There's been a recent Veritasium video about worldwide PFAS contamination, which TBH kinda scared me and got me thinking about where all waste goes, like at the end. I guess there's really nowhere but our planet that we can dump this stuff. If we were a little bit smarter maybe we could find ways to preprocess it into something safer for our environment, or like idk just send cargo rockets outside of the solar system or straight into the sun
After viewing the same video, I searched my local water utilities report to find 40x the updated Federal PPT, due to local airport and military base contaminating the local water supply. Looking at active charcoal filter and reverse osmosis options ASAP to hopefully mitigate any future ingestion/poisoning.
Quite fitting for Dutch researchers to compile such an overview. As the paper says: most PFAS tend to distribute & wash out of soil into waterways. NL surface water quality is among the poorest in EU member states.
However that has more to do with Netherlands' very intensive dairy industry. And to a lesser degree (but still important), other forms of livestock & agriculture. There's other factors, like dumps from illegal drug labs, wastewater treatment facilities unable to remove all remains of (prescription) drugs, the odd fire or spill from industrial plants, runoff from roads, etc etc. NL is a densely populated & industrious country.
In that context PFAS aren't high on the list of issues. But they are everywhere & persistent in the environment, which matters for production of drinking water (& not just that).
