BASF will phase out PFAS by 2028. This decision signals a new trend among chemical giants to phase out “forever chemicals".

Environmental charity Fidra says 168 of 195 SSSIs it surveyed are contaminated with tiny pellets

This month, our Sewage Free Soils team at Fidra attended the 30th European Biosolids and Bioresources Conference in Manchester, where we joined water industry professionals, consultants, and academics...

The Food Safety and Standards Authority of India has proposed a ban on the use of bisphenol A (BPA) and PFAS in food packaging.

Rachel Burden and Gordon Smart with unique stories, and the biggest news and sport.

With growing evidence around the soil health and environmental risks associated with emerging contaminants such as microplastics, PFAS, bisphenols and pharmaceuticals in treated sewage sludge (biosoli...

The persistent pollutants which build up in the environment have been linked to serious illnesses.

Today, a group of 50 patient organisations, healthcare professionals and scientists sent a letter to the UK Government urging it to align with the EU’s update to its own toy safety regulation. The let...

The application of sewage sludge to land delivers high levels of microplastics (MPs), contributing to soil contamination and chronic effects on soil biota. Despite this, the quantitative chronic risk assessment of MPs in sludge-amended soils (SAS) to soil biota has not been thoroughly addressed, and none has been done directly on sludge samples. Here, we combined environmental exposure and species sensitivity distributions, built on published data, with two-dimensional Monte Carlo simulations to characterize the risk from MPs in sludge samples and in SAS, testing worst-case and realistic case scenarios of sludge behavior in soil. Contamination with MPs frequently exceeded the concentration likely to affect more than 5% of the species. Risk characterization showed that the worst-case MP scenario affects 39% of species, while the realistic scenario affects 15–18% of soil species, implying that the current state of sludge application fails to protect 95% of soil biota. The percentage of species affected by MPs approximately doubled in SAS. Our conservative results suggest that regulatory limits on MPs in sludge being applied to land should be urgently considered.