Delay raises the cost of PFAS liabilities

Summary

• Alternatives to PFAS are held back by low production volumes and price rather than by performance, the closing session heard.

• Weak economic incentive is the main barrier to phasing them out, attendees said, ahead of legislation and supply chain transparency.
• Practitioners argued the persistent substances should be handled through existing environmental risk tools rather than treated as a special case.

Most attendees at Environment Analyst‘s free online conference, Assessing, Managing and Remediating PFAS and Emerging Contaminants, said phasing out 95% of PFAS use within five years is not possible.

Asked what prevents companies acting, they put weak economic incentive first, ahead of legislation, supply chain transparency and technical expertise.

Two speakers on day one, addressing opposite ends of the PFAS lifecycle, made a similar argument that the obstacles are commercial rather than chemical, and not acting is the expensive option.

An economics problem

Emil Damgaard-Møller, senior consultant at the Danish Technological Institute (DTI), told the closing session that for most PFAS uses, substitution is not primarily a technical but an economic and knowledge problem.

He pointed to lead, PCBs and asbestos as substances that were phased out across Europe, without the collapse in innovation that was predicted at the time. 

When Danish grocery chain Coop found PFAS in its microwave popcorn packaging in 2016, Damgaard-Møller said, suppliers insisted no alternative existed.

When the retailer removed the product from sale, suppliers returned with an alternative within six months.

He also challenged the industry line that the substances are only used when essential. PFAS is usually the best value for money option with a high safety margin, he said, which is why it is specified so widely.

Where substitution works, he said, it comes from identifying the properties an application actually requires rather than seeking a like-for-like swap. 

The economics turn on production volumes. PFAS has decades of manufacturing scale behind it, while most alternatives sit early on the cost curve, are low volume and therefore expensive. 

Without demand, volumes stay flat and prices stay high. Doing the right thing has to become the profitable option if learning curve effects are to follow, Damgaard-Møller said.

Knowledge is the other constraint. DTI’s November 2025 study of the Danish industry, based on a survey of 198 companies, found more than one in four do not know whether they use PFAS at all, with the substances frequently arriving through suppliers. 

DTI operatesthe Danish Environmental Protection Agency’s PFAS partnership, which offers companies free support in mapping and phasing out use.

Due diligence for PFAS on-site

Chris Ramsbottom, strategic projects director at Adler & Allan, made a similar case for contaminated sites, saying that PFAS should not be put on a pedestal and tthe sector’s existing investigation tools apply. 

He put it plainly: PFAS are just another group of pollutants.

The difficulty, he said, is that stakeholders, from regulators to insurers to investors, each prioritise something different, which makes liabilities hard to pin down and can slow things down. Inaction wastes time and risks larger spend later.

His answer was to work backwards from a clear objective. Then characterise the site using the standard source, pathway and receptor model, identifying where PFAS might be stored or used, how it could move, and what it could harm. 

The persistence of PFAS is the main way it differs, he said. This means pathways, such as drains or pipework, remain active far longer and can themselves become new sources.

Ramsbottom outlined how the value of that groundwork showed in a pre-acquisition check at a fuel storage terminal. Verification uncovered four 1,000 litre containers of firefighting foam concentrate, next to a petrol tank with limited containment and plumbed into the site-wide fire main, with the sea close by. 

Once the source was found, pipework was cleaned and records reviewed. The PFAS was assessed as low risk in context, and the sale completed with a price adjustment for remediation.

Ramsbottom also warned against tracking a single compound, since PFAS changes over time. On one project, a type known as 6:2 FTS broke down into others over about a year. So monitoring only the original would have missed the wider contamination.