Angela Walker In Conversation - Inspirational Interviews, Under-Reported News
For news lovers everywhere. Join former BBC reporter and broadcast journalist Angela Walker as she engages in thought-provoking conversations with inspirational individuals about current affairs and under-reported issues. We examine stories mainstream media don’t cover: issues of social justice and campaigns that aim to improve society and the world we live in. We look at issues around government, climate change, the environment and world around us. In this podcast, we aim to shed light on important topics that often go unnoticed, providing a platform for insightful discussions with our guests.
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Angela Walker In Conversation - Inspirational Interviews, Under-Reported News
FOREVER CHEMICALS: The PFAS Crisis with Environmental Journalist Leana Hosea
Synthetic chemicals which can cause cancer are contaminating our drinking water and farmland, and have been found in breast milk and embryos.
Why is the British government so slow to regulate against them? Why are higher levels of polyfluoroalkyl substances allowed in our drinking water than in other countries?
They're in many products including noon-stick pans and fire-fighting foam - but there are alternatives.
My guest is Environmental Journalist Leana Hosea and co-founder of Watershed Investigations.
https://watershedinvestigations.com/
https://www.angelawalkerreports.com/
Hi listener. I thought you might enjoy Don Anderson's podcast. Missing Pieces - NPE Life is a podcast that curates stories of and about people who find out, usually through a home DNA test, that someone in their family tree isn't who they thought. They also tell stories of adoptees who've found lost family, or are looking. The host, Don Anderson, found out in 2021 that his dad wasn't his dad. It changed his life. NPE stands for Not Parent Expected or Non Paternity Event.
https://www.angelawalkerreports.com/
they're contaminating our drinking water. They're contaminating our farmland, our food, our blood and our babies. I'm talking about forever chemicals, pfas, per and polyfluoroalkyl substances. That's a group of synthetic chemicals used in many products, from non-stick pans to shampoo. I'm journalist angela walker, and in this podcast, I talk to inspirational people and discuss under-reported issues. My guest today is environmental journalist Liana Hosea and co -founder of Watershed Investigations. While you're here, please subscribe and comment. If you're watching this on YouTube or if you're listening, please follow and review this podcast. That will mean it reaches more people, liana, welcome. Hi, angela. How are you Very good, thank you. Thank you so much for talking to us today. Now, you've just co-authored a series of reports about PFAS for the Guardian newspaper, and we'll talk about those reports in a minute. But what exactly are PFAS and how did you first start looking into them?
Leana Hosea:So PFAS are a class of about 10,000 chemicals and you know PFAS is their umbrella name and they are. A lot of them are toxic and they're kind of nicknamed forever chemicals because they have. You know, it's one of the strongest bonds in nature, it's the fluorine carbon bond, and this means that they are heat proof, grease proof, waterproof and they don't break down in the environment. So that's why they kind of stay around forever. And what makes them brilliant, which is all those qualities which means that it's in all your waterproof clothing, it's in nonstick pans, lots of industrial processes which you know need to have high heat, for example. But that's what also makes it. This indestructible quality is what makes it so bad.
Leana Hosea:And a number of these chemicals have also been proven to be toxic to humans. So they are carcinogenic. They cause some of them cause cancer or they probably cause cancer, infertility issues, reproduction issues. They weaken your immune system so that vaccines don't work so well in you A whole host. The more that the scientists are looking into PFAS, the more problems and health concerns they find about them. And again, it's that forever issue because they build up inside your body and it takes. You know it's called bioaccumulation and that means it will stay in your body and kind of be absorbed, and especially if you keep on being exposed to it in your drinking water, in your food, in like your sofa, which might be sprayed with it, you know, the more that that's kind of kind of build up and potentially, you know, cause these health problems.
Angela Walker:It's a scary thought, isn't it, that PFAS are in our bloodstream and even found in breast milk. I mean, is there no way that we can protect ourselves from these chemicals? That?
Leana Hosea:is a big question because, yes, it's already everywhere. It's been found in rain on the Tibetan plateau, you know, and they're not producing it over there. But because this stuff we've been a couple of few companies, like DuPont and 3M were the inventors, you know, real spearheading the production of this chemical, and they've been producing it since the 1950s, and obviously other you know. They gave the patent, shared the patent with other companies who've been producing it. So it is everywhere and, like you said, it's even in fetuses, because you can pass it. Mothers will pass it through the umbilical cord, so babies will be born with it. So this is why there's a number of things that scientists would like to see, so non-essential uses of PFAS being kind of stopped. This is why you've got this legislation proposal in the European Union to ban those non-essential uses and to ban it for all 10,000 PFAS chemicals, which is why there's this massive lobbying push, which we'll talk about because it was part of our investigation, our new investigation.
Leana Hosea:What they're mainly doing is doing a lot of dilution of water. So you know, you've got some contaminated water and it's above the levels that are allowed and the water companies will try and just mix it with cleaner water to bring those levels down. Of course, long term that's not a great solution and there are ways that you can filter some of them out. You can't filter them all out though. You know I have a water filter. I do put my tap water through the extra filter and apparently the carbon filtration is meant to reduce some of the PFAS, but it, you know, it can't get rid of all of it. You know there's loads of it out there. So, but that is one way.
Leana Hosea:In Jersey as well, we can talk about that a bit later as well, because I, you know, one of the articles was about Jersey, where they have found high levels of PFAS in residents' blood and there is a scientific panel which is looking at how to reduce those levels.
Leana Hosea:And, for example, there is this cholesterol drug that they've kind of there's been a small study which shows it reduces it or bloodletting. So you can essentially, yeah, get rid of your blood and try and get you, you know, and then your body will kind of replenish the blood. So you know it's really difficult once it's out in the environment, it's really difficult to, you know, get rid of it and then, and then, when you have got rid of it, then you have to incinerate it at. You know, like you know, after the maybe you've got this water filtration, you know a special filtration system at the water treatment plant potentially and then they've got to get rid of that and you've got to incinerate it above 1000 degrees, which is very expensive, very energy intensive, which is why the costs of getting rid of it are so high.
Angela Walker:So, yeah, people kind of want to start to turn off the tap, but massive pushback from industry to doing that I can imagine and we can talk about that in a minute You've been investigating the scale of PFAS contamination and you've plotted that contamination on the watershed pollution map. Tell us a bit more about your findings and about this. I've had a look. It's like an interactive map, isn't it? Just talk us through that a bit.
Leana Hosea:Yeah, the map actually has loads of different pollution data sets on there, so everyone is welcome to get on that or the watershedinvestigationscom site. So what we did as well with a group of European journalists across Europe last year is we kind of got together all of the data available. Year is we kind of got together all of the data available. Uh, you know, we focus, of course, in in the uk, you know, from uh, water company data, environment agency data. We actually went out and tested uh, water rivers and kind of discharge ourself as well and had that tested, which is sort of the first time that that had kind of been done by, um, you know, individuals, so, um, and then we were able to plot uh, high levels of uh, some of this PFAS contamination and what we found is that it's absolutely everywhere.
Leana Hosea:So it's all over the UK and it's all over Europe, um, but, and we were able to kind of look at, you know, start to kind of narrow that down, and that's what we did a little bit more this time. So where are the hot spots? Because we could look at the concentration levels, um, so some of the hot spots, and we kind of wrote about this sort of in a top 10 hot spots list is the AGC chemicals plant which manufactures PFAS, and that's up in Thornton, cleveley's, and we tested the discharge from there. We found really high levels of the proven carcinogenic PFAS just pouring out into what is meant to be a protected river wire. And then you know there's other areas like Bentham. So I think the map kind of also helped locals start to look into.
Angela Walker:Oh, why are we on this?
Leana Hosea:map and it's because there's a firefighting foam production factory. Firefighting foams have PFAS in them and they also test. They've been testing a lot of firefighting foam there so they've got some of the highest levels of PFAS in their groundwater in the country and kind of. Our map helped them to start, you know them and other journalists to start looking at it. So that's what the map is really for for people to kind of be able to drill down into their local area, for journalists, academics and scientists. Because all this information is sort of like you know, you gotta work so hard to get it all. It's not presented in in a very uh, you know, user-friendly kind of way.
Angela Walker:So we just tried to collate it all and make it you know, user-friendly and well, it's almost like people don't want you to discover the levels of of PFAS in our water and in our blood and uh coming out from factory discharges into our protected rivers. So I mean, I know in one of your articles you mention that the industry is employing tactics like those that were used by the tobacco industry to resist stricter regulation. Tell me a bit more about that.
Leana Hosea:Yeah, so this is the project that we did this year with our European colleagues and we called it the Forever Lobbying Project. This cross-border investigation involving 46 journalists and 18 experts scientists, academics across 16 countries and we really we analysed all of the kind of lobbying data you know we put in so many, took us over a year of putting in loads of requests. We had a big leak as well of documents and we also looked last kind of forever Industry kind of put in like an unprecedented amount of responses in the consultation process. So what we were able to do is sort of analyse all of it all together and what we found is that you know, there's this large scale coordinated pressure from you know, these multi-billion pound industries and so many kind of industries, a concerted effort to push back against kind of legislation and some of the ways that they've done. It is, you know, industry funded scientific research.
Leana Hosea:You know so it's not neutral research and lots of exaggerated claims or to kind of push back against and kind of misinformation as well. So this is why we likened it to the tobacco lobbying, and I mean. Professor Gary Fuchs, who's a researcher in corporate harm and commercial kind of determinants of health at the University of Bristol said that the parallels that have been drawn with big tobacco are compelling, but if anything, it's actually much bigger than the tobacco industry could ever have been drawn with. Big tobacco are compelling, but if anything, it's actually much bigger than the tobacco industry could ever have been able to pull together. This kind of corporate lobbying, like the sheer number of meetings with politicians and civil servants, he said, has been, you know, extraordinary.
Angela Walker:And, of course, we have a choice as to whether we smoke, but we don't have a choice as to whether we drink our drinking water really. So what's the government response to all this, then? Because this is hard evidence that you're showing them, isn't it?
Leana Hosea:To the lobbying allegations. Defra spokesman said that the government is committed to protecting the environment from the risks posed by chemicals and they're currently considering the best approaches for chemical regulation in the UK. And the UK has been very weak around chemical regulations, around regulating PFAS. They've got nothing near what's been happening in the United States and what's being proposed in Europe, so they've been very slow in the United States and what's being proposed in Europe. So they've been very slow and they say it's sort of pragmatic. But an industry is very pro the UK approach and has been sort of using it to sort of beat Europe with and say look, you know, you're just going to isolate yourself. You know you need to have this more pragmatic approach like the UK which you know and a lot of you know scientists and campaign this more pragmatic approach like the UK, which you know and a lot of you know scientists and campaigners will say that the UK approach is slow and weak. What we allow, for example, in our drinking water I don't want to get too technical but we allow 100 nanograms per liter of 48 PFAS now in our drinking water and if, if we go above that limit, then water companies have to do more to bring it below. But in the United States, under the Biden administration, they passed a level of four nanograms and they've regulated seven PFAS, but it's so much lower. So that's just one way, and in Europe they're looking to regulate all 10,000 PFAS in one go because they all are very persistent and last forever.
Leana Hosea:It takes a really long time to prove each one of those chemicals is going to be toxic. But we already know that two of them are hugely toxic and that was proven. If you know Dark Waters the film starring Mark Ruffalo about the American lawyer who bought the first PFAS case that's, that was the outcome of his of that legal case they had a seven year epidemiological study of hundreds of people's blood. It was the biggest study ever. That was the one that linked these two PFAS to all the health problems. So you know you can't do that for every single chemical. It's just impossible.
Leana Hosea:So that's why Europe said let's legislate them all together, because the more we find out about them, the more similar they. You know they seem to have similar or other toxic properties, or they at least all are persistent and build up in the environment. So let's or they're all persistent anyway. So let's legislate them all, and the UK is not doing anything about that. What they are doing is as well is they're sort of looking at firefighting foam, which is one of foam which is one of you know a major kind of source of of PFAS is is firefighting foam. So, um, they are kind of looking, investigating whether to restrict um PFAS in firefighting foam and they've said they will set out more detail in due course. And so many scientists are like this problem is like slapping us in the face. Why are we only just starting? We're still looking at it. This is what the UK government are doing and meanwhile the cost of cleanup is just ratcheting up.
Angela Walker:Yeah, how can you clean up PFAS, then? Because they're so persistent, isn't it?
Leana Hosea:Actually so yes, and it's really widespread. So if you take water, for example, water treatment plants were never built, were never designed to get rid of these complex chemicals, so they mostly don't, and you get a lot of industrial waste and landfill leachate going straight to water companies. And they're not, it doesn't get cleaned, it doesn't get rid of PFAS, so you have all this PFAS coming out of the water treatment plants straight into rivers, into water sources. It's also, you know, spread on fields in sewage sludge, and so what you'd have to do is you'd have to update all of the treatment plants with uh, special filtration systems, um, which will reduce the amount of PFAS, and you'd have to. In Ant Antwerp, for example, there's this facility where they're actually washing the soil. Gosh, they're washing hundreds of thousands of tons of soil and then they're having to get you know. Then you've got this contaminated kind of water.
Leana Hosea:You have to kind of get rid of the, distill out the water, and then you have to burn what's left in a thousand degrees, kind kind of incinerator, to get rid of it sounds costly yeah, that's why the cost of exactly that's why the cost of cleanup we investigated that and found that if we don't do anything and we just carry on as is is like going to be 1.6 trillion pounds across the UK and Europe, and that's just for a 20 year period.
Leana Hosea:So in the UK, if all emissions remain unrestricted, uncontrolled, it'll reach 9.9 billion pounds a year. And then to clean up the legacy pollution that we already have, that's going to cost 428 million every year for a period of 20 years, and that's based on existing cost data. It's only going to cover remediating contaminated soil, landfill leachate and to treat just 5% of drinking water in large supply zones for only two of the 10,000 PFAS, and so it's just decontamination costs. It's not all the other potential related socioeconomic health costs. And it also assumes PFAS emissions are going to stop immediately, which of course they're not going to.
Angela Walker:So which types of PFAS do you think we could easily phase out? Like which ones could we do without? What products are they in that we yeah, that we just don't need?
Leana Hosea:So I think it's more like what products do we not need PFAS in? I mean, for example, your nonstick pan is coated with Teflon, which is a PFAS. So you know there are alternatives out there. You know there's ceramic pans. You know waterproof clothing could there be other? There are kind of other materials now being used. So I think, in you know, consumer everyday products, some, some products I think are just over engineered. You don't need.
Leana Hosea:You know, does your pizza box have to be lined with, you know, potentially toxic chemical which lasts forever? I think it gets harder when you get to sort of industrial processes and this is what industry has been really pushing back on, like green tech or you really need it. But you know other. You know other innovate.
Leana Hosea:You know there's innovations coming up all the time and you know if there's this is not the first chemical that has been banned. You know, for example, there are those two toxic proven chemicals that have already been banned and unfortunately a lot of the alternatives were all too similar. So they you know completely different alternatives out of the PFAS family do need to be found, but you know that's happening all the time. And then you know those innovators will then be rewarded with huge profits that they'll come up with. So, and there are now non-PFAS firefighting foams as well. So there are alternatives, and I think if you know that European EU ban were to come in, you know already. Companies are innovating, so you'd assume that there would be more innovation that isn't likely to give me cancer, do you?
Angela Walker:do you think that we need um? Consumers need to be a bit more aware about the risks that you know when they're buying a frying pan. Hey well, why don't I go for this ceramic one instead of this one that's got carcinogens in?
Leana Hosea:I mean, yeah, definitely, people deserve to have the choice to know. You know that you could. You know that you could. You know that this could potentially, you know, I think, with the pan. So what the manufacturers would say is oh no, when it's, you know, in use, it's completely fine. And in some ways that type of PFAS that we use in Teflon nonstick frying pans, a lot of it, is a bit like asbestos in the way that it's most toxic when it's being created and when it's being disposed of um. When it's being used, it will generally only kind of it. It has to be kind of like a bit overheated um for it to turn into a carcinogenic um PFAS but still not a risk that yes, I think.
Leana Hosea:I think it would be very you know, very much better for public health if you know you had to label everything, for example, if absolutely firms were forced to to label what's in their products.
Angela Walker:Gosh, it's, isn't it? We always wait until something is proved to be really, really, really toxic. Then we regulate it. We always give everything the benefit of the doubt for a very long time before that happens, don't we? Let's talk about sewage sludge why not? You mentioned it earlier. It's like a byproduct of cleaning water, isn't it? That we then use in farming, and you found high levels of PFAS in this kind of fertilizer.
Leana Hosea:Just talk me through that a bit yes, it was actually quite hard to get hold of samples of sewage sludge. Surprisingly, uh, yeah, I was I didn't uh break any laws or trespass laws clambering into uh fields that had just been spread, but we did manage to get a number of samples of sewage sludge. And what this, this stuff is is that obviously our human waste will go into the wastewater treatment plant and then, at the same time, as I kind of mentioned before, there's lots of industrial waste also going to the water treatment plant and then landfill leachate and it all gets mixed up in there. And then, you know, as I said, the treatment plants are not able to kind of filter out pfas in their processes and um, so you end up with, you know, what we found was that, um, all these samples of sewage sludge that we've got had levels of the possible carcinogen called PFOS at levels that you know you wouldn't be allowed to have on a private allotment, and this is being spread all over our agricultural fields and has been for a long time.
Leana Hosea:So and then what they found in America, they've proven this as well, and you know. So. And then what they found in America, they've proven this as well, and you know, pfas is also in pesticides, but so. But also what they found in the US is that you know, it's been an enormous problem for farmers because PFAS has been in dairy milk, which is unsafe levels, and it's kind of taken up by vegetables, by wheat. So it's a significant way that we can top up the PFAS in our bodies.
Angela Walker:Gosh. Well, I did contact DEFRA to see if they wanted to put someone forward to join us on the podcast and they didn't. But they did send me a statement and they put. An Environment Agency spokesperson said effective regulation in the safety of spreading sludge on land is vital and we are clear sludge can only be used if it does not impair the quality of soil or surface and groundwater. And then they go on to say they're undertaking a multi-year program to better understand the sources of PFAS. And they also said it's not appropriate to compare PFAS in sewage sludge to the guideline that applies to the concentration in soil allotments, because when they're plowed into the land they're significantly diluted. What do you say to that?
Leana Hosea:Well, there is no official level in know level in sewage sludge. So they haven't even set a safe or regulatory level in sewage sludge, so there was nothing else for us to compare it with. And you know, the fact that they don't even have a level, you know, is again another sign of how slow and behind, and that they're still looking into where the sources are. Well, you know how come I, we found a lot of the sources that you know this is. This has been a problem that's been going on for you know, decades in you know the us, for example. They could just look in the us and see what's happening there. You know they don't need to be, you know, reinventing the wheel.
Leana Hosea:This, this, the scientific information, the research is all out there. I mean, I think it's. You know it might be, because obviously the cost is huge. You know, in kind of we've we've had insiders at the environment agencies, you know say that they're really kind of scared at the spiraling cost for just four contaminated sites and the environment agency, um, a report for them has found that there's probably more like 10 200 hotspot sites across the uk. So I suppose if you don't look, you're not gonna find it. Or you know, it's this, it's sort of you know an idea that they might be kicking this can down the road. But yeah, as I've mentioned before, this stuff is building up in the environment, it's building up in our bodies, and so that's why a lot of groups would say, well, better action needs to be taken now.
Angela Walker:And how do you feel when we see this kind of like at best, complacency at worst? You know potential cover up. Like you know, you've managed to find the statistics. We know how dangerous they, and toxic PFAS, can be. We don't want them in the water. We don't want them plowed into our farmland, even if they are being a bit diluted. I mean, how do you feel about the responses that you're seeing to these findings?
Leana Hosea:I mean, I guess in a way it's not really surprising when you look at the history you know of these types of things, and I always think that we, probably they would have carried on completely getting away with us not knowing anything about PFAS if it really wasn't for the lawyer, Rob Billott, whose story again is told in the film Dark Waters, where you have this farmer who's, you know, allowed DuPont to dump waste on his land and realized, like why are my cows getting sick and dying?
Leana Hosea:Why is the river, you know, bubbling and frothing like this, you know, and he managed to get hold of Rob Billot because Rob, the lawyer's grandma lived next door and Rob, his job was to protect and represent chemical companies. So this is the first time he kind of did a favor for his grandma, crossed over to the other side and actually uncovered and the biggest, you know contamination. Really. It's the pollution of the century. It's these handful of companies have contaminated the entire world. It's these handful of companies have contaminated the entire world. The fact that it's in everybody's blood, rain, absolutely everywhere, animals as well, wildlife. It's been found in, you know, it's absolutely pervaded everywhere.
Angela Walker:And the fact that we would never have even known. It is just cover. Cover-up works well. You're giving a lot of credit to him, but also you should take credit as well because you've raised an awful lot of awareness. So thank you for your work on this, because if it wasn't for for you and watershed investigations in the uk, we would all be in the dark.
Angela Walker:So thank you and um, thank you you've you've got your whole series of articles in the Guardian newspaper, haven't you? So people can find out more about this there and just tell it. Tell us a little bit more about how people can find out about your work and find out for themselves.
Leana Hosea:Read the figures for themselves yes, well, all our work that we that we've been doing over the two years that we've, that Watershed Investigations have been in existence. It's all on our website. So the way that we work is we do our investigations and then we publish in the mainstream media and whoever will, you know, will take us and a lot of the time, that is the Guardian, so you can see all our work on there or on the Guardian, as you were saying. There's like 10 articles from recently, just this year, like bloodletting in Jersey, the cost of cleanup and kind of everything you know. And also something that we didn't touch on as well is how RAF bases are real hotspots of forever chemicals. And what I find concerning as well is that, because the groundwater at RAF bases are very highly contaminated and that you know, a lot of bases personnel and their families could have been drinking that water. So shout out to anyone who might have questions about water that they may have drunk on their bases. I'd love to kind of find out more about that as well.
Angela Walker:Leona. What is it about RAF bases that are making them hot spots for PFAS, do you think?
Leana Hosea:It's the firefighting foam. You know they will all have like a burn centre, kind of like a training ground, so they set crafts on fire and things and then you practice putting them out with firefighting foam, and that's been happening since the 50s. So again, you know PFAS is. You know, firefighting foam is such a kind of source of it.
Angela Walker:So that's how it would have soaked into the ground.
Leana Hosea:Um, I mean, we we kind of showed that um the cambridge water some of their drinking water supplies near duxford, a former raf base, were contaminated and people off. Because of our investigation, cambridge water had to take some of the supplies off some of the local villages who could have been drinking that water. They said that they diluted it, but you know, the water companies only started looking for PFAS in like 2018. They only started testing for it. So you know before that we will all have been much heavily, much more heavily exposed and those who are living and taking water straight from the hotspots areas, they would be the most exposed.
Angela Walker:Gosh, it's really frightening. Thank you so much for coming on the programme. You can read all about Liana's amazing work on Guardian website and on watershedinvestigationcom. Thank you, liana. Thank you so much for having me on. Thank you, you've been listening to Angela Walker in Conversation. Don't forget to subscribe, like and follow the podcast. That will mean it's recommended to other people. Until next time, goodbye.
