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The Biden administration has set the first ever limits on PFAS levels in drinking water.
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These “forever chemicals” have been linked to some cancers, lower fertility, and other health issues.
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Water officials have five years to comply with the new limits.
The Biden administration is cracking down on toxic “forever chemicals” that are widespread in America’s tap water, food and household products.
The EPA on Wednesday finalized the first-ever limits on PFAS levels in drinking water, putting the chemicals in the same class as other known pollutants such as lead, arsenic and nitrate.
PFAS are called “forever chemicals” because they do not biodegrade and instead accumulate in the environment and in our bodies over time, posing a hazard to human health. Peer-reviewed studies have linked them to some cancers, reduced fertility, reduced response to vaccines, high cholesterol, and developmental delays in children.
“It’s easily the most consequential and difficult decision to protect drinking water in the last 30 years,” Ken Cook, president of the Environmental Working Group, told reporters.
He added that the watchdog group began researching PFAS more than two decades ago and found PFAS everywhere they tested, including umbilical cord blood.
The chemicals were first developed in the 1940s to make non-stick cookware, and then found their way into clothing, carpets, food packaging, and firefighting foam used by airports and military bases to put out jet fuel fires. Companies that make PFAS have dumped the chemical into waterways, landfills, and unlined pits in states like North Carolina and Minnesota.
EPA Administrator Michael Regan is announcing the new limits on drinking water in Fayetteville, North Carolina, where residents learned in 2017 that a river was heavily contaminated with PFAS pollution from a Chemours manufacturing plant, and formerly DuPont.
“This action will prevent thousands of deaths and reduce thousands of serious illnesses,” Regan told reporters, citing EPA estimates of the impact of drinking water limits.
There are thousands of different types of PFAS manufactured today. The EPA is regulating six of them based on research linking them to harm and showing they are widespread in drinking water, David Andrews, deputy director of investigations and senior scientists at EWG, told BI.
They include PFOA and PFOS that persist in waterways and the environment, despite production being phased out in the US since the 2000s. The EPA said these two chemicals are not actually safe at any level, but the lowest level modern labs can detect in drinking water is 4 parts per trillion – the limit set by the agency .
The limit for some other chemicals is 10 parts per trillion. The EPA also set limits for mixtures of two or more PFAS chemicals, as research shows they may have combined health effects.
State and local water officials will have five years to meet the new limits: Three to test for PFAS levels; and if they exceed the federal limits, two more years to install technology that cleans the water. The administration is providing $1 billion in grants for public water systems and private well owners to install treatment technology.
Senior administration officials said they expect up to 10% of the 66,000 water systems in the US to take steps to comply. That means the vast majority of PFAS levels will not exceed the new limits. But this is just an estimate, they added. The first three years of sampling will reveal the true scope of the problem.
“The technology is there, especially for cleaning drinking water, to filter these compounds out of the water. So it becomes a question of cost and political feasibility,” Andrews previously told BI.
“The agency has known about the harm these chemicals can cause for many years,” he said. “For too long, many people across the country have been drinking contaminated water levels that could affect health.”
The Biden administration has a broader $9 billion PFAS strategy that goes beyond drinking water, including military bases, airports and food packaging.
The FDA said in February that paper food packaging — such as fast food wrappers, microwave popcorn bags, and takeout pizza boxes — are no longer made with certain types of PFAS-resistant adhesives. The voluntary phase-out eliminated the main source of exposure from our diets, the agency said. Still, there are lingering stocks of packaging containing PFAS that could take months to be exhausted.
Some scientists told BI that while these are important steps, they are not enough to control PFAS contamination.
“It’s better than no regulation, but it’s really just a Band Aid solution to the whole problem,” said Carmen Messer, a professor of reproductive environmental epidemiology at Harvard’s TH Chan School of Public Health, who studies PFAS. “We should regulate the entire class of chemicals and stop companies from manufacturing them in the first place, rather than trying to control what’s in our water.”
Read the original article on Business Insider
