Removing PFAS Pollution in Europe Would Cost €100 Billion Every Year
PFAS pollution comes with a high price, both environmentally and financially.

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It would cost European countries around €100 billion every year to remove and destroy all per- and poly-fluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) from the environment, according to a new analysis.
Over 20 years, this kind of continent-wide project would cost more than €2 trillion.
These hefty estimates were made by The Forever Pollution Project, a European research and journalism investigation initiative launched in 2022.
Forever expensive
PFAS contamination is a mounting issue around the world. The group of surfactants were first mass produced in the mid-20th century to waterproof consumer products like pans, paints and packaging. They’re now known as “forever chemicals” because they have an almost-unbreakable highly fluorinated alkyl chain backbone that makes them extremely chemically stable, and difficult to degrade naturally.
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Instead, an increasing number of researchers and policy makers argue that efforts should be stepped up to remove new PFAS from consumer products and older PFAS from the environment.
Now, for the first time, the Forever Pollution Project has given this kind of monumental task a price tag.
The project estimates that cleaning up the most concentrated European PFAS hotspots – landfills, airports, military sites, sewage outfalls and places where large amounts of firefighting foams have been used – would cost €4.8 billion per year. These efforts would focus on destroying long-chain PFAS.
To tackle newly made PFAS products and all short-chain PFAS compounds (which are small enough to bypass most water filters), the project estimates European countries would have to pay €100 billion every year.
The cost of remediation outside of Europe was not considered.
To get their figures, the project team say they calculated the costs of each stage of such an endeavor, from consulting fees to the development cost of remediation technology, to the budget for PFAS monitoring over the lifetime of remediation. This calculation relied on over 14,000 previously unpublished documents, the majority of which originated from 184 freedom of information requests.
The team acknowledge their data have some oversights. For instance, no information could be retrieved on illegal landfills or wastewater treatment plants that aren’t reported to the European Union.
Nonetheless, the project says its estimates are the most thorough of their kind.
“We cannot remove PFAS from human blood, sea foam or rain. But there is still a lot that can be done,” the Forever Pollution Project stated.
“An alliance of forever polluters claim that only the previous generation of PFAS is problematic. These polluters are orchestrating an EU-wide lobbying and disinformation campaign to derail a proposed European ban on PFAS,” the project added.
“If they are successful, we will all be the subjects of a gigantic, irreversible experiment on a planetary scale.”
Hotspots of PFAS exposure
The field of PFAS research is still in its infancy, but a few key points have already become salient. In low quantities, the chemicals are unavoidable. In high quantities, occupation and location are paramount risk factors.
“There was an FDA study,” Dr. Graham Peaslee, an Emeritus professor at the University of Notre Dame, told Technology Networks last year. “They went out and measured 500 food products – raisins and fresh fruits and vegetables and fish [etc.,]. What they found was only 4 or 5 really had PFAS in them, which meant that the food supply is safe in the United States. I mean, 93% don't have any PFAS. It really depends on where you are.”
“It really is too limited a study to make much of,” he admits. Nonetheless, given his own PFAS research and the work of others, he retains “the general theory that, in most places, the food isn’t contaminated. But there will be places where it is.”
One kind of location bound to be contaminated is anywhere that’s ever been sprayed with aqueous film-forming foam (AFFF).
Speaking to Technology Networks, Dr. Peaslee recalled the case of several Australian firefighter who was being studied by a colleague.
“She measured the PFAS in all of them, and she found that they were elevated relative to the general population, about 10–12 parts per billion instead of 5 [parts per billion]. And it was expected, because they [the firefighters] use AFFF.”
“This was a residential fire station,” he explained, “where they lived for a week on base. They [had] a professional kitchen installed and lessons on how to cook. The firefighters responded to this very positively; they were in better shape, they ate better. And this one firefighter with 1,700 parts per billion in his blood was eating 5 organic egg yolks a day as part of his protein-building diet. Well, egg yolks are highly bio-accumulative.”
“He got five fresh organic eggs a day because the station kept a bunch of chickens out the back. And they fed them the fresh organic wheat that they grew right in the backyard, which happened to be around an old test pit where they tested the foam…”
“So, the foam from 20 years ago, which he had never touched, was leaching into the wheat, which was being fed to the chickens, which accumulated [the PFAS] in their eggs. This guy ate five eggs a day and his PFAS was through the roof!”