PFAS - Do the new guidelines go far enough?

While there is some good news about dealing with the PFAS problem in Australia many are stating it just doesn't go far enough

In Australia you’d expect to find clean, safe, drinking water widely available. But instead millions of our residents have actually been drinking toxic PFAS chemicals. PFAS are also known as “forever chemicals” because they don't break down in either the body or the environment.

The government has now been forced to act, and the National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC) has released new draft guidelines, reducing allowable levels of certain types of the chemicals. Australia doesn’t manufacture PFAS, but that hasn’t stopped them entering our household water supplies, rivers and lakes.

While these new draft regulations are in line with some allowable limits seen in the United States, it allows for one problem chemical, perfluorooctanoic acid (PFOA), to be an unbelievable 50 times higher.

While the NHMRC has dropped the level from 560 nanograms per litre down to 200 nanograms per litre, this is way short of 4 nanograms per litre limit allowable in the USA. In fact that's 50 times higher than the United States will allow.

So it's no surprise that many experts believe the proposed changes to regulations don't go far enough. "These new proposed drinking water guidelines for Australia are much less stringent than those of the European Union, the United States and Canada," Professor Denis O’Carroll, managing director of the UNSW Water Research Laboratory said.

Both the upper Blue Mountains and parts of Newcastle in NSW have been found to contain worrying PFAS levels in drinking water that would breach the proposed new guidelines. While in Melbourne it's not just humans being impacted but also our precious marine life with dolphins in Port Phillip Bay having been detected with the highest levels of PFAS of anywhere in the world.

With the bleak prospect that many Australians may have been drinking tap water contaminated with PFAS chemicals for decades there's never been a more important time to commence filtering these toxins out of your water in both the kitchen and if possible rest of the home.