Cost of Dealing With PFAS Problem Sites 'Frightening', Says Environment Agency (theguardian.com) 28
The number of sites identified as potentially having been polluted with banned cancer-causing "forever chemicals" in England is on the rise, and the Environment Agency (EA) says it does not have the budget to deal with them. From a report: A former RAF airfield in Cambridgeshire and a fire service college in the Cotswolds have joined a chemicals plant in Lancashire and a fire protection equipment supplier in North Yorkshire on the agency's list of "problem sites" for per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS). In total, according to a report compiled for the agency, there could be more than 10,000 locations in England contaminated with PFAS -- substances that have been linked to a wide range of diseases including cancers, and which do not break down in the environment, earning them the nickname "forever chemicals." But to date the agency is only taking action on four sites.
[...] In an email sent to Defra in May, the agency says there are "funding pressures this year to take on all the inspection work we have been asked to do" relating to "PFAS and the two new potential site inspection requests we have accepted for AGC and Duxford." "These are the first requests we have had for many years and the very high cost of analysing for PFAS is beginning to get frightening,â the agency wrote. The "ballpark estimate of costs to carry out ... investigations on four PFAS problem sites ... has just come out at between $2.3m-$3.5m. We aren't planning to spend anything like [that], certainly not immediately but it does put the total value of our contaminated land budget of $392k plus $262k from [the chemicals funding stream] into context."
[...] In an email sent to Defra in May, the agency says there are "funding pressures this year to take on all the inspection work we have been asked to do" relating to "PFAS and the two new potential site inspection requests we have accepted for AGC and Duxford." "These are the first requests we have had for many years and the very high cost of analysing for PFAS is beginning to get frightening,â the agency wrote. The "ballpark estimate of costs to carry out ... investigations on four PFAS problem sites ... has just come out at between $2.3m-$3.5m. We aren't planning to spend anything like [that], certainly not immediately but it does put the total value of our contaminated land budget of $392k plus $262k from [the chemicals funding stream] into context."
From clamshells to Chlorox... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:From clamshells to Chlorox... (Score:5, Informative)
This goes all the way back to "Silent Spring" by Rachel Carson.
The thing that made DDT a great pesticide was it's persistence in the environment. If you applied it, and it didn't rain, you didn't have to reapply it because the half life of DDT was *fifteen years*. Decades of persistence is way too much of a good thing for a pesticide which you apply outdoors by the ton.
PFAS are sneaky, because they're supposed to be inert; they're not toxic in the concentrations you initially see in the environment. And they're not supposed to be released into the environment by the ton. But unless we recycle them, every gram of PFAS that gets manufactured ends up in the environment, and these suckers have a half life measured in *thousands of years*. Dose makes the poison, and eventually whatever the problem threshold is we're going to hit it.
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So no glass or rocks eh?
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I can't tell if you are serious or joking....?
I mean, how would anyone know what you're throwing into your trash?
You don't have any sort of "Trash Police" where you are that actually go THROUGH everyone's trash/trashcan do you?
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The "trash police" are the guys on the garbage truck. From what I've seen, they LOVE not taking trash to the dump. They're just waiting for an excuse. Usually they do just leave contraband on the curb, with no explanation. But tickets are theoretical possibility, and they do happen. (To OTHER people; you're welcome.)
I suppose, if you conceal it well enough that the sanitation guy can't identify it as being full of rocks (or concrete, or heavy-gauge metal, or "bulk") at pickup, you could avoid a ticket.
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Glass is a rock. Obsidian == glass, which is a volcanic rock. I think if the thing you are discharging is naturally occurring you should be able to discharge it in the same proportions it naturally occurs.
Silicon dioxide is basically everywhere as sand. If you crushed a bunch of soda glass into sand size particles and dumped it into the middle of a desert or the ocean, I don't think it would disrupt anything as long as you didn't bury a bunch of native flora.
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I'm can't tell if you don't know who mandated the flame retardants or you don't know what guinea pigs are or it's an excellent pastiche.
+1 Poe's Law achieved.
Pay a lot now or a more later (Score:1)
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Nobody wants to pay for cleanup, but the costs only grow. The only way to truly defer the costs is for the environment to die, and us with it.
So long as somebody makes a profit right up to the last moment, capitalism wins!
First step (Score:2, Insightful)
The first step should be to track down all the perpetrators and make them pay. Only when they have nothing left should the public purse be drawn on - and in that case, the perpetrators should be punished.
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> track down all the perpetrators and make them pay
The regulators who mandated flame retardants?
They barely have a livable pension.
I guess you could jail them and seize their assets but it won't go far.
It would send a message to future know-nothing regulators.
Actually, scratch that - Dunning-Kruger is how we got here.
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Yeah, thos
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You mean the companies that probably no longer exist? Your next move is screaming at clouds.
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The problem is that a lot of them dumped this stuff back when it was legal, and the general principle in English & Welsh law is that new rules can't retroactively criminalize people.
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There's no "cleaning it up" (Score:2)
Most PFAS-polluted sites will be left alone and nature will be allowed to take it's course. The stuff is bad, and it's persistent, but I'm not convinced that the compounds actually last thousands of years out there in the wild. Whenever people think that a substance lasts "forever" in nature, 10 or 20 years later some biologist discovers a fungus or bacteria that breaks it down.
Th
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Led by 2018 Stockholm Water Prize winner Bruce Rittmann, the team uses a specially modified membrane known as MCfR that causes a reaction in water, to attack the chemical composition of PFAS particles it contains. The water is then treated by microorganisms in a special reactor (MBfR) to break down the remaining pollutant particles, which possess among the strongest carbon bonds in chemistry. “We use the MCfR to knock off a few to all of the fluorines, and then we hand that water with those compounds over to the microorganisms in the MBfR, and they finish the job,” said Rittmann.
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...“We use the MCfR to knock off a few to all of the fluorines.
Yes, knock off the fluorines, and they are no longer per- and poly- fluoros (The "PF" in "PFAS")
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Yup. You can't clean them up at this point. It is like trying to wash the earth's soil, and where would you put all of the contaminated soil? Best bet is to accept they are there, don't add to them and work on a way to speed up their breakdown and filter them out cheaply at the water supply end.
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How many polluted sites have actually been "cleaned up"? The answer: not very many, because it's eye-bleedingly expensive. Most PFAS-polluted sites will be left alone and nature will be allowed to take it's course. The stuff is bad, and it's persistent, but I'm not convinced that the compounds actually last thousands of years out there in the wild. Whenever people think that a substance lasts "forever" in nature, 10 or 20 years later some biologist discovers a fungus or bacteria that breaks it down.
That being said, there are definitely going to be water tables that wind up contaminated for centuries.
Looking at the information, this stuff is pretty bad - a whole range of issues from cancers to liver issues, even being endocrine disruptors.
So we don't want to inhale or ingest the stuff.
One thing though - "Forever chemicals" doesn't mean forever. Polyfluoroalkyl substances have a half-life of over 8 years. IIRC it is ten years in this case. So this is not a thousands of years situation. So really, the moniker is FUD, when there is an obvious issue anyhow that people should be concerned about.
That