How to stop ‘forever chemicals’ from lasting, well, forever

Long before the Environmental Protection Agency announced new rules this month about “forever chemicals” in drinking water, officials in the state of Vermont knew there was a problem.

Regulators there began looking into PFAS – shorthand for synthetic perfluoroalkyl and polyfluoroalkyl substances – after residents near the town of Bennington complained that their water had been contaminated by a nearby factory, which for decades had produced fiberglass-coated fabrics. That was in 2016. Vermont officials eventually uncovered a public health crisis – which resulted in strict statewide PFAS regulations.

Recently, advocates say, this wake-up has been happening on a broader scale. Across the United States, there has been a wave of grassroots public health campaigns, state policies, and even burgeoning federal efforts designed to reduce the risk of these forever chemicals, which have been linked to a slew of health impacts.

Many advocates hope the new nationwide rules released by the EPA last week, which create stringent new standards for PFAS in drinking water, will be only the first step of a wider effort to study, remediate, and regulate the chemicals. 

“While I welcome the new enforceable drinking water standards, we really need to look upstream,” says Judith Enck, president of the advocacy group Beyond Plastics. “How do we reduce the use of PFAS in general?” 

PFAS are used in consumer goods from carpets to rain jackets, from cookware to cosmetics. They are resistant to heat, and repel stains, oil, and water, but they do not break down in nature. And they regularly end up in drinking water, soil, food, and ultimately humans. 

The term “PFAS” refers to thousands of different substances, all containing a certain chemical bond; the new EPA water standards apply to six. While advocates praised the move, some water utilities criticized what it said would be a costly mandate – one study by an industry association estimated the new rules would cost upward of $3.8 billion nationally. 

“The vast majority of these treatment costs will be borne by communities and ratepayers, who are also facing increased costs to address other needs, such as replacing lead service lines, upgrading cybersecurity, replacing aging infrastructure and assuring sustainable water supplies,” the American Water Works Association said in a statement.

A “wake-up call”

Others agree with the idea that it is a lot harder to try to clean up PFAS than to keep them out of the environment in the first place. 

“The thing we realized was that trying to treat every wastewater treatment plant and every drinking water facility – it was going to be impossible,” says Matt Chapman, director of the waste management and prevention division at Vermont’s Department of Environmental Conservation.

Vermont’s experience with responding to PFAS may prove instructive as more consumers and politicians take note of forever chemicals.

Investigators in 2016 discovered Bennington’s groundwater had indeed been tainted with unsafe levels of perfluorooctanoic acid, a particularly dangerous variety of these industry-produced chemicals. 

After the discovery in Bennington, the Department of Environmental Conservation scrambled to check other locations in the state, from wastewater treatment facilities to landfills to areas where another type of PFAS was used in firefighting foam. Although the levels varied, the contamination was across the state. 

“That was the wake-up call for Vermont,” says Marcie Gallagher, an advocate focusing on environmental health with the Vermont Public Interest Research Group.  

Vermont created its own drinking water standards in 2019, but also added prohibitions on PFAS being added to categories of consumer goods, such as carpets, clothing, cookware, and ski wax. (Regulators found high levels of PFAS contamination around cross-country ski centers, and then realized that the wax used for cross-country racing was high in the substances.)  

Other states have banned PFAS in products such as artificial turf and cookware. In 2021, neighboring Maine went even further and passed legislation that would ban by 2030 all nonessential uses of PFAS in products. (That law was amended this year to provide exceptions.) Minnesota soon followed suit.  

“It’s a way to limit consumer exposure to it,” says Sarah Woodbury, vice president of programs and policy for Defend Our Health, a Maine-based group that works on environmental health issues. “We’re phasing it out in a whole bunch of consumer products that people are exposed to on a daily basis.” 

Currently, about a dozen states have some sort of regulation of PFAS, while a number of companies have pledged to phase out PFAS use in their products. In the Northeast, states have joined forces to create a regional response. 

But a state-by-state approach is scattered, advocates say. They say the federal government should create rules around PFAS – including transparency requirements that let consumers know whether the things they buy and eat contain the chemicals.  

“This really should be regulated at the national level,” says Ms. Enck. “Absent federal leadership, states try to step in and fill the vacuum. All the states are doing it differently.”  

Regulation debate 

Chemical companies object. The industry has already voluntarily regulated and monitored those PFAS shown to be dangerous, according to the American Chemistry Council. Grouping together the thousands of different substances that fall under the PFAS label is a mistake and threatens innovation, the council says. 

“PFAS are a diverse universe of chemistries that are essential to modern life,” the group says on its website. “PFAS chemistries are also key to the resiliency of our nation’s critical supply chains, including semiconductors, cable coatings, building materials, fuel cell and lithium-ion battery technologies, and much more.” 

Besides, there’s no proof that all PFAS are dangerous, the group says.

That’s true, advocates acknowledge. But they say there’s also no proof that all PFAS are safe – and a lot to indicate that they’re not. Chemical companies have been the target of thousands of PFAS-related lawsuits in recent years, including class action cases and those brought by state attorneys general. At the same time, research on the connections between PFAS and various health concerns is evolving.

“These are toxic forever chemicals that share carbon fluorine bonds,” says Katie Pelch, a scientist in environmental health at the Natural Resources Defense Council. “Because all the chemicals in that class share that chemical group, we need to treat them as class. The one-at-a-time chemical regulation that we typically see just will not make a dent fast enough to actually protect public health.” 

In the U.S., regulation tends to come after there is evidence of health risks. But that “innocent until proven guilty” approach, advocates say, shouldn’t be the case for this class of chemicals, with some of them already shown to be harmful. 

“PFAS should be banned,” says Ms. Enck. “We should have no PFAS in packaging. We should have no PFAS in consumer products. Companies use it because it makes things slippery and water-resistant. But we have to turn off the tap.”