A Chemical Time Capsule for Environmental Liability Protection

Dr. Adam Gushgari, Senior Director of Emerging Contaminants

You may have heard the adage before – the environmental sector is driven by both regulation and litigation. The longer I work in this field, the more self-evident that truth becomes. The technological advancements that define the Digital Age have delivered, in a strikingly short period of time, a quality of life that would have been incomprehensible just a generation ago. But that progress has come with a chemical shadow. Synthetic chemistry, once celebrated as an unqualified tool for human benefit, has quietly pervaded every corner of our natural and built environments. We are only beginning to understand the breadth of that footprint. The compounds that extended human lifespans and modernized global industry may, in the same breath, be working against us in ways we are only now truly comprehending.

When Science Outpaces Regulation

We've seen this most recently demonstrated by the growth of interest and litigation around per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS). I first became aware of the pervasive environmental contamination associated with PFAS back in 2013 during my graduate studies. At the time, academic research in this space was beginning to accelerate, but neither regulators nor the broader public had yet grasped the scale of the crisis unfolding beneath the surface. New Jersey was the first state to make meaningful headway into regulating this chemical class, establishing a maximum contaminant level (MCL) for PFNA in 2018, followed by MCLs for PFOA and PFOS in 2020. Other states would adopt similar standards in the years that followed, finally culminating in the establishment of federal enforceable drinking water standards in 2024 which go into effect in 2027. It is worth noting that the potential health hazards of PFAS were first formally identified to the USEPA in 1998, representing a 26-year gap between identification and meaningful federal regulation. Perhaps equally sobering is the fact that only six of the potential 21,000 PFAS (by EPAs Definition of PFAS) carry any environmental regulation or monitoring requirement whatsoever.

Unfortunately, the story of PFAS is not a unique one, but rather a pattern we are seeing repeated across a growing class of compounds we have come to call emerging contaminants. Decades of accelerating plastic production have given rise to the ubiquitous contamination of microplastics and nanoplastics across virtually every environmental matrix on Earth. The daily global use of pharmaceuticals and personal care products has led to the measurable contamination of natural waterways downstream of wastewater treatment plant discharges. Carcinogenic disinfection byproducts, such as N-nitrosamines, have been detected with troubling regularity across both municipal drinking water systems and private groundwater wells. And here is the uncomfortable reality – of the roughly 350,000 chemicals and mixtures registered globally for production, we lack sufficient chemical data on approximately 35% of them – and that figure does not account for the chemical interactions between compounds that may generate entirely new substances we have not yet thought to look for. When it comes to synthetic chemical contamination, our blind spots vastly outweigh what we know. And today’s unknows become tomorrow’s liabilities.

Reframing the Questions

So how do you protect against the unknown? The growth of non-targeted analysis (NTA) may play a key role in environmental litigation defense (or perhaps more accurately, as insurance against liability exposure) as we move forward into an era of accelerating chemical regulation. Historically, environmental analysis has relied on a well-established framework: we identify which compounds we want to look for, and we analyze samples accordingly. NTA approaches environmental monitoring differently, asking not "how much of this compound is present?" but rather "what is actually here?" NTA requires a special analytical instrument to capture the mass spectra of everything present in a sample – essentially generating a complete chemical fingerprint of that matrix at that moment in time. That fingerprint is then compared against lists and libraries of known regulated and emerging contaminants, allowing us to characterize the full chemical composition of the sample. For instance, an NTA analysis of a water sample might detect 10,000 chemical features and, when compared against existing spectral libraries, confidently identify 300 compounds, tentatively identify another 2,000, and leave 7,700 as unknowns. But those unknowns do not disappear. Their mass spectra are preserved in the raw data file and can be reviewed (reanalyzed) years or even decades later, benchmarked against new and expanded chemical libraries as they become available with no degradation of the underlying data. The chemical record is permanent, even when our ability to interpret it is not yet complete.

The application that feels most natural to me is the use of NTA as a standard component of environmental due diligence in commercial real estate transactions. Imagine a buyer obtaining a scientifically defensible chemical snapshot of the soil and groundwater on a property at the time of purchase – a baseline record that could later serve as evidence that a contaminate of concern existed prior to their acquisition, absolving them of inherited liability. This becomes particularly important when a transaction involves a land use change, for instance, the reclassification of agricultural land to industrial use, where legacy agrochemical residues may not yet carry regulatory significance but could become highly consequential as the science evolves. Critically, the NTA baseline protects both parties: the buyer is shielded from inheriting contamination they did not create, and the seller is protected from being held responsible for conditions that develop after the transaction closes. The same logic extends naturally to commercial lease transitions, where frequent tenant turnover can obscure the origin of contamination and make attribution genuinely difficult. I can also envision NTA being integrated into environmental insurance underwriting at both the residential and commercial scale, functioning much as a title search does in a property transaction – establishing a clean record before coverage is extended. Beyond real estate, the novel approach holds equal promise in industrial site decommissioning, brownfield and Superfund site management, wetland restoration, carbon sequestration programs, and the emerging challenge of climate-driven remobilization of legacy contaminants buried in soils and sediments.

Getting Ahead of the Curve

The point is this – an extraordinary analytical capability already exists that has yet to be fully explored, but carries the potential to benefit a remarkable breadth of industries and professions. Much like LiDAR, satellite imagery, or PCR – technologies that originated with narrow, specialized applications before proliferating across sectors their inventors never anticipated – NTA stands at an early inflection point. The instrumentation is becoming more accessible, spectral libraries are expanding, and the computational tools for interpreting complex chemical data are advancing rapidly. The question is not whether this technology will reshape how we approach environmental monitoring. It is whether industries will recognize its value proactively, or wait for regulation and litigation to compel them. At Eurofins Environment Testing, we believe in getting ahead of that curve. Our specialty laboratory teams are actively exploring new applications of NTA technology, driven by a straightforward conviction: that the work we do in the laboratory today has consequences that extend far beyond the sample in front of us, touching the communities, ecosystems, and generations that depend on the environments we are charged with protecting. The chemical record we preserve today may be the defense someone needs tomorrow. That is the essence of testing for life. Not grand gestures, but the quiet, rigorous work of ensuring that the environments we have come to depend on are understood, documented, and protected.