From.. https://www.msn.com/en-us/health/medical...r-AA10ws6q
Bad News for Earth: Rainwater Is No Longer Safe to Drink Thanks to Plastic
Remember when you were a kid, and it was fun to tip your head back during a rainstorm and open your mouth to drink the drops? You shouldn’t do that anymore. That’s because you’ll be ingesting too many particles of Perfluoroalkyl and Polyfluoroalkyl Substances (PFAS), the hazardous chemicals that leach from the ultra-durable plastics we’ve created for about the past 120 years.
Earth is officially past its safe zone for plastic contamination. The PFAS “boundary has been exceeded,” according to a study published August 2 in the journal Environmental Science and Technology. PFAS are known to be hazardous to both the environment and human health. At this point, these “forever chemicals” are all over the globe and have seeded the atmosphere. Most importantly, they don’t break down in the environment.
“Based on the latest U.S. guidelines for PFOA in drinking water, rainwater everywhere would be judged unsafe to drink. Although in the industrial world we don’t often drink rainwater, many people around the world expect it to be safe to drink and it supplies many of our drinking water sources,” Ian Cousins, a professor at Stockholm University’s Department of Environmental Science, and the lead author of the study, says in a news release.
The original study titled Outside the Safe Operating Space of a New Planetary Boundary for Per- and Polyfluoroalkyl Substances (PFAS) is here..
https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.est.2c02765
Bad News for Earth: Rainwater Is No Longer Safe to Drink Thanks to Plastic
Remember when you were a kid, and it was fun to tip your head back during a rainstorm and open your mouth to drink the drops? You shouldn’t do that anymore. That’s because you’ll be ingesting too many particles of Perfluoroalkyl and Polyfluoroalkyl Substances (PFAS), the hazardous chemicals that leach from the ultra-durable plastics we’ve created for about the past 120 years.
Earth is officially past its safe zone for plastic contamination. The PFAS “boundary has been exceeded,” according to a study published August 2 in the journal Environmental Science and Technology. PFAS are known to be hazardous to both the environment and human health. At this point, these “forever chemicals” are all over the globe and have seeded the atmosphere. Most importantly, they don’t break down in the environment.
“Based on the latest U.S. guidelines for PFOA in drinking water, rainwater everywhere would be judged unsafe to drink. Although in the industrial world we don’t often drink rainwater, many people around the world expect it to be safe to drink and it supplies many of our drinking water sources,” Ian Cousins, a professor at Stockholm University’s Department of Environmental Science, and the lead author of the study, says in a news release.
The original study titled Outside the Safe Operating Space of a New Planetary Boundary for Per- and Polyfluoroalkyl Substances (PFAS) is here..
https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.est.2c02765
