Welcome back to Talking PFAS podcast.  I am a journalist and your host, Kayleen Bell. 

Episode 37 - Published 25/11/2022.

Thanks for being patient listeners (as I have been unwell since the Conference).  It is good to be back with new episodes.

For the next several weeks I will be bringing you episodes recorded at the International Clean Up 2022 Conference held in Adelaide mid-September, hosted by CRC Care.  I have already published two interviews recorded at the conference, episode 35 and episode 36 and I encourage you to have a listen.  There are six more to come from this conference, hopefully I can get them all up before Christmas, if not they will run into January, 2023.

Today’s guest is Paul Nathanail from Nottingham, England, Technical Director of LQM, which specialises in contaminated land management in England and around the world.  Paul was a keynote speaker at the Clean-Up Conference and in today’s episode we will discuss details from his talk on PFAS.  In brief, Paul believes we need to form an International Working Group to look at the entire universe of PFAS and then break this universe down into galaxies of individual PFAS substances that have more or less the same chemical properties and more or less the same toxicity properties.  He will explain this in more detail in today’s discussion.  I would like to point out that he refers to this universe of PFAS chemicals at around 9000, and at the last count that I heard, was 12,000, so the PFAS universe seems to be growing all the time.

Now to today’s chat with Paul Nathanail.

LQM (Land Quality Management) based in England but they work all around the world. 

https://www.lqm.co.uk/

Their website states:

LQM is a specialist environmental consultancy based in Nottingham (UK) with an international track record of assessing and managing the risks posed to human health and the environment by contaminants in soil.  Increasingly, this is being done within a context of sustainable development and specifically sustainable brownfield regeneration.”

About LQM from today’s discussion:

“We are specialists in contaminated land management (not just PFAS).   LQM does high level consultancy.  We write a lot of technical guidance.  We developed the biggest set of soil screening levels that are used in the UK.  I helped to write the International Standard on Sustainable Remediation. We run training courses.  We write books and occasionally we go to conferences in far-flung placed like Adelaide.”  Paul Nathanail, Technical Director LQM

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*NB: The 10 million contaminated sites we speak about in this episode was a number that was given at the Clean Up 2022 conference – please note this number is not just PFAS sites, but would include some of those.