The PFAS crisis can sometimes seem hard to grasp. Those tiny little molecules spread out over huge areas in low concentrations. What does it really mean? Join us as we put it into perspective.

Without an EU-wide ban, PFAS emissions in the EU over the next 30 years will amount to 4.7 million tonnes, according to official figures. The calculations were performed by the five EU member states that sent in the proposal for the PFAS ban.

That’s an average of 157,000 tonnes a year, or 350 grams of PFAS for every person in the EU. That amounts to one gram per person per day, the equivalent of one blueberry.

A tiny blueberry of PFAS per day may not sound so bad, but let’s put that into perspective. The EU’s tolerable weekly(!) intake for the four main PFAS chemicals in a healthy adult is 4.4 ng per kilogram of body weight. So, for a full-grown adult male, that’s roughly 0.000000352 grams.

Suddenly, the blueberry doesn’t seem so tiny.

2,700 Eiffel Towers’ worth of heavy PFAS use

Sorry, but it gets worse. Over the next 30 years, the EU will use 27 million tonnes of PFAS, according to the same calculations. 

How come there is such a big gap between usage and emissions, you ask? That’s because PFAS can take a long time to leach out from products and into the environment. The 30-year period used in the official calculations is not only arbitrary — it is misleading.

“Every gram of PFAS that is used will end up in the environment eventually”

Every gram of PFAS that is used will end up in the environment eventually. That’s why PFAS are called “forever chemicals”. They don’t go away, they hang around forever, exacerbating the PFAS crisis.

There is a lot of talk about remediation technologies right now, but the fact remains that we still do not have a way to properly handle PFAS waste. If we put it in landfills, PFAS leach out from there into the environment. If we burn it, we only create smaller molecules and speed up the emissions.

27 million tonnes of PFAS weigh the same as 2,700 Eiffel Towers. Or the same as stacking almost four Eiffel Towers of PFAS on top of each other in every city in Europe*. 

That’s a heck of a lot of PFAS to have in our environment. 

Energy sector is by far the biggest user

The calculations from the five member states show that much of the projected PFAS use will come from the green energy transition. A staggering 42% of all PFAS used in Europe over the next 30 years will be in the energy sector. 

This includes: 

• Renewable energy generation (wind and solar)

• Hydrogen technology (fuel cells and electrolysers)
• Batteries

• Electrical grids (switchgear and circuit breakers)

• Manufacture of chemicals via electrolysis

“42% of all PFAS used in Europe over the next 30 years will be in the energy sector”

Using conservative assumptions, the calculations show that energy will demand more than 11 million tonnes of PFAS between 2025 and 2055. That’s more than 70,000 blue whales’ worth of forever chemicals that will eventually end up in water, air and soil. 

The second-largest sector in terms of PFAS use is textiles, requiring just one-third as much PFAS as energy. 

If it ain’t clean, the energy transition ain’t green

The huge use of forever chemicals in the energy sector shows that the green energy transition will not be clean unless we substitute PFAS with safer alternatives.

As ChemSec has already demonstrated, commercial alternatives already exist for solar and wind technologies, fuel cells, batteries and heat pumps. Yet, the chemicals industry continues to insist that PFAS are critical to achieving clean energy. 

The real question is whether politicians in Brussels will have the foresight to stop the PFAS crisis by introducing a universal PFAS ban, ensuring that we can fight climate change without polluting our world with forever chemicals.

* Assuming that Europe has 800 cities with 50,000 or more inhabitants.