We have been drinking dangerous chemicals for a long time
The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Proposal for a First Limit on Pervasive Chemicals: Impact on Water Treatment Facilities, Rivers, Wastelands, and Sewers
The EPA is proposing the first limits on a set of pervasive and dangerous chemicals. The chemicals, known for their strong carbon–fluorine bonds, are difficult to destroy and have become widely dispersed in the environment. Scientists and engineers are busy developing ways to extract the chemicals more efficiently from water and soil and break them down, but water utility companies warn that meeting the EPA’s new standards will be expensive in the short term — possibly prohibitively so for small water-treatment facilities.
This is a huge deal in the sense of protecting public health, and it’s going to take a lot of work to accomplish that.
The first time the EPA has mandated a mandatory limit for PFAS in drinking water was in 1996. The core of the proposal would restrict two of the most dangerous PFAS compounds, PFOA and PFOS, to four parts per trillion. That is the lowest level that is detectable using current laboratory tests, although the agency has determined that there are risks associated with much lower concentrations. Another four chemicals would be regulated as a mixture.
Similar movements to rein in PFAS are afoot internationally. Legislation is being considered by the European Union that would ban the production of PFAS.
Many of the culprits are still making the problem worse. Experts estimate that more than 30,000 companies could be using PFAS and dumping their PFAS wastes into rivers, landfills and sewers, or pumping them into the air.
By one measure, the EPA estimates that implementing its proposal nationally would cost around US$772 million annually, but a study commissioned by the AWWA using similar assumptions suggests that the price tag could be around $2.9 billion a year. The EPA says over $9 billion is available through a US infrastructure law which was enacted in late 2021, but Moody warns that this is just the beginning of a $58 billion cost over 20 years.
If history is any indicator, however, costs will probably come down over time, says Melanie Benesh, vice-president of government affairs at the Environmental Working Group. “With regulation often comes market innovation,” she adds.
Why Americans are choosing air and water as dumping grounds for PFAS contamination, and why they’re so concerned about their impact on the environment
For her part, Crimi is working with the US Department of Defense to test a technology that could be used to clean up plumes of PFAS contamination in groundwater before they leach into drinking-water supplies. In order to break the carbon–fluorine bonds, the team at Crimi’s is going to collect the ground water at a horizontal well inside the space force base in Colorado Springs.
Editor’s Note: Scott Faber is senior vice president of government affairs at the Environmental Working Group (EWG), which is a nonprofit environmental health research and advocacy group. He is also an adjunct professor at Georgetown University Law Center. The views expressed are of his own. Read more opinion on CNN.
Our drinking water utilities were only recently required to test for unsafe levels of these chemicals, so we don’t know how many people have been drinking them. But, according to research estimates, it’s likely that more than 200 million Americans have been drinking a chemical linked to an increased risk of cancer, reproductive harm, immune system damage and other serious health problems, even at low levels.
For long, we have been used to seeing polluters complain and seek to escape responsibility for using air and water as dumping grounds. They always do, that’s why.
They did not wait to argue that the science is not strong enough or that protecting ordinary people from cancer and other harms is too costly. Many of the companies which are already fighting Bidens win for consumers have been hiding the dangers of PFAS for decades.
