A water quality expert has called on the Australian government to expand a planned ban of certain PFAS as a Senate committee heard concerns from a New South Wales community affected by chemical contamination.
PFAS (per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances), a group of several thousand synthetic compounds, are found in a wide variety of products including waterproof fabrics, food packaging, hygiene products and firefighting foam. They are sometimes referred to as “forever chemicals” because they are slow to break down and persist in the environment for extended periods.
In recommendations set to be tabled at a Senate inquiry into PFAS on Wednesday morning, Prof Stuart Khan, the head of the School of Civil Engineering at the University of Sydney, called for a “far-reaching ban for PFAS used in products made inside and outside Australia”.
The impacts of many PFAS chemicals are not known, but certain compounds have been linked to adverse health effects, such as PFOA – a compound used to make Teflon – and PFOS, formerly the key ingredient in Scotchgard.
A health study conducted by the Australian National University in three communities with known PFAS contamination, published in 2021, found a link between PFAS exposure and higher cholesterol levels.
In December 2023, the International Agency for Research on Cancer classified PFOA as cancer-causing to humans – in the same category as tobacco smoking and alcoholic beverages – and PFOS as “possibly” carcinogenic.
In the same month, the Australian government reclassified PFOA, PFOS and PFHxS on the chemicals register: from 1 July this year, products containing these compounds will be banned from import, manufacture and use in Australia.
Khan called for that ban to be expanded “to include a much wider range of PFAS”.
“Almost every molecule of PFAS that has ever been synthesised is still with us in PFAS form. Some do break down – but mostly into new PFAS,” he wrote. “Proper and thorough risk assessment would have revealed the ‘forever chemical’ nature of PFAS at the time they were first introduced to products used in Australia.”
Khan also called for improved testing and mandatory labelling on PFAS products. “When we export any beef or wine to Europe they do lots of residue testing for pesticides. We should do the same thing for PFAS coming in,” he told Guardian Australia.
The federal government “should seek to take a much more active role in setting drinking water quality and risk management requirements”, added Khan, who has previously said that in light of a revision to the limits of four PFAS chemicals in drinking water, the public did not need to be concerned about cancer risk when drinking tap water.
Khan added that the costs of remediating PFAS pollution should be borne by manufacturers and polluters, instead of governments and consumers.
On Tuesday, a public hearing chaired by the independent senator Lidia Thorpe heard from Aboriginal community members affected by PFAS contamination at Wreck Bay Village in Jervis Bay.
In 2023, the federal government settled a $22m class action brought by the Wreck Bay Aboriginal community council, which alleged that the Department of Defence had negligently allowed PFAS from firefighting foams used at the HMAS Creswell naval base and the Jervis Bay Range Facility to leach into sacred land and waterways.
Tamara Mitchell, the chief executive of the council, told the Senate hearing it was seeking funding for independent blood testing of PFAS levels of those living in the community. “We’re told that our water is clean … that only certain parts of Wreck Bay are contaminated. If this is true, then the PFAS levels of the community members will be the same as the PFAS levels of … members living outside the village.
“I don’t think this is something that Wreck Bay should have to fund ourselves, since we’re not the ones that poisoned the land,” she said.
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Members of the Wreck Bay community also expressed concerns about the ongoing impacts of the pollution, including cultural loss and contamination of water supply.
Craig Allsopp, the joint head of class actions at Shine Lawyers, told the hearing that the Wreck Bay case “only related to economic loss and cultural loss, and excluded personal injury and health issues” because the scientific evidence for PFAS health harm was not sufficiently established from a legal perspective at the time.
“Defence disputed basically every aspect of our claim and the settlement was made without admission,” Allsopp said.
“Because of the First Nations connection to land, I think it is one of the worst impacted [communities],” he said. “There is an opportunity for government action along the lines that have been recommended by the community members themselves that I can’t achieve in a court case.”
When asked by Thorpe whether the defence department took responsibility for the PFAS contamination in Wreck Bay, Celia Perkins, a defence deputy secretary, responded: “Yes. We acknowledge that PFAS used in the Jervis Bay defence site has leached into the waterways.”
Since 2015, the defence department had identified and was remediating the historical use of PFAS firefighting foam at 28 defence sites, Perkins told the hearing. The total cost to date of investigation and remediation work, excluding legal settlements, was $850m, she said.
A permanent water treatment plant at Jervis Bay would commence construction this year, Perkins added.
Thorpe asked why the defence department only began to phase out firefighting foams containing PFOA and PFOS in 2004 when it had been warned about environmental contamination risks as early as 1981.
“I can’t speak to the decisions made in the 80s and 90s, but since 2015 we have been committed to both investigation and remediation and very changed behaviour,” Perkins said.
When asked whether the department would consider funding blood tests for the Wreck Bay community, Perkins said: “Part of the reason that it is not currently government policy to undertake blood testing is that there is insufficient consensus on what PFAS levels in blood might mean.
“Most of us will have PFAS in our blood … but with no way to really understand what that blood test tells us about health effects.”
