The True Cost of PFAS

The production, use and disposal of PFAS has many direct and indirect (societal) costs throughout the life cycle of these chemicals and the products in which they are used.  While production costs are borne in the price of the product, many of the environmental, societal, and health related costs are borne by governments, i.e., taxpayers, or by the persons affected by PFAS-related disease. This project aims to identify the true socio-economic costs across the PFAS chemical lifespan.  Current focus is on two types of costs:

  1. Environmental costs, ranging from the costs of cleaning up and replacing contaminated drinking water and agricultural soil to the costs of lost natural resources; and

  2. The costs of health impacts due to exposure to PFAS as workers in production and manufacturing plants, as residents of communities with PFAS-contaminated drinking water, and as the general population.

The Cost of Inaction: A socioeconomic analysis of environmental and health impacts linked to exposure to PFAS

This report, published by the Nordic Council of Ministers in March 2019, estimates how much PFAS exposure is costing Europe’s citizens. It reviews how people are exposed to PFAS via industrial emissions, consumer products and environmental media, such as drinking water. It then looks at the impacts on human health and the environment and estimates the socioeconomic costs of those impacts.

Health-related costs for Europe are estimated at 52 – 85 billion EUR a year, while non-health related costs (mainly drinking water remediation) are estimated to range from 16.9 to 170.8 billion EUR over twenty years.  These are conservative estimates due to the lack of data; the real costs are likely to be significantly higher.

The Cost of Inaction on PFAS in the USA

[to come]