Known as trifluoroacetic acid (TFA), the chemical is found in pharmaceuticals, pesticides, refrigerating and air conditioning fluids and industrial materials.
This is the first research looking at TFA levels in British rivers. TFA is part of a group of chemicals known as PFAS, or forever chemicals – so named because they are thought to take hundreds of years to break down.
Little is known about the risk forever chemicals pose to wildlife and human health as research is at an early stage.
And, in the case of TFA, it has been linked to birth defects in rabbits while similar PFAS chemicals have been shown to have effects on freshwater organisms.
“We looked at only 32 rivers and found it in 31 of these,” Professor Alistair Boxall, of York University, told The i Paper. “Given the many sources of TFA, it is likely to be almost everywhere,”
“While most levels we found were lower than this value, some of the concentrations we saw in rivers did exceed it,” Professor Boxall added.
Nor is TFA confined to rivers.
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“While some countries have proposed ‘safe’ values, we still don’t really understand what the risk of this chemical is to human health.
For the study, scientists took samples from five rivers in Wales, three in Northern Ireland, 13 in Scotland and 11 in the north of England.
This concentration – 78,464ng (nanograms – a billionth of a gram) per litre – is the second highest TFA river contamination ever recorded globally.
The highest concentration of TFAs was found in Germany, where a sample from the Neckar River contained 140,000ng per litre in 2016.
The researchers say the average concentrations of TFA in the UK are at the “higher end” of the global scale compared with the results obtained from other studies.
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