What about TFA?

So small it’s harder to detect, so slippery it’s nearly impossible to remove from water. So pervasive it’s in your body right now!

Remember Ladder PFAS? TFA is the 2-rung version of ladder PFAS and is generally unregulated. Health effects are being argued about, but everyone agrees that they are persistent. Also, unlike longer ladder PFAS, TFA is super super hard to remove from water¹. Which means that once it’s out there, it’s really staying there forever. We can’t even pretend that we can remove it. Happy birthday to your great-grandchildren.

Where do they come from???? Unfortunately, the current answer is that we don’t really know. They definitely come from PFAS manufacturing facilities, from coolant use (see next paragraph), and from breakdown of other PFAS in the environment and our waste management systems (over 2000 chemicals can turn into TFA, possibly more than a million²). For a long time, people couldn’t figure out why there was some much TFA in the environment, so they threw their hands up and said there must be a natural source. But no one has any idea where they would come from naturally, so that seems unlikely³.

Refrigerators and air conditioning and other cool technology work by squeezing and unsqueezing a special liquid called a coolant. We used to use something called CFCs, but turn out they started ruining the ozone layer, so everyone in the world stopped making in. Now they make something called HFCs (hint: the F is the same F in PFAS!) and increasingly something new called HFOs (hint: this is also an F-word). HFCs and HFOs don’t make holes in the ozone layer (yay!) but they do break down into TFA (booooo!) And the refrigeration industry is moving more toward HFOs, which make even more TFA that HFCs. This means that more and more TFA will be made from this source¹.

Like with other PFAS, we need to identify and limit the sources of TFA to the environment to limit harm to future generations. And TFA is especially worrisome, because it’s almost impossible to remove. There’s no drain to this bathtub.

Want the sciencey shit?

[1] Garavagno, M. de los A., Holland, R., Khan, M. A. H., Orr-Ewing, A. J.,
& Shallcross, D. E. (2024). Trifluoroacetic Acid: Toxicity, Sources, Sinks
and Future Prospects. Sustainability, 16(6), Article 6.
https://doi.org/10.3390/su16062382

[2] Solomon, K. R., Velders, G. J. M., Wilson, S. R., Madronich, S.,
Longstreth, J., Aucamp, P. J., & Bornman, J. F. (2016). Sources, fates,
toxicity, and risks of trifluoroacetic acid and its salts: Relevance to
substances regulated under the Montreal and Kyoto Protocols. Journal of
Toxicology and Environmental Health, Part B, 19(7), 289–304.
https://doi.org/10.1080/10937404.2016.1175981

[3] Joudan, S., Silva, A. O. D., & Young, C. J. (2021). Insufficient
evidence for the existence of natural trifluoroacetic acid. Environmental
Science: Processes & Impacts, 23(11), 1641–1649.
https://doi.org/10.1039/D1EM00306B