PFAS: Toxic and extremely durable

PFAS investigations for eight federal states

Dr. Dieter Martens, Deputy Scientific and Technical Director and Head of the Department of Environmental Analysis and Product Quality at LUFA Speyer, has been working on PFAS, a group of industrially produced carbon fluorine compounds, for around 15 years. They are distributed worldwide via air and water and are extremely stable. They are used because of their special properties. They are water-, grease- and dirt-repellent and non-sticky. They can be found everywhere: from Teflon pans and fast food packaging to outdoor clothing. In the past, they were often found in fire extinguishing foams at airports, which contaminated drinking water. Sewage treatment plants use activated carbon to remedy this. The German government wants to ban this “eternal chemical” in general and force the use of substitute substances that are less harmful to humans and nature.

More and more studies are showing that PFAS are more toxic than assumed. As a result, the legal limit has been lowered step by step. Dr. Martens has been testing primarily animal feed, but also water, sewage sludge, soil and some foods for PFAS since 2008 and now has a wealth of expertise in this field. Since the German Association of Agricultural Inspection and Research Institutes (VDLUFA) first developed a standardized method years ago, ever finer measuring methods had to be developed. This means that the limit of quantification had to be reduced by a factor of 50 - from five micrograms per kilogram of feed to 0.1 micrograms per kilogram. Last fall, the LUFA Speyer method, which guarantees high sensitivity, was accredited and has since been applied to feed samples from various federal states: As only very few laboratories can determine PFAS with sufficient sensitivity, Hesse, Saxony, Thuringia, Saxony-Anhalt, Berlin and Brandenburg now also have feed samples tested in our laboratory in addition to Rhineland-Palatinate and Saarland.