One of the Keynote speakers at AquaConSoil 2025 has kindly made his contribution available to EBNet members.
The talk by Dr Hans Slenders of Arcadis focused on PFAS, including the emerging pollutant trifluoroacetic acid or TFA. A version of his presentation on ‘How sustainable is our current approach for PFAS?’ can be seen here. Although there is no voice-over, the outstanding clarity of the talk makes it easy to follow.
Dr Slenders said, “My message would be, it is not sustainable to set Environmental Quality Standards that go beyond (lower) than background levels in surface or groundwater. The wider negative effects of our measures will have more impacts than the uncertain and very limited additional health effects: moreover, these extremely low standards will slow down the urgently needed remediation of our hot spots”.
EBNet is very grateful to the speaker and to AquaConSoil chair Prof Frederic Coulon, for permission to disseminate this valuable contribution on PFAS research and regulatory needs.
Prof Coulon is also an EBNet Co-I and Director of EBIC. The presentation slides are also available via the PFAS WG webpage. For other recent posts on this topic, see here.