Your home is full of these chemicals. Your tap water provider wants them banned

The nation’s drinking water providers, including Sydney Water, have called for a blanket ban on the entire family of “forever chemicals” in Australian consumer goods to stop the pollution of tap water with the cancer-linked toxins.

The Water Services Association of Australia made the dramatic call to action at a senate inquiry on Wednesday, arguing it was necessary to protect public health and prevent consumers from being saddled with the exorbitant costs of treating water once it was contaminated.

Adam Lovell, the executive director of the Water Services Association of Australia, says tap water providers want a blanket ban on “forever chemicals”. Credit: Brook Mitchell

The per- and polyfluoralkyl substances (PFAS) have been linked to cancer and other adverse health effects, including immune suppression and high cholesterol.

Australia has an incoming ban on three of roughly 14,000 so-called forever chemicals circulating in hundreds of everyday consumer products, including makeup, skincare, cookware, bedding, toilet paper and clothing.

“We’re finding it literally everywhere,” said Water Services Association of Australia executive director Adam Lovell.

“We’re deeply concerned … about the levels of PFAS that have been allowed to enter the country through thousands of everyday household and industrial chemicals and products.”

The association is the peak body representing providers of tap water to 24 million people, including Sydney Water and Melbourne Water.

It called on the Albanese government to ban or severely restrict PFAS in non-essential consumer goods, and introduce mandatory labelling requirements giving consumers the ability to reduce their exposure.

Lovell said a national containment strategy should also be developed.

“Protecting public health is absolutely the highest priority for our industry,” Lovell said. “Prevention is always better than the cure.”

Lovell said a failure to act risked pushing the massive costs of removing PFAS from drinking water onto consumers.

University of Sydney Professor Stuart Khan says consumer goods should be tested for PFAS residues.

The call for a far-reaching ban was echoed by Professor Stuart Khan, a water expert and head of the school of civil engineering at the University of Sydney.

He also called on the federal government to develop a testing program to detect PFAS residues in a wide range of products, make the polluters shoulder the costs of the clean-up, create an Australia Safe Drinking Water Act and establish an intergovernmental body on hazardous chemicals, so the problems weren’t repeated in the future.

“PFAS pollution of environmental water bodies now puts the entire concept of safe, affordable publicly supplied tap water in jeopardy,” he said.

Australia’s drinking water guidelines are set to introduce tougher limits on four types of PFAS this year.

Sydney Water principal public health adviser Kaye Power said all of Sydney Water’s supplies would meet the incoming guidelines and more stringent US standards.

However, she noted not all of Sydney’s drinking water would meet the US EPA’s “aspirational goal” of zero detections in drinking water, based on its conclusion there is no safe level of the probable carcinogens.

“If we’re looking at that, we’re looking at putting in treatment at probably 50 per cent of our plants,” Power said.

Dr Kristal Jackson, a director at the National Health and Medical Research Council, said Australian authorities were “interested” in the European approach to limit the total amount of PFAS in drinking water instead of targeting individual chemicals.

Europe and the US state of Minnesota are also pursuing blanket bans on the chemicals in consumer goods.

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