Asbestos and lead can teach us about PFAS

Lets jump right in it….

What can asbestos and lead teach us about tackling PFAS

The UK’s PFAS Plan, published in February 2026, marks the government’s first coordinated, long-term strategy for managing per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances. For those of us working across contaminated land and Geoenvironmental engineering, it raises an important question: how do we translate policy ambition into practical, deliverable remediation on the ground?

 

Richard Colin, our PFAS and emerging contaminant technical lead, says:

“The answer may lie in looking backwards before we look forwards”

Writing in Ground Engineering, Richard argues that our approach to PFAS need not start from scratch, the industry has faced comparably persistent, complex contaminants before, and the lessons from managing asbestos and lead in the built environment are directly transferable.

A familiar challenge, in a new chemical form

PFAS chemicals present a genuinely difficult problem. The carbon-fluorine bond that gives them their name is one of the strongest in organic chemistry, and it’s why some PFAS compounds are estimated to persist in the environment for over a thousand years. They are mobile, bioaccumulative, and while research is still evolving, have been linked to a range of health effects including cancer, endocrine disruption, reduced immunity and fertility, and developmental issues in children.

It’s a profile that will sound familiar to anyone who has worked on asbestos or legacy lead contamination. Asbestos was once considered indispensable as a building material before being phased out over decades. Lead, despite being removed from petrol and paint years ago, still persists in urban soils at levels that society has, in effect, learned to manage against an accepted baseline of risk. Richard’s central point is that PFAS is likely to follow a similar trajectory: a widespread, persistent legacy contaminant that can be managed sustainably, but only once we address the source our continued dependence on the chemicals themselves.

 

Prioritising the right sites, first

Given the scale of the challenge, remediation strategy needs to be pragmatic about sequencing. Richard suggests that medium-term efforts should concentrate on the sites where PFAS contamination is best understood and most concentrated, typically in the upper soil layers. That means former chemical manufacturing sites, fire training grounds, and military and aviation facilities where PFAS-based firefighting foams were used extensively.

The remediation toolkit

There is no single fix for PFAS in soil, and the right method depends heavily on site conditions and contamination levels. The options currently available include:

  • Excavation and disposal to appropriately licensed landfill, the traditional, and often most straightforward, route.
  • Soil washing, which separates and recovers PFAS from soil particles at moderate to high concentrations, though it generates wastewater that itself requires treatment.
  • Bioremediation, chemical agents and activated carbon, which work by locking PFAS into the ground rather than removing it entirely.
  • Thermal treatment and incineration, carried out at specially designated facilities capable of reaching the temperatures needed to break the carbon-fluorine bond.

Each has trade-offs in cost, timescale, secondary waste streams and applicability, which is why site-specific technical judgement remains essential rather than defaulting to a one-size-fits-all solution.

 

Learning from experience

What the asbestos and lead comparisons really offer is a template for how an industry moves from uncertainty to established practice: developing robust risk assessment frameworks, building a supply chain capable of delivering remediation at scale, and setting realistic expectations about what “acceptable risk” looks like in a regulatory and economic context.

The UK’s PFAS Plan gives that process a formal starting point. But as Richard’s analysis makes clear, the technical and strategic thinking behind it doesn’t need to be entirely new, it can, and should, draw on decades of hard-won experience managing other persistent contaminants in soil.

Read the full article here:  Ground Engineering.