Alison Ling
Brandon Woller '17 / University of St. Thomas

In the News: Ali Ling Co-Authors Study on PFAS Pollution Costs in Europe

Ali Ling, assistant professor of civil engineering at the University of St. Thomas School of Engineering, was recently quoted in The Guardian for a story about the cost of cleaning up toxic PFAS pollution.

the guardian

From the story:

Just to clean up existing legacy pollution in the UK, analysis has found it will cost an estimated £428m every year for the next 20 years, based on existing cost data. This would cover remediating contaminated soils, landfill leachate and to treat 5% of the drinking water in large water supply zones for just the two regulated PFAS compounds, PFOS and PFOA. These costs are conservative, as they only include decontamination costs, not socioeconomic costs or potential costs to the health system. It also assumes that PFAS emissions stop immediately.

“The ‘legacy’ cost scenario we developed represents the minimum costs needed to manage environmental health risks from past actions related to PFAS that are currently regulated,” said Ali Ling of the St. Thomas School of Engineering.

The UK Environment Agency has identified up to 10,000 high-risk sites in the UK that are contaminated with PFAS. It is reeling at the potential costs involved in simply investigating four problem sites, before even considering cleanup costs, and has told Defra that the associated bill is “frightening” and way beyond its budget.