The human-made compounds are used in a variety of products, ranging from waterproof clothing to fast food containers, and studies have linked some of them with cancer, reduced vaccine response, reproductive issues, delays in child development, hormonal issues and increased cholesterol levels.
More than 98 per cent of Canadians have forever chemicals in their blood, according to Statistics Canada.
Previous federal limits for safe concentrations of PFAS in drinking water only applied to PFOS (perfluorooctane sulfonate) and PFOA (perfluorooctanoic acid), allowing for up to 600 nanograms per litre and 200 nanograms per litre, respectively.
One nanogram is about the weight of a single human cell.
The new recommendations, which are not enforced, drastically reduce those limits to 30 ng/l total, a sum of 25 types of PFAS.
The good news for Rodney Bouchard’s utility is that sampling last fall at Union Water Supply found levels that are well within the new standards — a total sum of 13 ng/l.
That testing was done by University of Waterloo chemistry professor Scott Hopkins, who is screening for PFAS at water utilities across southern Ontario.
He said average results across all the water utilities he’s tested have ranged from five to 15 ng/l, which he compares to a Coca-Cola bottle’s worth of water in Lake Erie.
“No alarm bells, but definitely worth monitoring and trying to come up with some sort of strategy for how we would handle this in the future,” Hopkins said.
Since forever chemicals can take hundreds of years to break down, scientists aren’t just concerned about what’s in the water today — but also in the future as forever chemicals continue to build up.
“Those concentrations that we have in the environment I don’t think are going to drop unless we force them down. We put the molecules there. The environment is not able to handle it. It’s up to us to take them out.”