Antwerp: The Belgian port city knows the price of forever chemicals better than most, having spent years grappling with contamination around a chemical plant on its edge. A new European review suggests its ordeal is far from unique.

The European Environment Agency reports that PFAS, the family of synthetic compounds nicknamed forever chemicals, now pollute waters across the continent. One briefing found that between 2018 and 2022, most of Europe’s rivers breached the safety threshold for a common member of the group.

These substances earn their nickname because they barely break down. They linger in soil, water and human blood for years, and researchers link some of them to cancers, immune damage and developmental harm. Once released, they prove almost impossible to recall.

Regulation is finally catching up. The recast Drinking Water Directive orders member states to monitor PFAS in tap water from 2026, capping total PFAS at half a microgram per litre. The agency sets out the scale of the problem in its water review.

The economics sober the debate. A study drawing on agency data put the annual cost of PFAS pollution across Europe in the tens of billions of euros, once health treatment, water cleanup and lost productivity enter the ledger. Someone, the authors note, always pays.

Bathing spots, fisheries and farmland all sit downstream of the problem. PFAS seep from industrial sites, landfills and firefighting drills into groundwater, then travel far from their source, which is why even remote lakes now register traces.

Industry faces its own reckoning. Five European governments have pushed a sweeping proposal to restrict thousands of PFAS at once, a move that makers of everything from frying pans to firefighting foam and semiconductors are fighting hard. They warn of shortages; campaigners counter that safer substitutes already exist.

Water utilities sit in the middle. They must now test for compounds they cannot easily remove, and the cost of scrubbing PFAS from drinking water ultimately lands on household bills unless polluters foot the account instead.

Cleanup lags far behind contamination. The technologies that strip PFAS from water remain expensive and energy-hungry, and no method destroys the compounds cheaply at scale, which leaves prevention, rather than the costly business of cleaning up after the fact, as the only affordable cure.

Campaigners want the Union to move faster and adopt the broad restriction without carving out too many exemptions. Every year of delay, they argue, adds another layer of chemicals to rivers that will still carry them long after the factories have closed.