There may be disruptive effects of TFA on human health or on Earth system processes that are currently unknown, similar to how the effects of longer-chain PFAAs on human health, and CFCs on the ozone layer, were initially unknown by the broader scientific and regulatory community. Overcoming this ignorance is the hardest part of understanding that a certain novel entity that is irreversibly increasing in concentrations globally may pose a planetary boundary threat . Such effects cannot be fully described or anticipated by established paradigms of hazard and risk assessment. However, as those paradigms are commonly used in defining regulatory human and ecosystem health thresholds for chemicals, this is where we start our analysis of TFA potentially causing a disruptive impact on a planetary scale.