A small North Yorkshire town has been been reported to have the highest concentration of “forever chemicals” in the UK.
The market town of Bentham, which is said to be home to 3,000 people and set on the banks of the River Wenning, is also home to the Angus International Safety Group – locally known as Angus Fire – which, since the 1970s, has been producing firefighting foams containing PFAS at a factory near the town centre.
Per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, PFAS commonly known as forever chemicals owing to their persistence in the environment, are a family of about 10,000 chemicals that have been linked to a wide range of serious illnesses, including certain cancers. They are used in a huge range of consumer products, from frying pans to waterproof coats, but one of their most prolific uses is in firefighting foams.
The firm has not breached any rules in terms of the PFAS it has produced or tested at its Bentham site, and it stopped testing PFAS foams there in 2022 as the industry prepares for the banning of PFAS foams containing the known carcinogen PFOA in 2025, according to available reports.
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But data obtained by the Ends Report under a series of freedom of information requests and shared with the Guardian, has revealed for the first time that the highest known levels of PFAS contamination in the UK have been recorded in the groundwater on the firm’s Bentham site. Among these chemicals are PFOA and PFOS – forever chemicals with known human health impacts.
Angus Fire has also repeatedly breached its environmental permits, with one permit breached 20 times in the past 10 years. Last year, the firm was warned by the Environment Agency that its permit could be suspended after the regulator found unpermitted discharges of PFAS to the environment in Bentham.
Under its permit, the firm is required to test the soil and groundwater on the site. The results of this testing, obtained by the Ends Report, show that in 2008 the groundwater samples recorded a PFAS sum of 1,199,000 ng/l.
Dr Patrick Byrne, who is a reader in hydrology and environmental pollution at Liverpool John Moores University, said these were the “highest concentrations of total PFAS that I have ever come across in any environment in England”. Byrne said that it was “particularly concerning” that these samples were from groundwater, rather than raw effluent coming directly from the foam production.
Story was adapted from the Guardian.
