The rapid expansion of PFAS, combined with their complex environmental interactions, results in a patchwork of data. Critically, due to the sheer number of PFAS, environmental discovery and characterization studies struggle to keep pace with development and release of next-generation compounds. Bioaccumulation in both aquatic and terrestrial species has been widely observed, and while large-scale monitoring studies have been implemented, the adverse outcomes to ecological and human health, particularly of replacement PFAS, remain largely unknown.

As these products flow through their lifecycle from production to disposal ( Print Fig.), PFAS can be released into the environment at each step, potentially taken up by biota, but largely migrating to the oceans and marine sediments in the long term. These numerous applications are possible and continue to expand because the rapidly broadening development and manufacture of PFAS is creating a physiochemically diverse class of thousands of unique synthetic chemicals, related by their use of highly stable carbon-fluorine bonds. In that time, industrial uses of PFAS have extended to more than 200 diverse applications of over 1400 individual PFAS including fast-food containers, anti-staining fabrics, and fire-suppressing foams. Although public awareness of these compounds is still relatively new, PFAS have been manufactured for almost seven decades. Dubbed “forever chemicals” due to their innate chemical stability, per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS), have been found as ubiquitous environmental contaminants, present from the far Arctic reaches of the planet to urban rainwater.

Without Opposite by Marcel Eschauzier