The Ministry of the Environment hastened the development of a method to measure the amount of organic fluorine compounds that have been detected in rivers and groundwater near U.S. military bases. We plan to establish it at an early stage.
PFOS and PFOA, which have been pointed out to be harmful, have been detected in rivers and groundwater around U.S. military bases in Okinawa Prefecture and Kanagawa Prefecture, one after another, exceeding the government's provisional target values. We are promoting measures such as setting up a family council to consider formal target values for water quality.
In addition, since PFOS and other substances are hardly decomposed in the natural environment,
▽ places where old foam extinguishers made before their use in manufacturing in Japan was banned, and ▽
factories that used them in the manufacturing process in the past It is said that there is a possibility that the substance remains in the soil and flows out as groundwater in the surroundings such as.
Therefore, the Ministry of the Environment is accelerating the development of a method to measure the "elution amount" of PFOS and other substances remaining in the soil that dissolves into water, so that it can be used for countermeasures by local governments.
Minister of the Environment Nishimura said, ``At the moment, a unified measurement method with sufficient accuracy has not been established, so we would like to accelerate the study so that we can present a specific method early next fiscal year.''