Institute of General Organic Chemistry (IQOG-CSIC)

Ahead of the anticipated conclusion of a United Nations global treaty on plastics, a group of international experts calls for greater attention to health effects when addressing plastic pollution. The work, published in The Lancet, reviews current evidence on how plastics—including microplastics and plastic chemicals—affect health, and announces the launch of a new project to monitor these effects.

A "large fraction" of groundwater samples are contaminated by perfluoroalkyl and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFASs) and would be considered unacceptable for drinking water, a study claims. The analysis, published by Nature Geoscience, brings together data from 273 studies of surface and groundwater samples from around the world since 2004. The exact proportion of samples exceeding the thresholds varies according to the standards considered. For example, 69% of groundwater samples with no known source of contamination exceed the Canadian threshold, but the figure is only 6% if the EU criterion for the sum of all PFASs is considered.