We attended the ALGA emerging contaminants symposium: Apparently PFAS wasn’t enough

The ALGA Emerging Contaminants Symposium in Melbourne explored the list of substances showing up in our environment and the widening gap between what laboratories can detect and what the rest of us know to do with the results.

A session on plastics, additives and environmental risk brought that problem into sharp focus. The presentations covered microplastics, chemicals released from tyres, the movement of plastics through biosolids and into agricultural soils, and the surprisingly complicated business of agreeing on how microplastics should even be measured. Apparently PFAS was not enough; we needed microscopic tyre particles and plastic additives to worry about as well.

Taken one presentation at a time, each issue seemed manageable. Taken together, they painted a grim picture. The products that make modern life convenient do not disappear when we are finished with them. They break down, wash off, move through waste streams and turn up in places we never intended them to be. By the end of the session, I was beginning to regard every plastic object I owned with suspicion.

The more reassuring point, and there was one, was that detecting a contaminant is not the same as demonstrating unacceptable risk. Analytical capability is advancing quickly, sometimes faster than our ability to interpret what a detection means. Finding something at a low concentration may be important, or it may simply mean we have become exceptionally good at finding things.

That makes monitoring more important, not less. The job is not to fill spreadsheets with results, but to collect defensible data that helps determine what is present, where it came from, how it is moving and whether action is needed.

I left with two conclusions: interpretation may now be harder than detection, and the environmental industry will have no shortage of work. One of those is more comforting than the other.

If you need to monitor PFAS, please reach out to our monitoring team.