Australia Introduces Stricter Guidelines for Cancer-Linked 'Forever Chemicals' in Drinking Water

Strict new limits for cancer-linked 'forever chemicals' in drinking water have been released, but experts say there's further to go to keep Australians safe. The National Health and Medical Research Council has been conducting a review of guidelines for PFAS in drinking water since 2023. PFAS are a group of more than 4000 manufactured chemicals used in a wide range of industrial and consumer products, from firefighter foam to cookware.

They have been dubbed 'forever chemicals' due to their long life in soil, through which they can infiltrate water sources. PFAS have also been linked to health issues, mostly ranging from mildly elevated cholesterol to hormonal and kidney effects, as well as more serious afflictions including potential cancer, thyroid, and bone marrow issues.

RMIT University's Professor Oliver Jones said the new guidelines represented a 'significant shift'. Experts have largely praised the new guidelines, but urged further action. 'However, implementing it won't come without challenges, particularly as drinking water guidelines are often used to inform other environmental standards,' he said. 'As such this update could have wide-reaching implications across compliance, environmental management, and risk assessment frameworks.'

University of Sydney School of Engineering head Professor Stuart Khan said Australians could feel 'confident' in the new health guidelines, but also warned of the cost of implementation. 'In some cases, advanced water treatment processes may be needed and the cost of these advances will necessarily flow through to customer bills. Drinking water cost increases will hit smaller regional communities hardest,' Khan said. 'A great injustice is that this is the opposite of the 'polluter pays' principle, in which the clean-up cost would come from the companies and industries that caused the pollution. Passing remediation costs to drinking water suppliers, and therefore on to their customers, is an example of privatising the profits and socialising the costs.'

Professor Denis O'Carroll, who recently led a study on PFAS in global water sources, said Australians needed more information about how to reduce their exposure. 'The recent Australian Bureau of Statistics report suggests that PFAS is in the blood of virtually all Australians, yet the vast majority of our drinking water is PFAS-free,' he said. 'This begs the question: how are we exposed to PFAS, and how do we avoid it?'

Dr Cheng Zhang from the Australian Institute for Bioengineering and Nanotechnology at the University of Queensland said the stricter guidelines were 'encouraging', but there was much further to go. 'The PFAS concentration guidelines in countries like the USA and Canada remain far stricter than these new levels released today in Australia,' he said. 'The global effort to phase out PFAS is also not helped by the fact each country has slightly different benchmarks for measuring and reporting PFAS variants and concentrations.'