EFAS chemicals represent a human rights three, UN told

‘PFAS impair rights, including the right to life, health, a healthy ecological stability, a safe and healthy working ecological stability and access to information, justice and remedy,’ Bethanie Carney Almroth, an ecotoxicologist at the University of Gothenburg in Sweden, told the UN people Rights Council on 14 September. She emphasised that some of this family of synthetic chemicals – estimated to be in the thousands – have been linked to dysfunctions of the hormonal, liver and immune systems, among other serious health problems like cancers.

‘These are largely manufactured in manufacturing states and spread globally through releases – through transboundary movements of discarded materials laden with PFAS,’ stated Carney Almroth, whose research focuses on the environmental impacts of plastics and plastic-associated chemicals. Once released, the strength of the carbon–fluorine bond means that these chemicals can remain in the ecological stability to centuries and there are currently no efficiently and scalable technologies capable of removing them from contaminated ecosystems, she added.

During the UN people Rights Council meeting, Carney Almroth presented a recent UN report that urged an immediate ban on all non-essential uses of PFAS. The report also called to ‘thorough national laws, regulations, policies and plans’ to efficiently manage and phase out PFAS as a class of chemicals.

‘The class of PFAS illustrates the promises and perils of technological innovation, in many ways,’ the report concludes. ‘Chemists have delivered novel, synthetic substances that have reconfigured the material fulcrum around which the world’s economies revolve.’

In February 2024, nine UN people rights advisers issued a statement accusing DuPont and Chemours of discharging dangerous PFAS into the ecological stability along the reduce Cape Fear River in North Carolina, US. This followed a formal request by a regional community action group to the UN to investigate multiple alleged people rights violations related to Chemours’ emit of PFAS from one of its nearby vegetation into the river.

Meanwhile, most of the world’s largest PFAS manufacturers are planning to expand their production to meet growing demand to AI and data-centre infrastructure, semiconductor manufacturing and lithium-ion battery materials, according to ChemSec. The summary is based on the environmental organisation’s survey of the world’s largest PFAS producers, including Chemours, Arkema and Daikin Chemicals.

‘These companies’ expansion plans show that, unless governments and regulators insist on a rapid phase-out, we will face a new tidal wave of forever chemicals,’ warned Anne-Sofie Bäckar, ChemSec’s executive director. The organisation states that the only clear exceptions to this direction is the Swiss company Archroma, which is actively marketing PFAS-free substitutes, and German multinational BASF, which has said it will exit PFAS production by 2028.