PFAS in textiles: a critical review on contamination pathways, analytical methods, toxicity assessment, and feasible...

The widespread application of PFAS in textile industry has triggered serious human health risks worldwide, leading to typical adverse health outcomes such as thyroid dysfunction, neurodevelopmental disorders in children and reproductive damage. This paper reviews per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) in textiles, focusing on their overlooked release mechanisms across the lifecycle (production, usage, disposal). It summarizes post-release detection, regulation, environmental distribution, exposure characteristics and health-related toxicity, and mitigation strategies. PFAS enter the environment mainly through industrial emissions during manufacturing, oxidative degradation in use,and improper disposal. Liquid chromatography-tandem mass spectrometry (LC-MS/MS) is the most widely used and reliable method for PFAS detection, with emerging ion chromatography-tandem mass spectrometry (IC-MS) offering cost-effective, low-interference analysis for trace health-risk PFAS monitoring. PFAS undergo atmospheric deposition, aquatic transport, soil accumulation, and bioaccumulation; toxicity assessment increasingly uses computational modeling to reveal chain-length-dependent toxic differences of textile PFAS. Mitigation includes adsorption (activated carbon, biochar) and degradation (advanced oxidation, microbial degradation), optimized by computational simulations to achieve health risk reduction. Future research shall focus on clarifying long-term health hazards of emerging PFAS alternatives, exploring combined toxic effects from multi-pathway human exposure, and establishing health risk-oriented lifecycle prevention and control systems to reduce public health threats posed by textile-derived PFAS.