PFAS are man made chemicals manufactured and used around the world since the 1940s. They are very persistent in the environment and in the human body – meaning they don’t break down and they can accumulate over time, concentrating as they move up the food chain. There is evidence that exposure to PFAS can lead to adverse human health effects. Here's a map of contaminated public water supplies (blue dots) in the US...
Here is an interactive map that pinpoints the sources...
Interactive Map: PFAS Contamination Crisis: New Data Show 2,230 Sites in 49 States https://www.ewg.org/interactive-maps/pfas_contamination/map/ I'm sure there are similar maps for the rest of the world.
They've recently found PFAS entering and exiting the Arctic ocean, surprisingly, more exiting than entering. Perhaps our newfound friends, the Russians, have taken the newfound ice less Arctic as their newfound industrial waste dump. They're of the out of sight, out of mind type, similar to our climate deniers.
PFAS readily attach to macro, micro and nano plastics, so it's no wonder they are pervasive in the environment, being easily dispersed by wind and water to every nook and cranny. I imagine there might even be extra heavy presence of PFAS in mountain valleys and ravines, where, as everyone knows, snow accumulates year after year after year. With the increased glacial runoff due to AGW, all the deposits of the last 70 years of these chemicals, and the more toxic earlier versions of them and others, might be why there are more exiting the Arctic than entering. I just jumped to the Russian conclusion based on their past history of using the Baltic Sea, the Black Sea, the Sea of Japan and the Arctic Ocean as a repository for all their other industrial, chemical and nuclear waste. My bad.
I guess though, with the Dutch OceanCleanUp expected to remove 90% of plastic waste from the oceans in a matter of a few years, once they manage to get a working model, maybe in another decade, assuming they get another 30-40 or 100 million dollars, all will be well.
Meanwhile, those pesky PFAS have been detected in the blood of 97% of people tested in Wilmington, NC. Similar to the Arctic Ocean, with no obvious source of PFAS, the Yadkin-Pee Dee river system has been found to be contaminated, with water, sediment, algae, plant, insect, fish, crayfish, and mollusk samples all containing PFAS. Hopefully, the government will take charge of this public health problem and and control the hazard by reducing the amount of testing done. The numbers afflicted will then plummet as has been recently shown in other circumstances.
