During the recent Engage pre-seminar event on sustainability, led by Liverpool City Council’s Sustainability Manager Simon Mansfield, one of the residents raised serious concerns about the recent report from Liverpool John Moores University in ‘forever chemicals’ being the worst case of pollution in the UK and the third worst in the world.

There is an excellent article published in February that explains the investigation by LJMU and the implications for public health. The article can be found here:

• ENDS Report: River Mersey forever chemical loads among the largest in the world. 18.02.24

It states that the River Mersey is transporting some of the world’s largest recorded loads of carcinogenic forever chemicals through its catchment and out into the Irish Sea.

You can also read the original LJMU study in full to find out more verifiable information supporting the ENDS Report and article above:

• PFAS River Export Analysis Highlights the Urgent Need for Catchment-Scale Mass Loading Data. 19.02.24 on the ACS Publications website.

Liverpool Friends of the Earth are doing great work in this area and shared with Engage some information from their campaign work:

“There is clearly serious inadequate monitoring of river quality with sewage already very much in today’s news headlines and there is little or no monitoring of cancerous ‘Forever Chemicals’. The US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has much stronger standards than the UK’s Environment Agency which is seriously under-funded at the moment. Liverpool Council, as others in the North, do not have the finance and resources to monitor the chemicals. The subject is increasingly moving up the global agenda with much recent research showing how dangerous ‘Forever Chemicals’ can cause cancers as well as other diseases.”

You can read the excellent report from the Royal Society of Chemistry below:

• RSC challenges UK Government to reduce PFAS levels in British water as research highlights serious health risks posed by ‘forever chemicals’

The above article describes very clearly what PFAS are and how they can be cleaned up.

Engage will be exploring more issues concerning sustainability before and after the autumn seminar series. You can find out more about the seminars HERE.

IMAGE: Getty Images. 3D Render of a Topographic Map of Liverpool City, UK. All source data is in the public domain. Contains modified Copernicus Sentinel data (Jun 2018) courtesy of ESA