Since the rise of commercial chemical manufacturing in the 1940s, the environment has been plagued by a growing concentration of man-made substances like microplastics, PCBs, and bisphenols.
There’s even a new one rising to prominence: the chemical compound trifluoroacetic acid, or TFA.
New reporting by Nature detailed the troubling rise of TFA and its inexorable creep into every corner of the natural world. TFA comes mostly from synthetic petrochemicals found in pesticides and landfills, where they break down from PFAS, commonly known as forever chemicals because they can take hundreds or even thousands of years to degrade on their own.
As a tiny and highly soluble chemical, TFA is incredibly agile, following the water cycle with alarming ease. A recent study of drinking water across 11 European countries detected TFA in 94 percent of tap water samples, and in 12 of 19 bottled waters.
TFA levels have exploded throughout the natural world in recent decades, with dramatic increases recorded across tree species in Germany, the deep sea waters of the Atlantic ocean, the Swiss mountain saddle of Jungfraujoch, and even ice cores in the Arctic.
It’s even being found in most of the world’s rainwater, according to Nature. However, terrestrial TFA doesn’t evaporate with water — meaning the typical industrial polluters associated with PFAS aren’t necessarily to blame for this type of acid rain. Instead, TFA typically joins with gaseous water molecules through fluorinated gases, a byproduct of refrigerants, air conditioners and fire extinguishers.
Though the full effects of TFA on human health aren’t well established, animal studies have shown the chemical to have harmful impacts on embryos and blood-filtering organs like the liver.
Nature notes that, though researchers have been concerned with TFA levels since the late 1980s, some petrochemical industry researchers have turned the chemical byproduct into a scientific debate, arguing that TFA shouldn’t be classified as a PFAS at all. (The US Environmental Protection Agency currently classifies TFA as a non-PFAS.)
Specifically, they say the consequences of TFA exposure are overblown, and point to massive amounts of it in the ocean water as evidence that the planet is coping just fine with the human-made chemical. Therefore, the argument goes, it’s not worth fretting over the dramatic influx of TFA into ecosystems throughout the globe.
This attitude runs all the way to the top of European governments, with research groups convened by the United Nations Environment Programme arguing that synthetic TFA levels pose a “minimal risk,” allowing governing bodies like the European Commission to brush aside TFA concerns and delay regulation. That’s a huge boon to multinational corporations like Honeywell, which aren’t exactly shy about their take on the issue.
However loud — and well-connected — the naysayers are, many in the scientific community disagree. A 2021 study by a team of University chemists in Canada, for example, found no “sufficient evidence that TFA occurs naturally,” declaring it a myth that has been accepted without scrutiny.
The researchers don’t mince words, asserting that “natural TFA should not be invoked in any discussions about the production and/or regulation of TFA.”
TFA’s own ancestry shows us the danger of taking the petrochemical industry at its word. Though companies like 3M and DuPont have been churning out PFAS since the 1940s, evidence of its harms didn’t make it into the scientific record until the late 1990s — despite compelling evidence that the petrochemical industry knew PFAS was “highly toxic” since at least 1970.
By then, it was too late. In 2001, a widely influential study on the proliferation of PFAS found traces of the forever chemicals had spread throughout North America, Europe, and the Arctic, through the tissue of species like bald eagles, polar bears, mink, and seals.
Thanks to decades of corporate inaction, cancer- and disease-causing PFAS can be found in measurable amounts in virtually every person and animal on the planet. Given their track record on PFAS, the chemical industry’s PR work on TFA feels right as rain.
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