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Forever chemicals are not a fresh scandal that the world is only learning about now: in 2019 there was a Hollywood movie about them, based on a true story from the late 1990s. Mark Ruffalo was Rob Bilott, the crusading lawyer arguing that a West Virginia chemicals company was poisoning the locale. The film, Dark Waters, concerned per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (Pfas), synthetic compounds that resist oil, water and heat, and which came into wide usage in the 1930s with the invention of Teflon. Their selling point is that they refuse to break down. The problem with them is that they refuse to break down, and once they’re in soil, groundwater, rivers, food or the air, they get into humans’ bloodstream, from where some Pfas are thought to play a role in causing cancer and other serious health conditions.
Yet it took until February this year for the British government to come up with a plan for how to deal with Pfas, and the documentary In Our Blood: The Forever Chemicals Scandal suggests that, for at least one small town, it’s too late. Cameras arrive in Bentham, North Yorkshire, for what is by now the sadly familiar story of a community in northern England of a few thousand people, generations of whom have been proud and grateful to work at the medium-sized business that dominates the local economy. Years later, the people of the town wonder if the thing they helped to make might be bad for their health.
In the Bentham version of this narrative, the firm is one of the UK’s largest manufacturers of fire safety equipment, Angus Fire – “Angus’s” in the town vernacular – and the product is the thick, white foam firefighters use to tackle jet-fuel blazes and other serious fires. The foam has saved untold numbers of lives, but between 1976 and 2024 it – legally – contained Pfas.
The Bentham scandal begins in earnest in May 2024 when the Guardian and Pippa Neill, a journalist at environmental policy magazine Ends Report, break the news that groundwater on the Angus Fire site has been found to contain the highest levels of forever chemicals ever seen in the UK. Research has found links between certain PFAS and many types of cancer.
Filming in Bentham begins in June 2025, at a fraught town council meeting that the Angus Fire CEO decides not to attend. Hapless council folk sit behind a row of trestle tables, telling angry residents that they lack the necessary information to give clear answers. Nothing is really decided.
So the programme launches its own investigation, testing 39 Bentham residents’ blood to measure nanograms (one-billionth of a gram) of Pfas per millilitre. Anything at two or above is associated with adverse health effects; at 20, scientists in the US start talking of “increased risk”. Someone whose garden backs on to the Angus Fire factory has a reading of 28. For the only remaining resident of Duke Street, a road that runs along the side of the Angus Fire perimeter fence – everyone else has gone, after accepting offers from the firm to purchase properties that now stand empty – the number is 43. A former Angus Fire worker scores 405.
These numbers are met with alarm by the American lawyers the programme visits, who are pursuing Pfas-related class action suits in the US, often on behalf of people with lower levels in their blood. The lawyers are hardly neutral witnesses, and more work needs to be done in Bentham to properly separate correlation and causation, and to find out who knew what, when: the Angus Fire right of reply says the programme’s study is a small sample, and that the company has always followed the relevant regulatory guidance. There are indeed many ways for Pfas to enter the bloodstream: when TV previously tackled the issue, in a Panorama last December, the show’s own reporter, Catrin Nye, was found to have 9.8ng/ml without having been exposed to any particular contamination. That programme’s concerns were unfiltered water, scratched non-stick pans, waterproof clothing and other ordinary domestic items that might be drip-feeding you Pfas on a daily basis.
That’s no consolation to the people of Bentham, and there’s something particularly upsetting about mothers there passing Pfas to their babies through breast milk, or food grown in a communal garden potentially being unhealthy in a way residents could not have predicted. The lingering question is whether British authorities should have known earlier, and acted more swiftly. As the real Rob Bilott puts it when In Our Blood visits his office: “It’s frustrating to see folks just now realising that these chemicals are even out there, and then saying we don’t know much about them. Yes we do!”
