Forever Chemicals Found In Sea Foam On New Hanover, Brunswick County Beaches – WECT

 Forever Chemicals Found In Sea Foam On New Hanover, Brunswick County Beaches

It’s white, fluffy, and may be bad for your health. —Sea foam is now added to the growing list of things impacted by forever chemicals, known as PFAS, in the Cape Fear region.

Samples of sea foam collected by researchers with Clean Cape Fear along New Hanover and Brunswick County beaches show extremely high levels of PFAS, according to a study called Going Upstream: The Environmental State of our Waterways.

“Our area has some of the highest levels of recorded PFAS in foam,” Emily Donovan of Clean Cape Fear said.

Donovan says the chemicals can sit on top of the ocean, like oil on water.

Just as bubbles form in a bubble bath, when the chemicals are agitated by the waves, they create foam that sits along the coast.

Sea foam occurs naturally in the ocean, however, instead of an off-white, brownish color, PFAS sea foam is a bright white and resembles shaving cream.

NC State Senior Research Scholar Jeffrey Enders, who analyzed the data, says the PFAS sea foam samples have upwards of hundreds of thousands to millions parts per trillion of PFAS. For context, federal drinking water standards have a 4 parts per trillion limit for forever chemicals in drinking water.

“Those levels are a surprise,” Enders said. “There’s probably dogs that walk along the beaches that lick it and eat it. I wouldn’t want my dogs eating it and I wouldn’t want my kids playing in it.”

Enders team found some of the highest PFAS observed are known Chemours-specific compounds.

Chemours has a manufacturing facility in Bladen County and has been held responsible for contaminating waterways in the Cape Fear for years.

“Sea foam is a symptom to an underlying problem,” Enders says. “If you don’t change things it’s just going to continue to get worse. The sea foam is already incredibly contaminated. The only way to make it better is to stop it at the source.”

Donovan is calling on state legislatures. Currently there is no drinking water standards at the state level in North Carolina.

“There’s no excuse at this point for state regulators to allow PFAS to be discharged in bodies of water when we know that we have been severely contaminated for decades and when we add to that burden, it’s putting everything here at risk,” she said.

🔗SOURCE ➡️ WECT

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