Quick Take — PFAS in drinking water: companies and the City of Paris denounce

Faced with the crisis of eternal pollutants, two drinking water distributors have decided to play the game of transparency and launch a counter-attack. Eau de Paris, the main public water company in France, and Atlantic’eau, the public water service in the Loire-Atlantique region, communicated on Thursday 13 February the results of their analyses on the presence of PFAS (per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances) in water to respond to the ‘legitimate concerns’ of their users. The Paris agency announces that it will file a complaint against X in the coming days. The latter concerns several offences: pollution of drinking water supply networks due to the spillage of substances, abandonment of waste and substantial degradation of the environment. The mayor of Paris, Anne Hidalgo, had declared the day before that she was preparing appeals with other authorities and local operators to obtain compensation for ecological damage and to have the staggering costs of the clean-up financed by the producers. It is the polluters who have to pay, the chemical multinationals that market these pollutants whose toxicity they have known for decades,” explains Dan Lert, president of Eau de Paris. Not the users, not the drinking water operators, not the local authorities. “…

Quick Take — PFAS are present in the majority of drinking water samples in Italy and France

PFAS are present in 79% of drinking water samples analysed by Greenpeace Italy. The figure is alarming because we are talking about a large group of poly and perfluoroalkyl substances, some of which are classified as carcinogenic. If you think Greenpeace may have got it wrong, just look at what is happening beyond the Alps: two mass campaigns, made public on Thursday 23 January, and conducted separately by the consumer association UFC-Que Choice and the environmental NGO Generations Futures on the one hand, and the analysis laboratory Eurofins on the other, suggest that almost all French people are exposed to these toxic substances through their drinking water, and in the vast majority of cases at rates exceeding the theoretical quality threshold. PFAS: Drinking water in France is massively contaminated with ‘eternal pollutants’, especially in Paris. Read also : Bottled or tap water?