The Dutch water supply companies Vewin and the Union of Water Authorities believe that a complete EU ban should be imposed on the use of all PFAS substances in the environment. They go further than the government, which wants to continue allowing limited PFAS use and only ban it in non-essential applications. Which applications these are, is not yet clear.
Vewin and the Union of Water Authorities have called on EU Environmental Commissioner Frans Timmermans to ban all PFAS substances. They made this appeal last week during a meeting with the top civil servants of the office of the Vice-President of the European Commission.
According to them, the only way to address and phase out PFAS is by tackling it at the source. Once in the water or soil, these substances are difficult to remove. Therefore, they believe that PFAS entering the environment must be prevented as much as possible.
An advisory report from the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) stated last year that PFAS substances are even more harmful than previously thought. The Dutch National Institute for Public Health and the Environment (RIVM) recommends further reducing the total amount of PFAS that people ingest throughout their lives via food and drinking water.
Recently, the Netherlands together with several EU countries proposed a ban on non-essential applications. Since 2020, the Netherlands has collaborated on this with Germany, Denmark, Sweden, and Norway. All non-essential harmful PFAS substances, approximately 6,000 in total, will be banned at once.
This makes the proposal the most comprehensive and complex ban to date. However, the proposal still allows exceptions for applications considered indispensable. Vewin and the Union believe this does not go far enough. They explicitly advocate for a total ban.
Earlier this year, the European Commission published the zero pollution action plan. In this plan, the EU aims to address environmental pollution at the source and ensure polluters pay. Vewin and the Union want these principles of EU environmental policy to be strictly applied to regulating PFAS substances as well.