This is HUGE! Trigger warning: human health, animal welfare, corruption. If you don’t know about “forever chemicals” yet, this is a must read. They’re in everything from waterproof clothing to non-stick frying pans, wrappers and grease proof pizza boxes and are dubbed “forever” because they don’t break down in our environment. Like plastic pollution, they build, move and concentrate but the key difference is that these chemicals are invisible. All we see is the impacts. Forever chemicals are wide reaching, as this article shows! This. Affects. Everyone. They have been found in landfill, soil, tap water and in humans. A study found them in the blood serum of Inuit communities in the Greenlandic Arctic and breast milk of Norwegian mothers. Also like plastic pollution, there is poor regulation to restrict the use of PFAS and not enough research has been done to show its full impact but, from what we do understand, they can cause increased cholesterol, low birthweight and suppressed immune response as well as carcinogenic properties. In the UK, high levels of toxic chemicals were found in Cambridgeshire water supply earlier this year, pumped into the homes of 1000 people and none were told! Just because something hasn’t been proved unsafe, it doesn’t mean it is safe. This distinction is crucial. Watch: Netflix documentary Dark Waters all about a lawsuit on a big chemical giant that knowingly poisoned 70,000 local residents in the USA by leaking chemicals into its water supply. Listen: Costing the Earth podcast exploring the impacts of PFAS in the UK. Petition: Fidra (not on IG) is a campaigning charity calling UK supermarkets to stop using forever chemicals in packaging. Share: if nothing else, please share this far and wide to bring mainstream awareness to the problem of forever chemicals. I’ll link all these out in my stories! And I just want to reiterate that I’m never here to scaremonger but I find it astonishing that this stuff barely makes the headlines, and therefore government and industry aren’t feeling the pressure to act. We need to more to bring this to attention.