Estimating industrial and domestic environmental releases of perfluorooctanoic acid and its salts in China from 2004 to 2012

• China’s first source-specific inventory of PFOA/PFO environmental releases.
• More PFOA/PFO came from industrial activities than domestic sources.
• East China was the emission hotspot because of the agglomeration of fluorochemical industry.
• China is now the world’s largest PFOA/PFO emitter.

China has been documented as one of the few remaining producers of perfluorooctanoic acid and its salts (PFOA/PFO) and the world’s major contamination hotspot. However, limited information has been available for evaluating their environmental releases in China and the contribution to global PFOA/PFO burden. Here we present the first source-specific inventory for environmental releases of PFOA/PFO in China from 2004 to 2012, using a bottom-up approach for industrial sources and an inverse approach for domestic sources. Our results show that China became the current world’s largest PFOA/PFO emitter, with cumulative environmental releases reaching 250 tonnes (t) over the period of nine years. The eastern region was identified as the hotspot of environmental releases. Most of the national environmental releases were due to the activities of the fluorochemical industry (94.0%) rather than domestic use of PFOA/PFO-related consumer products (6.0%). Fluoropolymer manufacturing and processing, a dominating industrial source, contributed 83.7% of the national environmental releases. In contrast to the general decline trends in annual industrial environmental releases of PFOA/PFO in most industrialized countries, the trend increased in China because of the expansion of production as a result of the global geographical transition in fluorochemical industry. Based on these results, we recommend that the future reduction options are required in industrial sector in China.