The cost of removing PFAS (per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances) from the environment in Europe, including “emerging” PFAS like f-gas by-product trifluoroacetic acid (TFA), would be €100 billion ($108 billion) per year, or €2 trillion ($2.2 trillion) after 20 years, according to the “Forever Pollution” study published by a group of journalists and scientists.

 PFAS, a class of more than 10,000 synthetic compounds known as forever chemicals for their persistence and durability in nature, are used in a wide array of consumer and industrial products; they include many f-gas refrigerants and TFA, a major degradation product of f-gases (in the atmosphere) and other substances.

Certain longer-chain PFAS like PFOA and PFOS have been linked to severe health effects such  as certain cancers, reproductive issues, developmental problems and immune system. Ultrashort-chain TFA, which has been found in human blood, is considered a potentially harmful chemical.

The Forever Pollution Project, which was launched in 2022 to track the proliferation of PFAS across Europe, comprises two parts: the Map of Forever Pollution (published in February 2023) and the Forever Lobbying Project (published in January 2025). The latter describes lobbying strategies employed by the chemical industry to exempt PFAS from regulations and provides the data on PFAS remediation costs across all 27 EU countries and four non-EU countries (U.K., Norway, Switzerland and Iceland).

The Forever Lobbying Project was initiated in 2024 by Stéphane Horel of French newspaper Le Monde; Luc Martinon a data journalist in France and Germany; and Sarah Pilz, a freelance journalist in Germany. PFAS remediation cost estimates were handled by Ali Ling, Assistant Professor of Civil Engineering at the University of St. Thomas in St. Paul, Minnesota; Hans Peter Arp, Professor of Environmental Chemistry at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU), Raphaëlle Aubert, Data Journalist with Le Monde; and Eurydice Bersi, Investigative Journalist with Reporters United. Arp is also one of the authors of a study describing TFA as a planetary boundary threat.

“It’s meant to say [removing PFAS from the environment] costs too much; therefore, we should be reducing it upstream.”

Ali Ling, the University of St. Thomas

The Forever Lobbying team did two cost estimates for PFAS remediation in Europe. In the “legacy” scenario, PFAS emissions cease immediately and only legacy PFAS – long-chain PFAS such as PFOS and PFOA that have already been regulated – are removed, for an estimated cost of about €4.8 billion ($5.2 billion) per year, or €96 billion ($104 billion) over 20 years.

In the “emerging” scenario, emissions continue and remediation efforts also address short-chain and ultra-short chain PFAS like TFA, which are difficult to remove from the environment.  Estimated costs then rise to over €100 billion annually, or around €2 trillion over 20 years, though these costs could theoretically extend “in perpetuity,” said the Forever Lobbying Project. “These calculations do not include a wide variety of unknown costs due to a lack of knowledge and data sources, meaning they are underestimated,” The Project noted. “Ongoing innovations have the potential to lower the remediation costs, but the most economical option is to lower [PFAS] emissions.”

The emerging scenario is thus meant to reflect ongoing, annual remediation costs “in the case that effective restrictions and source control are not implemented,” particularly for the more challenging to remediate emerging PFAS. This estimate considers costs to remove ultra-mobile TFA and other short and ultra-short chain PFAS from drinking water and other media such as soil, which is technically possible (via reverse osmosis, followed by supercritical water oxidation of brine, for example) but comes at a high price. (Researchers from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign have developed an electrochemical process designed to economically remove up to 86% of TFA as well as long-chain PFAS from water intended for human consumption.)

Because TFA removal and destruction has not been widely studied or proven for landfill leachate or wastewater effluent,  the estimated costs reflect “targeted” TFA removal, not “guaranteed” TFA removal in these media, the Project said.

The European Fluorocarbons Technical Committee (EFCTC), which represents f-gas producers, did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the PFAS Lobbying Project.

Generational decision

Ling of the University of St. Thomas has done two previous cost estimates for PFAS remediation. One was for the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency in 2023, which determined the cost of removing six long-chain PFAS to be “millions of dollars per pound of PFAS,” she says in a LinkedIn post. The other was a global estimate in 2024, which concluded that the current costs to remove and destroy the total PFAS mass released annually into the environment would likely exceed the global GDP of $106 trillion (€98 trillion). The latter estimate did not look specifically at TFA.

Regarding the European remediation analysis, Ling wrote on LinkedIn that the key difference between the two cost scenarios is “what this generation decides to do about PFAS.” The emerging option would be to “continue to make, use, and emit PFAS, passing down whatever legacy they hold (and potentially 100 billion Euros/year in cleanup costs) to future generations.” Alternatively, Europeans could enact policies and support industries to phase out as much PFAS as possible. “In that case, we can pay the cheaper, legacy cost for cleanup, plus the costs of phasing out PFAS. (These have yet to be estimated, but I’m pretty sure they are less than €100 billion/year).”

The €100 billion annual PFAS remediation estimate – which could theoretically continue without pause – is intended more as a warning, explained Ling in an interview with NaturalRefrigerants.com. “It’s meant to say it costs too much; therefore, we should be reducing it upstream.”

 The European Chemicals Agency (ECHA) is, in fact, considering class-wide restrictions, with certain exemptions, on PFAS, including f-gas applications and their TFA degradation product. “If the EU acts now, we can prevent concentrations of emerging PFAS like TFA from reaching harmful levels in our drinking water,” said the PFAS Lobbying Project.

TFA in blood

Ling believes that TFA should be taken seriously as a potentially harmful PFAS. “I hear a lot of people saying that TFA is not toxic because it’s not bioaccumulative,” she said. “But I think that’s missing the fact that the concentrations of TFA in environmental media are getting so high now that it doesn’t actually need to bioaccumulate at all to have really high levels of TFA in your blood serum. It’s not like an exposure that happens once, and then you clear it.”

 But given the high cost of eliminating TFA from the environment, Ling described such an effort as “a fool’s game.” Acknowledging that “we target places where there’s a health risk,” she thinks that “talking about removing PFAS from environmental media is distracting from the need to phase it out and phase out the precursors.”

Another reason to restrict or ban or restrict PFAS at the source is that the cost of removing PFAS from the environment is often borne by governments and taxpayers. “If you remove it at the source, then the companies [that manufacture it] pay,” she said, adding that some of those costs may be passed on to consumers. Last year in the U.S., PFOA and PFOS were designated hazardous substances subject to CERCLA (the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act) – known as Superfund – requiring polluters and not taxpayers to pay for clean up..

The Forever Lobbying Project’s study of PFAS remediation costs throughout Europe, she added, is likely the first of its kind. “I think there have been some studies by consultants that have estimated costs for the U.K. or other places, but I don’t think there’s been a scientific study on it.”  She is working on a  manuscript that documents what was done for the project and hopes to publish it this summer.

On March 29, this article was updated with information on the U.S. Superfund law. On March 31, it was updated with information on the University of Illinois PFAS remediation study.