Following through on a campaign promise, President Joe Biden’s administration is limiting toxic forever chemicals in drinking water for the first time, a sweeping policy change intended to protect Americans from widespread threats to human health and the environment.
New regulations announced Wednesday will require every U.S. water utility to begin routinely testing for several of the chemicals. Any that exceed federal limits will get five years to overhaul their treatment plants to reduce, if not eliminate, alarming concentrations of the compounds in tap water.
More than 100 million Americans are expected to benefit, including at least 660,000 in Illinois who get their drinking water from a utility that violates the new standards for per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, commonly known as PFAS.
In 2022, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency declared there effectively is no safe level of exposure to perfluorooctane sulfonic acid (PFOS), used by 3M for decades to make Scotchgard stain repellent, or perfluorooctanoic acid (PFOA), sold to DuPont by 3M to manufacture Teflon coatings for cookware, clothing and wiring.
These versions of the chemicals build up in human blood, cause cancer and other diseases and take years to leave the body.
Water utilities will need to limit concentrations of the forever chemicals to 4 parts per trillion — an amount the EPA said is the lowest at which PFOS and PFOA can be accurately detected. Four other PFAS, including replacements for the original Scotchgard and Teflon chemicals, also will be regulated for the first time.
“There’s no doubt that these chemicals have been important for certain industries and consumer uses,” EPA Administrator Michael Regan told reporters during a Tuesday briefing. “But there’s also no doubt that many of these chemicals can be harmful to our health and our environment.”
Forever chemicals end up in lakes, rivers and wells after flushing through sewage treatment plants and spreading from factory smokestacks. They also leach out of products such as carpets, clothing, cookware, cosmetics, dental floss, fast-food wrappers, firefighting foam, food packaging, microwave popcorn bags, paper plates, pizza boxes, rain jackets and ski wax.
Based on limited testing by the EPA and some states during the past decade, thousands of utilities face expensive upgrades to their treatment plants. For now, though, it appears Chicago and other Illinois communities that depend on Lake Michigan for drinking water will not be required to do anything other than test for the chemicals.
Testing by the Chicago Department of Water Management and the Illinois EPA detected forever chemicals in treated Lake Michigan water but at levels below the new federal standards.
Peoria, where PFAS have been detected as high as 12.9 parts per trillion, is the largest Illinois city that will need to improve its treatment processes, according to a Chicago Tribune analysis of water testing conducted by the state during the past three years.
In the Chicago area, the state’s testing found PFAS levels exceeded the new federal standards in Cary, Channahon, Crest Hill, Fox Lake, Lake in the Hills, Marengo, Rockdale, South Elgin and Sugar Grove. All of those communities rely on wells; several have stopped using their most contaminated sources of drinking water.
Biden and Regan came into office pledging to make regulating PFAS a priority after years of promises but little action by the federal government.
Ken Cook, president of the nonprofit Environmental Working Group, called the Biden EPA’s action “easily the most consequential and difficult decision(s) to protect drinking water in the past 30 years.”
Cook’s group has studied PFAS and advocated for federal action since the early 2000s. He noted forever chemicals have been found in the bodies of nearly every American. Babies are born with PFAS in their blood.
Industry groups, as they almost always do, challenged the science EPA officials relied upon and raised the specter of skyrocketing water bills to comply with the agency’s standards.
The American Water Works Association, a utility trade group, urged the EPA last year to set a less stringent limit of 10 parts per trillion for the original Scotchgard and Teflon chemicals, which haven’t been manufactured in the United States for years but are still commonly found in drinking water.
One study commissioned by the association estimated that complying with EPA regulations will cost water utilities $3.8 billion a year, far more than the agency projects. Another questioned whether limiting PFAS in drinking water will protect public health.
On its website, the American Chemistry Council, a trade group for chemical manufacturers, accuses the EPA of overstating the non-cancer risks of forever chemicals and of failing to prove the benefits of limiting them in drinking water outweigh the costs.
Other industry groups fear their members could be sued for emitting forever chemicals into the air or discharging them into water.
The potential liabilities for corporations are staggering.
3M brokered a deal last year to pay at least $10.3 billion to settle thousands of claims accusing the company of contaminating public water systems with its forever chemicals. DuPont and two other companies reached a $1.19 billion settlement in the same cases, filed by cities and water systems across the nation.
DuPont and 3M earlier paid nearly $2 billion combined to settle other PFAS-related lawsuits without accepting responsibility for contaminated drinking water or diseases suffered by people exposed to the chemicals. The companies have long maintained forever chemicals are not harmful at levels typically found in people.
Many water utilities will get a share of the settlements. Congress and the Biden administration also are chipping in with $21 billion that will be shared over time to upgrade treatment plants.
“When you look at what’s happening today, whether it’s in the courts, our regulatory actions, or the actions Congress has taken, I have to say it is a good day for the people in this country who have long borne the impact of pollution from these forever chemicals,” Regan said.
Government action to protect Americans from PFAS has been slow-coming, in part because chemical manufacturers kept secret what they knew about the dangers.
Documents obtained during lawsuits show top executives at Minnesota-based 3M knew as early as the 1950s about the harmful effects of forever chemicals the conglomerate pioneered after World War II. 3M didn’t begin telling the U.S. EPA what it knew about PFOA and PFOS until 1998 — more than two decades after Congress approved the nation’s first chemical safety law.
“It has taken far too long to get to this point,” said Rob Bilott, a Cincinnati lawyer who uncovered scores of the once-secret industry documents during lawsuits against DuPont in Ohio and West Virginia, “but the scientific facts and truth about the health threat posed by these man-made poisons have finally prevailed over the decades of corporate cover-ups and misinformation campaigns designed to mislead the public and to delay action to protect public health.”
