The EU is working on a blanket ban of ‘forever chemicals’. Why isn’t Britain?

By Pippa Neill | The Guardian | February 10, 2026

Read the full article by Pippa Neill (The Guardian)

“Last week, on the morning the government published its Pfas action plan, I got a worried phone call from a woman called Sam who lives next door to a chemical factory in Lancashire. Sam had just been hand-delivered a letter from her local council informing her that after testing, it had been confirmed that her ducks’ eggs, reared in her garden in Thornton-Cleveleys, near Blackpool, are contaminated with Pfas.

Pfas – per- and poly-fluoroalkyl substances, commonly known as ‘forever chemicals’ due to their persistence in the environment – are a family of thousands of chemicals, and I have been reporting on them for years. Some, including those found in the eggs Sam and her family have been eating, have been linked to a wide range of serious illnesses, including certain cancers.

The levels recorded in one of the eggs was so high that if Sam ate just one a week, it would exceed the European safe weekly level for Pfas exposure 10 times over. This threshold sets out the maximum level of Pfas that can be consumed weekly over a lifetime without risking adverse health effects. Sam and her children have been eating these eggs every single day for decades."

This content provided by the PFAS Project.