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hello and welcome to technically speaking where scientists and Engineers come together to chat about a common interest share knowledge and satisfy some curiosity I'm Antonia and I'm joined by Jasmin, Soo-Mei and Laura to talk about forever chemicals and whether we should pay more attention to them so Jasmin you brought this up to our attention so what was your interest in Forever chemicals I've been aware of forever chemicals for a while forever forever yes since forever and ever uh
yeah they like crop up every once in a while in the news and in 2019 there was a movie called Dark Water about an American Environmental attorney who filed a lawsuit against Dupont chemical who's a really big Chemical Company in the US he filed a lawsuit because they were dumping toxic waste and it was impacting rural communities in West Virginia so I got really interested from that and also just from like reading about it in the news and listening to it in in podcasts so Laura what about you
and your knowledge or awareness of forever chemicals I suspect I may have seen that film but fallen asleep during it but I remember thinking that seems very similar to Erin Brockovich which I thought was very entertaining I don't know if that film with Erin Brockovich was about forever chemicals though but the thing is I know very little about them and as Jasmin said they pop on news feeds occasionally and I've never really clicked on the articles to find out out more so I kind of like to hear
from the people that have read about it or work on these things just before I went skiing this pops up on my news feed about waxing agents that they put on skis being on slopes forever yeah I'd like to also know about the full environmental impact that everything that I do in my day-to-day life causes yeah and how concerned should you be about them hanging around on those slopes how much of a problem is that do we know I'm hoping Soo-Mei might be able to help us because you've got some
experience working with what we call Forever chemicals and we will soon eventually actually explain what constitutes of forever chemical I work at Imperial College London as a lab manager right now but before this role I was working at a facility doing analysis uh using this um instrument called lcms qof what it does for you is it can do really high accuracy sample analysis for you I was doing analysis on the pasas family for uh one of our customer um so the customer is trying to tackle this
pasas issue by trying to look for develop materials that can help remove the pasas molecules from the samples so pasas I'm guessing is a type of forever chemical or is that the entire family P stands for the name for the entire family there are two molecules in this family which are called P P4 PFA and also pasas pfas and these are the two highest profile molecule from the pasas family they have got eight carbon chain in this molecules and the longer the chain of this P family molecules the
higher the toxicity it is I was working a lot with these two molecules P force and P4 are trying to develop analytical methods to detect them in the samples submitted by our customers it was definitely challenging because we call these molecules as the sticky molecules because if we try to inject samples that have a really high concentration of this uh molecules they tend to have a carryover effect when we run the next sample of analysis but it felt definitely felt like a really uh useful
uh use of my analytical skill working with this company to tackle this issue okay so I've done a little bit of analytical chemistry so you're basically saying they kind of get stuck or held up in the machine that does the analysis yeah I guess they tend to bond to it too well so you normally have like a sort of a substrate in there that attracts certain molecules with a certain amount of affinity yeah that's definitely what it you know it was doing but is that
what makes it also a useful chemical is that why we want it in our products kind of so like to give some context of like the chemicals that Fallen people family they were technically first invented in the 1800s but it wasn't until the 1930s 1940s before like the chemical industry really got interested in them past as a chemical have some really interesting properties some that are really good for certain applications so they're really durable which also makes it problematic
in terms of toxicity um but the things about them that make them really useful and why chemical companies wanting to manufacture them and use them is that um basically they're really good at not sticking to stuff that's kind of ironic really they get stuck in the itical machines but don't stick to anything else yeah they're really good at repelling water old like waterproof clothing on or accessories um they can use pasas in the coating s the waxes when people have heard of pasas it's
usually in relation to Teflon cuz past was used in manufacturing Teflon which was which is obviously used for non-stick cooking pans so I have Teflon cookware and I also have owned a lot of waterproof clothing over the years because I spend a lot of time Outdoors part of why the reason I'm Outdoors it's going to do a lot of Environmental Conservation work so I'm quite interested in things to do with what Antonio mentioned about the environmental impact in how the coating
has changed cuz I I'm pretty sure clothing is less waterproof now than it was and Jasmine you said it was historically used but now it isn't yeah since 2009 per floro octone sulfonic acid and it's or pfos their use and uses of similar persistent organic pollutants have been phased out what the alternative are not entirely sure it depends on the company some are going for more natural derived waxes While others are looking at less toxic not ban chemicals chemically how similar are
they what made past molecules so good you said it had a long carbon chain is that it or was there something else that made it special because it has like carbon and flooring B in there this type of f makes it especially stable for instance it has very high thermal stability so that's one of the things that makes it more durable which then means it can't be broken down in nature as easily because nature is not used to dealing with it it takes longer time to break down and also forever chemicals
some people will be wondering what forever chemicals because it's kind of stays forever but forever chemical the F and the C also refers to this carbon and Florine Bond so when we say forever are we talking about in my lifetime in thousands of years or in the scale of millions of years so I don't really know about this but I found this paper that says that the longer the chain is in a past molecule and then it would usually take longer for them to be excreted from
the body because of um the the lower water cability and also this small molecules that tend to have a higher affinity for protein serums and all this just adds up you know and make just increase the elimination time from the plasma and okay so by forever they just kind of mean longer than other substances we're currently aware of yeah yeah pretty much also in terms of like how to destroy them it's a lot more difficult because if they're released into the environment there's
nothing in the environment that can actually break them up or destroy them you just have to like wait for the chemical to just break down over time so there there isn't a man-made way to destroy it though human made sorry inclusive language I me okay an anthropogenic way to destroy it because as Su said the chemical bond between the carbon and a Florine bond is super strong you need to use artificial ways that are usually really energy intensive there's a lot of
research going into how to destroy foric these kind of chemicals because there's lots of concern about the long-term Health impacts you can use chemicals to try to dis break the bonds so use chemicals like sodium hydroxide or dimethyl sulf oxide you can also use UV radiation you can also use electrolysis so like electrochemical oxidation okay so some of it could be broken down naturally if UV plays apart yeah if you have enough yeah so what I was going to say is it like a really sunny day is it
fine as long as it's in sunlight for 12 that straight oh no I mean some people some of the companies are already using UV light in the water treatment but our main concern is it's going into the environment and it doesn't naturally degrade is there a concern about mammals humans plant life also absorbing these chemicals oh yeah for sure there's like a really big concern of bioaccumulation so if they get into plants and smaller animals and it can work its way up the food chain
and through bi accumul animals at the top of the food chain end up with higher dosages cuz I just thought you know just find out about the regulation what what how are they regulating the acceptable level of pasas concentration in the drinking water but what they are doing now with the water treatment is that apparently they would dilute the water down so that they can dilute the concentration of peas in the water before sending it to our tap oh wow so they need like a secondary source
know isn't contaminated with it in that case yes so they call this blending the water Jasmine did you have some information about the symptoms that it's going to cause exposure to pasas can have a lot of different symptoms um or result in a lot of different ailments um they're still not entirely sure like what the dosages what exposure rates you need to have to show that you're suffering from past contamination or exposure but generally the main things that would happen to you if you do have
high exposure to pasas are it affects fertility it impacts your blood pressure also leads to like delayed growth in children as well as really impacting birth weight bone variation behavioral changes in children it also increases your risk of certain types of cancers and it can also impact your immune system so like preventing your immune system to be able to fight off diseases so what doesn't it do yeah I mean that's why they're still studying it because it
can cause a lot of different things and is part of the reason it's so difficult to figure out one because biolog is really really complicated and there lots of other things that can have an interplay with what your body's doing yeah but also because there are lots of different types of these forever chemicals or pasas molecules yeah 5,000 substances in this molecules wow the interesting thing is with peas have been around for decades um but the chemical companies were manufacturing it they
weren't dis closing that it was toxic to the government's or regulatory bodies cuz they wanted to use it yeah so that's why it wasn't until the '90s that it was emerging that this stuff is toxic and at that stage they'd already been like dumping it to landfill discharging it into water having workers being directly exposed to it the one of the reasons why pasas is a really big concern in some places is just because the extent to how much has been dumped into an environment like in the Dark
Water yeah that is just what I was thinking when Jasmine said they not disclosing information that sounds exactly like a plot point in a movie they're writing scripts for us yeah but it happened in real life yeah so you mentioned that there were effects seen in children is that because of the sorts of practices that were allowed back then or the companies could get away with maybe I should say so children being exposed in the womb through their mothers were being exposed through water
as well as through other direct ways of being exposed um but also because they were living in places that were already contaminated but the main exposure to peas is through drinking water but so if if my water supply does have these chemicals in it all these substances I don't live near a chemical manufacturing plant so do I need to be less concerned than some other people the thing is they've found that there's actually pasas in most of the water in the world
but they don't know what the dose amount is that would cause an effect so yeah that's the other thing there is past in pretty much all water on the planet it's just they're still not entirely sure how dangerous very low exposure is yeah so you can be less concerned cuz I don't know you're still alive exactly this is what I'm thinking I can't I can't really control these things the closest thing I thought of when we started talking about this was it's accumulating kind of like
microplastics are accumulating in our bodies there isn't really a direct way to remove it once ingested cuz the small small and what are you going to do you can't filter that out of a body so what's the effect you know how at risk are we I suppose this is that Hazard likeliness risk Matrix yeah just how risky is it and I mean it's good that there's a lot of research going into it it's been recognized as a concern for very valid reasons but then it's how much of a concern what could be done in
which part of the world yeah it's difficult to to answer I mean the I think it's something that people should just be aware of uh not to like Panet but to pressure governments and Industry to do more to get rid of pasas from drinking water cuz there are ways of removing you can apparently you can use certain filters and UV light yeah and UV light but basically um do more because we need clean water the water companies in UK they would carry out like water safety planning and tests and make sure
that the water is safe for our consumption and then also by law your water company has to inform you if that is a problem you know with your water supply that could you know cause any risk to your health just to go back if we're asking you know water companies to make it a safe level how much is a safe level then how easy is that to actually test for especially if it's like all different what say 5,000 different substances or can you just lump them all into one and say as a whole they must be
below this amount think you just have to work according to the guideline defined by the country that you're in so for instance in Canada the sum of all pasas concentration in the drinking water has to be less than 30 nog per liter but then in EU EU standard is at the sum of 20 select pasas being less than 100 nanog per liters wow so in terms of the detection it depends on the kind of analytical instrument that you work with so I'm going to change concentration
into like using part per billion instead with the is C off a very specific well-known instrument yeah from aand we could detect down to concentration as low as 0.004 part per billion wow so that's actually low and is that enough to satisfy the regulation in Canada that I think was the strictest one you mentioned so we're going to have to convert the P Pavilion into nanogram per liters you're like on that limit you know you're in the same B Park Mak sha scale I guess a lot of attention came to
these molecules because of the negative effects of certain communities we're seeing but is it possible that there could be benefits to having these things in your body I don't know why there would be this is like mad speculation they tend to have really bad impacts I don't know unless humans mutate and then they also become nonstick or water repellant don't see much chance of having like a positive benefit different from past consumption unless you do mutate and become slow slippery that I
don't know you just glide through water like a seal is there evidence that they do cause mutations because you said they cause cancer but the mechanisms of cancer are really complicated it's an area where they're still researching so I can't say all we know is that if you have higher exposure it's probably just going to give you cancer if not some other disease I suspect that's probably applicable to quite a lot of things like yeah the list of effects of pasas on
human health is really extensive so there's like some things that are high certainty but other things that are lower certainty it's like thyroid disease high cholesterol Li liver damage kidney cancer uh miscarriage those was like high cty low certainty is basically every other type of cancer and other ailments including obesity so basically it does all of the wrong things yeah yeah it it's yeah yeah it's it's not good for you let's just put it this way in a really dark manga that I read
called holic there was a story where a lady was always sitting in a window and just not moving and so they went to investigate this is completely fictional but they said because she ate so many foods with preservatives her body was perfectly preserved oh does that mean that she lived forever no she was dead but her body was completely preserved and it hadn't decayed that is very and it's a good thing that that doesn't really happen although I'm now wondering what the effects of eating a lot of
preservatives are and I suspect that's not a straightforward answer either no have to do some research please don't self-experiment on yourself no leave it to the scientists that are doing controlled experiments yes yeah that's right isn't there one of those TV doctors who likes to do self- experimentation by going on weird diets that's not Michael Mosley sample size is too small so to bring the topic of conversation back to the forever sorry I feel like I decid diverted to sign so
I'm pretty sure I'll live be exposes my entire life I said I've had non-stick cookware and I drink tap water all the time so is it possible that it's having subtle effects that I've never really thought about because you know I've never had cancer I'm still alive as we say I mean potentially it's really difficult to tell because like the only way of collecting this data or like figuring out what the relationship is between like lowlevel exposure to past with health ailments is just basically
seeing how people live their lives seeing how people die and just collecting all the data in the met in a one of those really giant health studies one of those really long-term studies that takes decades yeah so maybe a good way of supporting the research to to see if there are any of those out there and signing up to that if you want to do a bit of Citizen science yeah yeah we should look for funding for this there is some there's more slightly more evidence on like exposure on a large
scale so like if you've been directly exposed to it but in terms of like the general population who are just consuming what is considered a low and safe amount of beas the health impacts are really uncertain we just have to see how what the science and the medical records show in like 2050 years sounds like very sensible advice I don't think I will be changing anything I do with my life result listening to this convers I here here's another thing is people sometimes when they're concerned about
water contamination they drink bottled water instead of potable water so plastic bottles what if there's P molecules in there as well pasas is literally in pretty much all the water on the planet so it's even in mineral water yeah it's in surface water it's in ground water and is in drinking water you can you can detect this molecules all water samples like this and I suppose at this point there is no inverted commas fresh water cuz it all just goes into to the ocean or gets
mixed up together I mean in theory glaciers and the ice in the Antarctic that's still frozen they in theory W won't contain any but we also don't want them to melt oh I am expecting to see a research paper that takes those deep ice C that says we found some yeah how far back would they have to go before they find it oh yeah they like find it from like in maybe the 1900s but hopefully not before then but yeah yeah it's everywhere and it's forever depending on how you define
forever forever until we develop sufficient technology to be actually be able to remove it enough from all our water or it's financially viable because there are methods that exist it's just not widely done yeah that too but clean drinking water for everyone it's a basic human right okay since we're on to Human Rights I think that's a good place to leave it we've learned that past or forever chemicals are a family of different substances containing this strong carbon Florine Bond they have
great uses for water repelling being highly stable chemical unfortunately that came with drawback namely we can't destroy it and now we have it everywhere thanks for listening hopefully future research will find new ways to understand how we can live better and manage resources more effectively so if you like this episode I hope you go for our back catalog find some less depressing episodes and learn more about how we better the world I'm not sure it was that depressing we're essentially
saying don't be too worried yeah unless you live near a chemical plant that you might want to look into their environmental emissions oh yeah yeah that's a very like pragmatic approach to it thanks Laura you're welcome the views expressed in this podcast belong entirely to the person that said them they do not represent any industry or organization if you enjoyed listening to these views it would really help us out if you could rate US leave a review and tell a friend this podcast was sponsored
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