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If adopted, the proposed changes would represent the first modification to drinking water standards for new chemicals under the Safe Drinking Water Act since 1996.
PFAS, short for per-and polyfluoroalkyl substances, are a group of potentially harmful chemicals used in multiple products including nonstick pans, cosmetics, some clothing, food packaging and firefighting foams. They are linked to multiple negative health outcomes including some cancers, reproductive problems and birth defects, among others. The chemicals don’t break down readily in the environment, so are often called “forever chemicals.” The nonprofit Environmental Working Group has found PFAS contamination at more than 2,800 locations in all 50 states, including in many public and private drinking water systems.
Related: What are PFAS?
The proposed changes would regulate two chemicals that are no longer in use, PFOA and PFOS at 4 parts per trillion. Four other chemicals — PFNA, PFHxS, PFBS and GenX — would be regulated based on the hazard of the mixture of them. While the six chemicals in the proposal are common, there are an estimated more than 9,000 types of PFAS compounds.
If the regulations are adopted, water system operators would have to test for the chemicals. If they are found above the thresholds, they’d have to take action — by installing additional treatment, finding a new water source or other methods. Public water treatment systems would have about three years to comply.
EPA Administrator Michael S. Regan said in a statement the proposal is “informed by the best available science, and would help provide states with the guidance they need to make decisions that best protect their communities.”
“This action has the potential to prevent tens of thousands of PFAS-related illnesses and marks a major step toward safeguarding all our communities from these dangerous contaminants,” he added.
Last year the EPA released lifetime health advisories for GenX, PFBS, PFOA and PFOS, and opened up $10 billion in grant funding — via the 2022 Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act— to assist communities dealing with PFAS and other emerging contaminants.
Environmental groups seek PFAS phase-outs
Environmental groups lauded the new proposed changes — and urged a complete phase-out of PFAS in products.
“We applaud the Biden administration for following the lead of the states and stepping up to protect communities from these toxic ‘forever chemicals,’” said Sarah Doll, national director of Safer States, in a statement. “We urge the federal government to continue to follow the lead of states and phase out the production and use of these chemicals in favor of safer solutions so that we stop adding PFAS to our already polluted water, land, and air.”
Ten states — Maine, Massachusetts, Michigan, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Vermont and Wisconsin — have already established standards for individual PFAS in drinking water. Many retailers — most recently REI — are phasing out the chemicals as well.
Liz Hitchcock, federal policy program director for Toxic-Free Future, said in a statement that the regulations are an important stop but “to prevent further PFAS contamination, we must put an end to uses of PFAS chemicals in firefighting foams used by military and civilian firefighters and in consumer products like food packaging and textiles.”
The new proposed regulation will open for public comment, and then the agency will make a final decision — likely later this year.
Today, more than 50 years later, that goal is unachievable because of unregulated discharges of toxic PFAS chemicals into rivers, lakes and streams. These hazardous chemicals have contaminated freshwater fish in waters throughout the continental 48 states. It’s past time to regulate PFAS to protect the health of everyone who drinks water and consumes fish from contaminated waters.
PFAS-contaminated freshwater fish
PFAS, short for per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, is a class of more than 9,000 chemicals with strong carbon-fluorine bonds that make them highly persistent in the environment. They are used in hundreds of industrial and consumer products that ultimately result in releases into the environment from manufacturing facilities, municipal landfills, wastewater treatment plants, airports and other sites where PFAS-containing fire-fighting foams have been used. The adverse health effects of the PFAS chemicals studied to-date include immune system suppression, increased risk of cancer, thyroid disease, high cholesterol, and reproductive and developmental impairments.
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has been monitoring PFAS chemicals in fish since 2008 through the National Rivers and Streams Assessment, and since 2010 under the Great Lakes Human Health Fish Fillet Tissue Study. These monitoring studies have found detectable levels of at least 5 different PFAS chemicals in most fish sampled, even though the fish were collected from randomly selected sites instead of known or suspected PFAS hotspots. A new study uses the EPA’s recent fish tissue data to estimate the concentrations of PFOS – the most frequently found PFAS chemical – in the blood of people who consume fish. The study estimates that eating only one meal a year of freshwater fish can elevate blood serum concentrations above 2 Nanograms per milliliter (ng/mL), the level at which the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine (NAS) recommends reducing PFAS exposure. The study also found that eating freshwater fish weekly can elevate concentrations above 20 ng/mL, the level at which the NAS recommends clinicians test for thyroid function, kidney and testicular cancer, and ulcerative colitis.
In July 2022, NAS published guidance on PFAS exposure, testing and clinical follow-up that advises clinicians to offer PFAS blood testing to patients likely to have elevated exposure, and to test for certain health effects if blood serum concentrations for PFOS and other PFAS chemicals exceed the concentration of 2 ng/mL.
We need PFAS fish consumption advisories
Given their widespread use and persistence, it is not surprising that PFAS chemicals have contaminated fish throughout the country. What is surprising is that federal and state governments have been so slow to regulate these toxic chemicals. The immediate priority should be for states to develop fish consumption advisories that recommend consumption limits based on existing EPA data from and state monitoring programs. Only 14 states have issued fish consumption advisories for PFAS. The Great Lakes states should consider developing a single advisory applicable to all the lakes since the EPA data show Great Lakes fish generally have higher PFAS concentrations than the fish from rivers and streams in other parts of the country.
Related: Just one meal of caught fish per year is a significant dose of PFAS
The EPA and the states must focus on eliminating PFAS releases into the environment. The EPA is working on rules to regulate PFAS discharges from two major industries and from landfills, but these rules will take several years to put in place. States should not wait for national rules. They should use their authority to set PFAS limits in permits for industries that discharge directly into their waters or into municipal wastewater treatment plants.
PFAS monitoring
More PFAS monitoring —using better analytical methods — is also essential. The EPA and states should monitor surface water, wastewater, sewage sludge and fish tissue using the EPA’s new analytical method, which allows detection of 40 individual PFAS chemicals. Wastewater samples should be analyzed using the EPA’s new method for total adsorbable organic fluorine, which indicates the presence of additional PFAS chemicals beyond the 40 detectable ones. The EPA has no plans to develop a total adsorbable organic fluorine method for fish tissue, but it is needed so the potential for additional PFAS contaminants can be evaluated.
The EPA should also prioritize the development of non-cancer and cancer toxicity levels for PFAS chemicals frequently found in freshwater fish in order to determine safe consumption levels. To date, the EPA’s monitoring programs have found five PFAS chemicals in most fish (PFOS, PFUnDA, PFDA, PFDoA, and PFNA), but has only developed toxicity levels for PFOS. If critical data needed for assessing the toxicity of the other PFAS chemicals are missing, the EPA should use its authority under the Toxic Substances Control Act (TSCA) to require industry to provide that data. Finally, the EPA should accelerate use of its TSCA authority to restrict or ban the existing uses of PFAS and to prevent future uses of these toxic chemicals.
The EPA and states have years of data showing that PFAS contamination of our nation’s waters poses serious public health threats. There is no longer any merit to the argument that further study is needed before we take action to protect our drinking water and fisheries. We must act to protect people’s health.
Betsy Southerland is the former Director, Office of Science & Technology, U.S. Environmental Protection Agency Office of Water.
Her views do not necessarily represent those of Environmental Health News, The Daily Climate, or publisher Environmental Health Sciences.
Our civilization needs commercial chemicals to prosper and survive. But as a chemist, I long ago arrived at a conviction — our civilization can’t last long without making a clean getaway from the endocrine-disrupting chemicals that litter today’s chemical enterprise and are harming us as seriously as climate change.
This means we must have appropriately wired people to accomplish the great escape from chemicals that are disrupting our endocrine systems. Engager is my term for that wiring. Let’s explore why this disposition is key for European Union leadership in pursuing their new chemicals strategy for sustainability.
Engager
The engager sustainability disposition moves its bearers to positive action when scientific facts demand that injustice cannot be ignored. You can detect this in talking with them. They conduct their own scholarship rather than parrot rumors. They follow up where possible by acquainting and allying themselves with the sources of the information. They have fidelity to scientific data and justice, and can tune out the outside noise.
People with the engager disposition cannot ignore the social and environmental justice issues, especially the ability of endocrine-disrupting chemicals to adversely impact families for generations after an incumbent generation has been exposed.
But like all powerful organisms, the modern chemical enterprise possesses a healthy immune system and resists the efforts of engagers. Think of the previous sustainability dispositions I’ve written about and where their bearers turn up — the executives, PR spin doctors, faux experts, lobbyists and trade association operatives.
"But like all powerful organisms, the modern chemical enterprise possesses a healthy immune system and resists the efforts of engagers."
In academia, especially American academia, researchers are scared to lose research funding by embracing controversy — and this dread intimidates folks from adopting the engager disposition.
While great engager-bearing sustainability scholars can be found in many academic institutions, academic administrations are often sustainability incompetent. They measure their progress in the technical advances of their faculty and students, development gifts, constructions, and, admirably, social justice reforms. Too many academic administrators are sleepwalking through flattering trustee meetings and cheerful college functions while being largely unresponsive to the calls of sustainability. They ignore the most vital of all academic domains where human ingenuity can best honor the gift of life and build transgenerational justice that is the measure of a civilization’s sustainability competence.
In our unsustainable world, academia could instead adopt a collective engager disposition to better honor its duty to seek and act on the truth that might set our civilization free.
Engager influence grows
I have come wearily to this judgment with chemical sustainability matters; only engagers have the assets of disposition, character and intellect to matter. This typically also means that engagers have had to look outside the system they are hoping to change for support at every level.
In my experience with many engagers, they each possess remarkable intellectual and creative function, an open mind with advanced natural abilities that deftly process abstract thought while keeping political thought in perspective. Engager bearers are prepared to risk their professional and even personal security when the situation calls for it to reject the status quo when it makes no sense to them in science or in justice.
This places a heavy burden and responsibility upon the individuals with engager dispositions. But to borrow phrasing from Martin Luther King Jr., the arc of the chemical future bends toward their solutions.
Fortunately, engager bearer numbers are growing, as is their influence. The birthing of the EU’s Chemicals Strategy for Sustainability, which explicitly incorporates both endocrinological science and the promise of funding for necessary innovations in safe and sustainable chemistry, is likely to accelerate those trends. As companies learn that their sustainability efforts are rewarded by the market for safer products, while their old, unsustainable chemicals are punished, the acceleration will be enhanced.
It’s depends on us, not the chemicals
In the end, whether we survive the threats of endocrine-disrupting chemicals or succumb to their perils depends on us, not on the chemicals. Escaping these chemicals owns the center of the ethical stage of the chemical enterprise. The more Europe’s leaders of the Chemicals Strategy for Sustainability actualization stay focused on their ethical duty to protect the future from the money-first present, the more successful the strategy and our civilization will be.
Engager bearers inspire me. The responsible engager heroes include not only spectacular scientists who are often Socratic visionaries, but an indubitable Gandalf (Pete Myers), journalists, authors, policy advocates, congresspeople and parliamentarians, students, institutional officials, and, occasionally, regulators.
The galvanized brilliance of engager researchers and communicators heartens me to believe that European civilization will indeed batter its weary way through the industrial endocrine-disrupting chemical defenses to a sustainable future.
Terrence J. Collins, Ph.D., is a Teresa Heinz professor of green chemistry, and director of the Institute for Green Science at Carnegie Mellon University. His views do not necessarily represent those of Environmental Health News, The Daily Climate, or publisher Environmental Health Sciences.
The author thanks the Axios Fund, Korein-Tillery LLC and the Heinz Family Foundation for support of CMU's Institute for Green Science.