Read the full article by Pippa Neill (The Guardian)
“Last February, I got a call from a woman called Sam Hammond. We had been speaking on and off for a while over her growing concern that her garden could be affected by pollution from a nearby chemical plant.
That morning, Sam had been hand-delivered a letter from her council informing her that her pet ducks’ eggs, reared in her garden, were contaminated with Pfas chemicals.
‘Are these chemicals in my blood?’ she asked me at the time. Seven months later, Sam has an answer to that question.
Pfas are a group of thousands of synthetic compounds known as ‘forever chemicals’ because of their persistence in the environment.
In 2024, Wyre borough council and the Environment Agency launched an investigation into contamination of one type of Pfas – Pfoa, a group 1 carcinogen that was globally banned in 2020 – in the vicinity of the AGC Chemicals Europe factory in Thornton-Cleveleys, a town to the north of Blackpool. Pfoa was emitted in huge quantities from the AGC Chemicals factory up until 2012.”…