French authorities and water managers find themselves at the dawn of an unprecedented situation: the majority of French people could soon find themselves with drinking water that does not meet quality criteria. The fault of a molecule, trifluoroacetic acid (TFA), an “eternal pollutant” today not regulated, and with poorly documented health effects, which contaminates water resources in France and Europe.
The TFAs found in water come from the degradation of a pesticide, flufenacet. Mainly used for the treatment of cereal crops (wheat and barley in particular), flufenacet is one of the best-selling herbicides in France. Its sales almost doubled between 2019 and 2022 (the last year for which data is available) to reach more than 900 tons per year.
However, on September 27, the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) recognized flufenacet as an endocrine disruptor. This reclassification should automatically lead the French authorities to now consider TFA as a “relevant” metabolite for drinking water, that is, potentially dangerous. Indeed, according to the procedure established by the French Agency for Food, Environmental and Occupational Health Safety (ANSES), as soon as an active substance is an endocrine disruptor, its metabolites must be considered by default as “relevant”, so they are subject to up to a threshold that must not be exceeded.
This limit is set at 0.1 micrograms per liter (μg/L). Beyond this concentration, although without proven risk to health, the water is declared “non-compliant”. Under the public health code, communities can get an exemption to distribute non-compliant water to users for three years. As the legislation stands, this exemption is only renewable once: after six years, the water must return to compliance in order to be distributed.
Bottled water is not saved
According to the modeling carried out by ANSES on behalf of EFSA within the framework of the flufenacet evaluation file, we have known since 2017 that the degradation of the herbicide leads to TFA concentrations of up to 10 µg/L, up to a hundred times higher. limit. The Pesticide Action Network (PAN) Europe carried out drinking water sampling in a dozen European Union (EU) countries, including France, between May and June: the compliance limit was exceeded in 86% of cases and in three out of four water samples analyzed in France. . A sample taken from the tap water that supplies a third of Paris revealed a level above 2 µg/L, twenty times higher than the quality threshold.
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