Chemicals Archives - Watershed Investigations

Revealed: the ‘black box’ wastewater trade that rakes in millions for UK utility companies

Firms made more than £340m last year from processing industrial and commercial wastewater at sewage works that are unable to remove many chemical pollutants

Water companies in the UK made more than £340m in revenue last year by pouring billions of litres of industrial and commercial wastewater into sewage treatment works that experts say are not designed to remove most chemicals, leaving pollutants to pass into rivers, seas and farmland.

Water companies are required by law to take industrial wastewater and issue permits called “trade-effluent consents” that allow businesses to send it to sewage works, though water companies can refuse applications.

However, no independent regulator oversees the trade-effluent process and there is no central register, so Watershed Investigations, the Guardian and the campaign group River Action compiled a database of 26,000 consents, providing the first ever national picture of the system.

Read more: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2026/oct/09/uk-water-companies-industrial-commercial-wastewater-sewage-treatment

Toxic ‘forever chemical’ found in almost all rivers and groundwaters tested in England

A “forever chemical”, which Europe’s chemicals regulator says may damage babies in the womb and is suspected of harming fertility, has been found in rivers and groundwater across England, according to Environment Agency data obtained exclusively by Watershed and Unearthed.

The highest concentration of forever chemical TFA in surface water was found in the River Ancholme in Lincolnshire. Image credit: Richard Croft

Five years after we found PFAS pouring into the River Wyre, we returned to uncover a community with contaminated blood

We tested residents living near a chemicals plant in Lancashire. Their blood contained some of the highest levels of forever chemicals ever recorded in the UK

Rachel Salvidge

Sep 24, 2026

“My husband died of cancer. My mum died of cancer. My sister died of cancer. My father died of cancer. My neighbours died of cancer. I have cancer in my head and a tumour in my spine.”

She doesn’t want to be named but she wants her story told. She tended her allotment, not far from a chemicals company, for decades, feeding herself and her family in what she thought was the healthiest way possible. Now she wonders whether its contaminated soils have contributed to her health conditions.

She has an extraordinarily high level of PFAS in her blood — 400 times higher than what would be considered normal, although given they’re manmade chemicals they have no right being in anyone’s blood at any level.

We’re sitting in the football clubhouse a Thornton Cleveleys in Lancashire. Around me people are waiting for or returning from a consultation after having received their blood test results.

All have PFAS in their blood. Most have high levels.

Five years earlier, my colleague Leana Hosea and I were clambering around the banks of the Wyre estuary, taking samples of effluent being discharged from the site of a chemicals company straight into the river Wyre.

This was before Watershed — the investigative outlet we’d go on to found — even existed. We were doing it evenings and weekends around our day jobs, convinced there was a need for it.

We sent the effluent samples to Dr Dave Megson at Manchester Metropolitan University and Professor Ian Cousins and Joost Dalmain at Stockholm University who analysed them for the so-called ‘forever chemicals’.

It turned out the site was pumping eye-watering levels of PFOA — a banned carcinogen — into a legally protected river, alongside hundreds of other types of PFAS.

We published our findings with the Guardian and a multi-agency investigation followed, with the Environment Agency, the UK Health Security Agency, the Food Standards Agency and the council all involved.

Unsurprisingly but disturbingly, the agencies found PFAS in people’s allotments and gardens. Residents were told not to eat vegetables, fruit or eggs. Interestingly, the Environment Agency decided against testing local soils for a PFAS the company itself manufactures, and one the agency suspects is reprotoxic.

The investigation continues today but the community wasn’t getting any help understanding whether the contamination might be affecting their health. So we joined forces with Dave Megson again and Sarah Moore, partner at law firm Leigh Day, to offer free blood tests to people living near the chemicals plant.

I have to say at this point that the chemicals company, AGC Chemicals Europe, says the PFOA in the discharges must be from historic pollution – ICI was at the site previously – because AGC has not used PFOA since 2012, well before it was banned in 2020.

The blood test results shocked us all.

Of the 49 people tested, 69% had combined PFAS levels in the highest health-risk category used by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. The NASEM reference levels classify exposure as low risk below 2ng/ml, increased risk between 2 and 20ng/ml, and high risk above 20ng/ml. None of those tested fell into the low risk category.

The average level of PFOA was 26ng/ml, comparable with the 32.9ng/ml average found in the landmark C8 study of residents living near DuPont’s Ohio plant, made famous by the Hollywood film Dark Waters.

The highest combined PFAS result was 435ng/ml — the highest level we have found reported in the UK. Most of that was PFOA.

The highest average PFAS levels were among people living within 1km of the site, although elevated levels were also found more than 2km away.

Several households had elevated PFAS levels in more than one family member, while some of the highest burdens were found among people who had lived in the area for longer.

There was also a striking pattern around food grown at home. Every frequent consumer of home-grown eggs fell into the highest exposure category, as did 75% of those who frequently ate home-grown fruit and vegetables.

One woman, who grew up playing in the dykes behind the plant and asked not to be named, has three autoimmune diseases, cysts on her kidneys, rheumatoid arthritis, primary biliary cholangitis and temporal arteritis.

Her son was born prematurely and has cerebral palsy and ADHD.

Both her grandfathers worked for ICI on the site AGC now occupies. Both died of bowel cancer.

“We played in those dykes that ran through the houses. We ate fruit from gardens. There’s PFAS in my soils. I don’t think there’s any escaping it for anybody. Where did this all come from?”

Another was diagnosed with cancer eight years ago. “It could just be one of those things,” she told us. But she has three children heading into adult life, and on her own cul-de-sac of fifty or sixty houses, she counts six cancer diagnoses. “Could be unrelated, but they could be related. It’s a question I want answering.”

One man spent eleven years doing electrical work on ICI sites. He has fibrosis of the liver. He doesn’t drink.

A fourth woman kept hens in her garden for two years and ate the eggs the whole time. “I’ve got my little girls. I want to know if my land is contaminated. It’s my home, and it’s an asset for my children when I’m not here.”

The Environment Agency has recommended that two sets of allotments be designated as contaminated land and the council is pressing the community to hand their plots back. A third allotment has not been tested at all because it falls under a different council, despite being close to the industrial site.

It’s not possible to prove any individual’s illness is connected to PFAS. And having PFAS in your blood does not mean you will contract an illness now or in the future. What the numbers do show is that this community’s exposure to PFAS is real, measurable, and among the worst documented anywhere in the UK.

What is clear is that there need to be better understanding of exposure to PFAS and other chemicals around industrial sites like this. It’s clear the UK needs a biomonitoring programme to get a picture of national public health and to identify hotspots. It’s clear that chemicals needs much better regulation and testing before they are placed on the market.

And right now, the people of Thornton Cleveleys and the surrounding area need immediate support from their council and local health institutions.

Meanwhile, Sarah Moore is exploring legal routes for the community.

And AGC? Last week it announced it would close the its plant, citing financial difficulties.

The story ran in The Times on the front page, and the BBC and ITV covered it across their platforms.

FIND OUR PFAS STORIES HERE (CHRONOLOGICAL ORDER):

Blood toxins at record levels in residents near chemicals plant

Residents living near a a chemical factory linked to historic forever chemicals emissions have hugely elevated levels of banned carcinogencs in their blood. Watershed teamed up with Manchester Metropolitan University and Leigh Day to offer blood testing to people living near the site following Watershed’s discovery that the site was discharging high levels of the banned PFOA forever chemical into the river Wyre.

“Nobody trusts the water, not with all the cancers,” Chief Tuccaro.

Canada’s oil companies want permission to treat and release toxic waste from Alberta’s tar sands into the Athabasca River — the same river that flows into the drinking water supplies of First Nations communities. But many First Nations leaders say they’re already carrying an unbearable burden from the world’s fourth‑largest oil reserve, with health impacts that continue to mount.

Toxic for 100 years: the UK golf course built on chemical waste dump

One morning in Sandbach, a neighbour appeared at Graham Warner’s door with a large folder: a delivery, she said, from an unidentified source.

“I think you’ll find this very interesting. Happy reading,” she said.

Warner was checking into a planned housing development behind his home. But the folder contained astonishing material not about the development but about the golf course next door to it.

‘Forever chemicals’ in water linked to film studio

The site of a former film studio has been investigated as a possible source of “forever chemicals” found in groundwater, a water company said.

Race to find source of carcinogenic PFAS in Cumbria and Lancashire waters

Watershed uncovered a string of toxic pollution hotspots across Cumbria and Lancashire, with high levels of the banned cancer-causing “forever chemical” Pfos detected in rivers and groundwater at 25 sites.

The contamination, spread across a large area, was uncovered by Watershed Investigations and the Guardian after a freedom of information request revealed high concentrations of Pfos in Environment Agency samples taken in January 2025.

Watershed’s Forever Chemical Romance

Rachel Salvidge

For chemicals famed for their non-stick properties, PFAS have clung to us remarkably well. Persistence is their thing, I guess.

My toxic relationship with PFAS has reached its five-year anniversary and I’ve just realised that my latest investigation brings us full circle, back to where it all started – deja vu like a smack on the head with a Teflon pan.

But first an explainer and some context. Between myself and my colleague Leana Hosea, we must’ve written the next couple of pars a thousand times but they remain critical because the PFAS story still lurks in the margins of most UK media when it should be a repeat headline-maker like the altogether sexier sewage scandal. (Poop is much easier for people to grasp, if you’ll forgive the imagery.)

So to PFAS. It’s shorthand for per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, a huge family of manmade chemicals used to make things non-stick, waterproof and stain-proof. Think cookware, firefighting foams, food packaging, clothes, furniture, coatings, industrial processes. If you can think of it, someone somewhere has probably tried to sell a version of it smothered in PFAS. There are bazillions of them depending how you define them and the industry is unsurprisingly arguing for a narrower definition than those trying to curb their use.

What’s the beef with PFAS? They can take thousands of years to degrade, if they break down at all. That means every molecule manufactured since the 1950s is likely still with us and we’re continually adding more to water, soil, air, wildlife and human bodies. Alarm bells, anyone?

Here’s the kicker: some PFAS are linked to diseases like cancers, immune problems, high cholesterol, ulcerative colitis, thyroid disease, and fertility and developmental issues. And once they’re out there, they’re incredibly hard and incredibly expensive to clean up. The Environment Agency for one is panicking about not being able to afford a handful of investigations, let alone the investigations of an estimated 10,000 hotspots around the country.

But PFAS have been bigger than poop in the US for decades. Manufacturers have coughed up billions of dollars in settlements to contaminated communities but in the UK there was an eerie silence on the matter. Hollywood even made a film about it starring Mark Ruffalo as Rob Bilott, the tenacious lawyer who first exposed the horrors of PFAS pollution to the world and whose work led to two PFAS being banned. Here? It didn’t even get a cameo in Eastenders.

My first story for the ENDS Report in 2020 reported spikes in banned PFAS in effluent and rivers in Moreton-in-Marsh in the Cotswolds and Alconbury and Duxford in Cambridgeshire. I’ve since exposed Cambridge Water for serving up tap water with high levels of PFAS in it without telling its customers or letting on to the Drinking Water Inspectorate, at least not until the article came out in the Guardian, anyway. Moreton-in-Marsh is now an accepted hotspot, a result of the firefighting training centre there that used lashings of PFAS firefighting foams.

My first story for the Guardian in 2021 essentially asked what on earth’s going on over here? I’d discovered that water companies were not required to test drinking water for these potentially very harmful chemicals, despite the Environment Agency describing some as being ubiquitous in the environment and the pollution crises in the US, Australia and Europe.

It was not long after this that I answered a call from Leana Hosea, a BBC journalist looking to collaborate after seeing my work on old landfill sites. We met and soon decided to work together to find out the true scale of PFAS pollution in the UK. A year earlier I’d had the idea for Watershed and had sounded out experts in the environmental and investigative journalism world to see if they thought it a foolish venture. Fortunately they didn’t. It took Leana and I a couple of years to raise the funds to launch Watershed, which we did in January 2023.

But we didn’t wait for the funding to start the work. For at least a year before launch we’d been working evenings and weekends around our full-time jobs, investigating, among other things, PFAS pollution in the UK.

This included clambering around the Wyre estuary, taking samples of effluent coming off the site of a chemicals plant. With the help of experts and scientists including Dr Dave Megson at Manchester Metropolitan University and Prof Ian Cousins and Joost Dalmain at Stockholm University, we found the site was pumping out eye-watering levels of the banned carcinogen PFOA into the ‘protected’ river. Thankfully the site and its surrounding area is now under investigation by the Environment Agency, UK Health Security Agency, Food Standards Agency and the council. Ominously but wisely, people living around the plant have been told not to eat vegetables from their gardens. The investigations are ongoing but the Environment Agency has oddly decided against testing soils for a PFAS that the company makes and that the agency suspects is reprotoxic. Go figure.

It was around this time that I took a call from Sara Pilz, a journalist who at the time was working at Arena for Journalism in Europe. She invited us to join a coalition of journalists – the Forever Pollution Project – led by Stephane Horel at Le Monde, to work on a Europe-wide map of PFAS pollution and we were thrilled to take part. It led to Europe-wide coverage and in the UK we ran the map with the Guardian and published our own UK investigations across the paper that week.

Two years later and a second collaboration with the same team (this time the Forever Lobbying Project led by Horel) revealed the extent of lobbying by the chemicals sector to avoid stronger regulation of the substances, as well as the eye-watering costs of cleaning up polluted land. Again, we ran more UK investigations alongside the collaborative work.

All of which brings me back to my first story on drinking water. Five years on and there have been improvements in guidelines, the DWI had ordered water companies to test for PFAS and results, a PFAS inquiry and much more regulatory action (albeit slow).

In January 2026, I worked with Esme Stallard and Becky Dale at the BBC on the number of water company assets afflicted with PFAS. It’s a lot. Even with patchy data it was possible to calculate that the drinking water of at least 6 million people is “at risk” according to the DWI. But at least the regulators are working on it.

A combination of painstaking research, EIR work and insider tips-offs helped me uncover PFOS contamination across a wide area of Cumbria and Lancashire in February. The race is on to work out who or what is responsible.

There has genuinely been more work by Watershed than I can squeeze into the already-too-long post. So I’ve pasted a chronological list of stories below that you can peruse at your leisure.

Meanwhile, our difficult relationship with PFAS carries on and we will continue to report on it as long as it remains a problem.

rachel.salvidge@watershedinvestigations.com

Life in the PFASt lane (in chronological order):

England’s bathing water results are out, but do they tell the full story?

Rachel Salvidge

The Environment Agency has released England’s latest bathing water classifications and the headline, pushed by Defra, is that 87% of bathing waters are rated Excellent or Good. Ministers call this a “success story”. The Government press release talks about “cleaner rivers and seas”.

But behind the spin, the data tells a more complicated story. And when set alongside Watershed’s investigation into bathing waters with scientists at the University of York, citizen scientists, and Surfers Against Sewage, it becomes clear that the government’s testing regime needs work.

I’ve plotted the results on the Watershed Pollution Map, so you can see whether or not each site has improved year on year.

There is some good news. The number of excellent sites rose from 289 to 297, poor sites fell from 37 to 32, sufficient sites dropped from 29 to 25.

But when you consider that dozens of bathing waters remain badly polluted year after year, it seems less of a win…

Bathing Water Name	2025 Classification	2024 Classification
Tynemouth Cullercoats	Poor	Poor
Littlehaven Beach	Poor	Poor
Scarborough South Bay	Poor	Poor
Wharfe at Cromwheel, Ilkley	Poor	Poor
Nidd at the Lido, Knaresborough	Poor	Poor
Wharfe at Wilderness Carpark	Poor	Poor
Sheep’s Green, River Cam	Poor	Poor
Wolvercote Mill Stream	Poor	Poor
Dymchurch	Poor	Poor
Littlestone	Poor	Poor
Worthing Beach House	Poor	Poor
Bognor Regis (Aldwick)	Poor	Poor
Southsea East	Poor	Poor
River Avon at Fordingbridge	Poor	Poor
Lyme Regis Church Cliff Beach	Poor	Poor
Stoke Gabriel, Dart Estuary	Poor	Sufficient
Steamer Quay, Dart Estuary	Poor	Poor
Coastguards Beach, Erme Estuary	Poor	Poor
Dunster Beach	Poor	Poor
Blue Anchor West	Poor	Poor
River Tone at French Weir Park	Poor	Poor
Weston-super-Mare Uphill Slipway	Poor	Poor
Weston Main	Poor	Poor
Weston-super-Mare Sand Bay	Poor	Poor
River Frome at Farleigh Hungerford	Poor	Poor
River Teme in Ludlow	Poor	Poor
River Severn at Ironbridge	Poor	Poor
River Severn in Shrewsbury	Poor	Poor
Blackpool North	Poor	Poor
Haverigg	Poor	Sufficient
Derwent Water at Crow Park	Poor	Poor
River Ribble at Edisford Bridge	Poor	Poor

And “Excellent” doesn’t always mean safe. The EA’s classification system is based on spot samples that miss pollution incidents and tests only for two bacteria (E.coli and enterococci), it averages sample results over four years masking critical details, it samples each site only around 15 times per bathing water season (May-Sept). It ignores a host of concerning chemicals, pharmaceuticals, superbugs and pathogens.

Watershed’s 2024 investigation, carried out with the University of York and Surfers Against Sewage, exposed widespread contamination at popular UK swimming spots, including officially designated bathing waters. The work was shown on ITV and in The Times.

Over a week of sampling, we found E.coli up to 22x higher than US safe limits, superbug genes that can lead to AMR and a broader chemical cocktails of pharmaceuticals, pesticides, and PFAS.

The government says this year’s results arrive “as new reforms come into law”, including automatic de-designation after five consecutive Poor classifications and introducing flexibility for site-specific bathing seasons, which means that sites can apply to change the boundaries of their bathing season.

This is the “first shake-up in a decade”, according to Defra. But the reforms do not introduce testing for chemicals, pharmaceuticals, or resistance genes. They do not require testing after sewage spills. They do not bring UK standards in line with US, NZ or EU thresholds. This is why campaigners — and many scientists — argue they fall far short of what is needed.

A further reform, which will look at new bathing water criteria, will come into force in May 2026 to allow guidance to be fully developed.

rachel.salvidge@watershedinvestigations.com