality and health. Here, we propose six urgent questions relevant to science, technology, and policy that must be tackled to address the "PFAS problem": (1) What are the global production volumes of PFAS, and where are PFAS used? (2) Where are the unknown PFAS hotspots in the environment? (3) How can we make measuring PFAS globally accessible? (4) How can we safely manage PFAScontaining waste? (5) How do we understand and describe the health effects of PFAS exposure? (6) Who pays the costs of PFAS contamination? The importance of each question and barriers to progress are briefly described, and several potential paths forward are proposed. Given the diversity of PFAS and their uses, the extreme persistence of most PFAS, the striking ongoing lack of fundamental information, and the inequity of the health and environmental impacts from PFAS contamination, there is a need for scientific and regulatory communities to work together, with cooperation from PFAS-related industries, to fill in critical data gaps and protect human health and the environment.
Related projects:

You are running an old browser version. We recommend updating your browser to its latest version.