Pollutants known as “forever chemicals”, which don’t break down in the environment, build up in the body and may be toxic, have been found at high levels at thousands of sites across the UK and Europe, a major mapping project has revealed. This is the opening paragraph of an extremely worrying report in the Guardian today, which goes on to provide a map of the sites in question, 10 of which are in Portugal, all of them close to rivers. None of the locations are in the Algarve, and compared with sites elsewhere in Europe and the UK, Portugal has a minimal number of these proven sites. Nonetheless, many other areas are presumed to be polluted by these chemicals, nine of them in the Algarve.
