PFAS, a group of incredibly stable and strong man-made chemicals, are one of the biggest talking points within the water treatment market currently. Awareness of the problem has been rapidly increasing, both amongst professionals and the general public too. These chemicals have proven links with cancers, hormone disruption, decreased fertility, and behavioural changes and developmental delays in children, and so the removal of them is vital.

In this article, we’ll cover what PFAS are, why and how they’ve become a problem, and how Jacobi has worked to create an effective, end to end solution for customers.

The first record we have of PFAS is from the 1930s. Fast forward two decades and the 1950s sees them used widely in the production of many household items. The purpose of PFAS is to make materials water or greaseproof, and so today they are used in the manufacture of food packaging, non-stick cookware, waterproof clothing and accessories, and stain-resistant upholstery coatings. They can even be found in some health and beauty related products, dental floss or cosmetics, for example. Outside the home, they are used in firefighting foam and aeroplane de-icers.

These chemicals served an important purpose and solved some everyday but significant problems. Try cooking or cleaning non-stick pans or take a walk in the rain without waterproof boots or a raincoat and it’s very clear why the use of these chemicals became so widespread. Put simply, they made people’s day-to-day life far easier. Today, they are found in a vast number of homes and, having made their way into water supplies, are essentially ubiquitous.

Now that they are present in the water supply (from various points of contamination), humans and wildlife ingest them on a daily basis. It is not only through consumption of water that they can enter the body, though. There are several other routes, for example through dust from treated carpets or contaminated soils too. Outside the body, the chemical make-up of PFAS is very strong and stable (earning them the nickname ‘the forever chemicals’), and this is still the case once they are inside the body.

Awareness of PFAS on a large scale began when people living near factories or airbases in the USA encountered significant health issues. It continues to be true that people living in close proximity to high concentrations of PFAS are facing the most prominent problems, but a large number of studies are showing PFAS chemicals in our blood and even bones, and traces have been found in placentas and breastmilk, in humans across the globe. Other studies have seen them discovered in water as far away as the Arctic. They truly are everywhere and, what’s more, there’s thousands of them, all with a different chemical structure.