And why are we now hearing about them?
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“Forever chemical” is used to describe any chemical that there’s no natural process that breaks them down. Usually, it’s used for the worst kinds of these, where we don’t know of anything that breaks them down (even plastics slowly break down over tens of thousands of years).
Hundreds of millions of years ago, this included the stuff plants were made out of. There was nothing that could break down leaves or wood, so that stuff just piled up for millions of years before fungi came along that could break them down.
Today, we’ve got technology that lets us use identify more chemicals and measure even the smallest amounts of it. So, we’re increasingly aware when we pollute and find that the chemicals we dump into the environment jut stick around (and get carried by water, leach into the soil, or work their way into our food). We’re eating, drinking, and breathing a lot of man-made chemicals that never breakdown, and we have very little idea what the health effects are.
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