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):