Residents near Lancashire chemicals plant told to wash homegrown produce

Exclusive: council issues advisory as investigation begins and documents reveal estimates of PFOA emissions

People living near a chemicals plant in Lancashire have been told to wash and peel vegetables from their gardens before eating them, while an investigation into potential contamination of soil in the area with a banned toxic chemical gets under way.

The chemical PFOA, one of the PFAS family of about 15,000 chemicals, does not break down in the environment and last year was categorised as a human carcinogen by the World Health Organization. It is also toxic to reproduction and has been linked to a range of health problems such as thyroid disease and increased cholesterol.

Last year the Guardian and Watershed Investigations revealed that the AGC Chemicals plant in Thornton Cleveleys, near Blackpool, was discharging hundreds of PFAS into the River Wyre, which flows into Morecambe Bay, including very high concentrations of the banned PFOA.

The Environment Agency, the UK Health Security Agency (UKHSA) and Wyre council have launched an investigation into the site.

Watershed Investigations and the Guardian have now obtained correspondence between AGC Chemicals and the Environment Agency, in which the chemicals company estimates that about 115 tonnes of PFOA would have been emitted into air, soils, water and landfills between 1950 and 2012, including when the chemicals company ICI operated at the site.

The documents say: “Since first production at the Hillhouse site the total mass releases of PFOA to air, land, water and in product is approximately 178 tonnes.” AGC says 49.1 tonnes would have been emitted into the air, 54.3 tonnes to water, 6.2 tonnes to landfill, 5.1 tonnes incinerated and 63.3 tonnes would have been sent to customers.

They also show that since 2014 AGC has sent waste to a landfill offsite that accepts hazardous materials, but before that it used the Jameson landfill, which is adjacent to the chemicals plant and which has been the subject of odour complaints from the local community.

Wyre council has told residents that the investigation relates to historical use of PFOA. PFOA is called a “forever chemical” because it takes many thousands of years to break down in the environment, and therefore any contamination that may have taken place in the 1950s would still be present today.

The investigation will involve “collecting small amounts of soil from a number of publicly owned locations within the vicinity of the site to establish whether PFOA is present and, if it is, to what extent. Some samples will also be taken from locations further away for comparison,” Wyre council said.

In a letter, the council told residents to “reduce contact with the soil by taking sensible measures” and to “wash and peel any produce grown in the soil in order to remove any soil or dust”.

Claire Rimmer, a Wyre councillor, said the first set of testing “in the vicinity of the site” was a pilot that could be extended depending on the results.

The instruction has echoes of a PFAS pollution incident in Zwijndrecht, in Belgium, where in 2022 residents around a 3M factory were advised to stop eating eggs and vegetables from their hens and gardens.

Prof Ian Cousins, a PFAS expert at Stockholm University, said: “Personally, I’m shocked that action wasn’t taken sooner.” Based on the historical emissions, “we would expect elevated PFOA levels in the soil within a few kilometres of the plant … It makes sense therefore to be careful regarding consumption of local produce,” he said.

Cousins said the figures looked plausible based on emissions from other fluoropolymer manufacturing plants but he expressed surprise at “how much is emitted to air … We normally assume 15% emitted to air and 85% to land or water.”

He said: “We know the AGC plant has emitted PFOA to air because Lancaster University measured high levels of PFOA in air at the air monitoring site near Lancaster when AGC were still using PFOA. And we [at Stockholm University] measured the replacement [PFAS] in air [called] EEA, recently, at the same air monitoring station.”

A former AGC worker told Watershed that the company had improved its processes in recent years but that “settling tanks and effluent pits used to overflow in heavy rain and everything would get into the river … we had to use anti-foam to stop the river frothing up.”

AGC has told Watershed that the PFOA it recently detected in the effluent being discharged from its site would be related to historical pollution and that it had not used PFOA since 2012.

In a statement, AGC Chemicals Europe said it “does not manufacture or sell PFOA, having voluntarily phased out the use of PFOA as a polymerisation aid in our manufacturing process in 2012. Release of the substance was within the permit held by AGCCE at the time and also UK legislation in place at the time.”

It said: “Although the investigation by the Environment Agency and the local authority has not been completed, at AGC we regularly monitor our emissions as we aim to ensure our activities do not pose a risk to the environment or to human health. All our essential chemical processes and products are already rigorously monitored and controlled and today we are compliant with current UK and EU environmental laws and regulations.”

Dr Dave Megson, a forensic environmental scientist at Manchester Metropolitan University, welcomed the investigation but said it “feels like too little too late. One hundred and fifteen tonnes of PFOA being discharged to the environment is not an insignificant amount. PFOA is highly persistent and so there is a significant potential for human exposure which needs to be established.”

Megson was concerned that the scope of the investigation was limited to just one type of PFAS. “It is important to realise that PFOA is not the only PFAS to have been released from this site. It is likely that a cocktail of tens to hundreds of different PFAS will have been released over the last few decades, and so it feels shortsighted to focus on the risks from just one PFAS.

“Nearly one tonne a year of [another PFAS called] EEA-NH4 can be legally discharged from the site – are we going to go through a similar exercise in another 20 years to understand the potential damage from that chemical? It also seems unusual that no human biomonitoring studies are being undertaken to understand if people in the vicinity have been exposed.”

Dr John Astbury, a consultant in public health at UKHSA North West, said: “At present it is not clear what, if any, public health risk there may be around the site. UKHSA will consider the potential risks and provide an assessment on the potential exposure as the investigation continues and more information becomes available. We will continue to provide advice to Wyre council and the Environment Agency and support their response. As more data is gathered from the site, the relevant agencies will work together to develop any further guidance as required.”

Cover photo: Wyre council has advised residents to ‘wash and peel any produce grown in the soil in order to remove any soil or dust’. Photograph: CSMimages/Getty Images/iStockphoto