The EU’s PFAS limits came into force this January. Most people have not noticed.

On 12 January 2026 something changed in European drinking water law that was reported almost nowhere. The recast Drinking Water Directive brought its PFAS limits into application, and for the first time every member state is obliged to monitor for them against a binding value.

PFAS — per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, the so-called forever chemicals — are a family of thousands of industrial compounds used since the 1940s in non-stick coatings, firefighting foam, waterproof fabrics, food packaging and a great deal else. What earned them the nickname is that the carbon-fluorine bond holding them together is among the strongest in organic chemistry. They do not meaningfully break down in the environment, and they accumulate in people.

The directive gives member states a choice of two parameters. They may monitor the sum of twenty specified PFAS compounds of concern against a limit of 0.10 micrograms per litre, or total PFAS against 0.50 micrograms per litre, or both. Those are very small numbers, and they have to be: the health concerns associated with PFAS exposure — immune effects, cholesterol, developmental effects, some cancers — attach at concentrations far below anything that would affect how water tastes.

A binding limit is real progress. It is also, on its own, less than it sounds, for three reasons worth being clear about.

The first is that a limit is not a removal. Monitoring tells a water utility what is in the supply. It does not put anything in place to take it out, and PFAS removal at municipal scale — granular activated carbon, ion exchange, high-pressure membranes — is expensive infrastructure that gets built over years, not months.

The second is that twenty compounds is twenty compounds. The PFAS family runs to thousands. The short-chain compounds that have replaced the notorious long-chain ones like PFOA and PFOS are, awkwardly, the hardest ones to filter out, because being smaller they slip through the treatment that catches their predecessors.

The third is the one closest to our work. National compliance is measured at the level of a supply zone. A child does not drink from a supply zone. They drink from a tap in a specific building, and between the treatment works and that tap sits a distribution network, a building’s own plumbing, and often a storage tank nobody has looked inside for a long time.

That gap is the whole reason this Foundation exists. We fund water systems for children’s homes and shelters — places where nobody living there chose the building, and nobody living there can do anything about its water. Being legally compliant and being clean are not the same thing, and children absorb more of whatever is present, relative to their body weight, than adults do.

It is also why we do not accept an installation without proof. In Greece, the systems the Foundation funds are designed and fitted by our partner NearonYdor, and their Twin system has been independently tested by the Chemistry Department of the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens and by the Hellenic Pasteur Institute. The PFAS testing covered fifteen compounds by LC-MS/MS, including the short-chain ones that are hardest to remove; after filtration every one of them fell below the limit of detection. The same laboratory tested eight heavy metals — the untreated tap water used in the test already contained lead at 2.20 micrograms per litre — and all eight fell below detection after filtration. The Pasteur Institute, working to European Pharmacopoeia methods under ESYD accreditation, took water at over 300 colony-forming units per millilitre down to zero.

We publish that because a charity asking for money to install filters should be able to show that the filters work, tested by someone with no stake in the answer. The equipment is our partner’s, not ours — the Foundation funds and maintains, local specialists install — but the evidence is the reason we fund that equipment and not something cheaper.

The new European limits are a good thing and we would like to see them enforced hard. In the meantime, the children in the homes we serve are drinking water this week. That is the timescale we work on.

Sources: Directive (EU) 2020/2184 on the quality of water intended for human consumption, PFAS parameters applicable from 12 January 2026; European Commission, "New EU rules limit PFAS in drinking water", 12 January 2026; laboratory reports, National and Kapodistrian University of Athens (Chemistry Department) and Hellenic Pasteur Institute (ESYD accreditation no. 516-5).