An overview of the uses of per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS)

By Juliane Glüge, Martin Scheringer, I. Cousins, J. DeWitt, G. Goldenman, D. Herzke, R. Lohmann, Carla A. Ng, X. Trier, Zhanyun Wang. Environmental Science: Processes & Impacts, 2020

1,650 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) are of concern because of their very high persistence and impacts on human and environmental health. Currently, many different PFAS (on the order of several thousands) are used in a wide range of applications and there is no comprehensive source of information on the many individual substances and their functions in different applications. Here we provide a broad overview of many use categories where PFAS have been employed and for which function; we also specify which PFAS have been used and discuss the magnitude of the uses. Our compilation is not exhaustive, but it was still possible to demonstrate that PFAS are used in almost all industry branches and many consumer products. In total, more than 200 use categories and subcategories were identified for more than 1400 individual PFAS. The identified use categories include many categories not previously described in the scientific literature but also a lot of well-known categories such as textile impregnation, fire-fighting foam, and electroplating. Besides a detailed description of use categories, the present study also contains a list of the identified PFAS per use category. On this basis, a database of exact masses of 1400 PFAS is provided that is intended to facilitate the analytical detection of many more individual PFAS in the future.

Subfields: Environmental Chemistry

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/209114cd01395394d95f60c386346ef1ec1d0f7c

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Citations in the corpus

Per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances in the environment (2022, neutral): “Historically, hundreds of PACF/PASF-based derivatives with a wide range of perfluorocarbon-chain lengths were produced, on the order of kilotonnes/year (15, 29), and used for industrial and consumer applications (2).”
Per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances in water and wastewater: A critical review of their global occurrence and distribution (2021, background): “The highest number of PFAS and their precursors are used in the textile industry, followed by paper packaging and aftermarket consumer products (Glüge et al., 2020).”