EPA action strengthens grassroots momentum to reduce toxic chemicals for good

EPA action strengthens grassroots momentum to reduce toxic chemicals for good

The suction pumps that once drew 6 million gallons of water a day from the Oostanaula River now sit mostly dormant in this northwest Georgia town.

Local officials allege that years of contamination miles upriver leaked toxic perfluoroalkyl and polyfluoroalkyl substances, known as PFAS, into Rome's water supply, making it potentially dangerous for the city's roughly 37,000 residents. A change in the water source from the Oostanaula and additional treatment have reduced traces of the chemicals running through residents' taps, but they have not removed PFAS from the community's water supply.

Test results finding contamination in Rome reverberated in communities across the country as researchers and regulators grappled with concerns about the effects of consuming the ubiquitous chemicals. Now the Environmental Protection Agency is accelerating the debate. In June the EPA new notices issued on PFAS in drinking water, lowering the levels regulators consider safe for four chemicals in the family, including two of the most common, PFOA and PFOS.

The EPA health notices are not legally enforceable. However, the agency is expected to propose new limits for PFAS in public water systems this year. If these drinking water regulations reflect EPA's latest recommendations, water system operators nationwide will need to act to address the presence of these chemicals.

“That’s a pretty important message,” Dr. Philippe Grandjean, a PFAS expert and associate professor of environmental health at the Harvard TH Chan School of Public Health. “This stuff is everywhere.”

The Environmental Working Group, a research and advocacy organization that tracks PFAS, said it has more than logged 2,800 pages in the US that have PFAS contamination. Public records show that the chemicals have turned up in water samples taken from domestic water wells, churches, schools, military bases, nursing homes and municipal water supplies in small cities such as Rome and Big cities like Chicago.

They are also present in the blood of almost every American, according to studies. And some PFAS compounds bioaccumulate — meaning chemical concentrations are not easily eliminated from the body and instead increase over time as people consume trace amounts of them every day.

In July, a National Academies Report of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine said PFAS testing should be offered to people who are likely to have been exposed to high levels through their work or who live in areas with known PFAS contamination. Grandjean, who helped review the report for the National Academies, said the committee concluded that "people have a right to know their exposure level and to be offered appropriate health care follow-up." He said this was “very important and, in my opinion, necessary.”

Both the EPA recommendations and the National Academies report follow ongoing grassroots efforts to curb PFAS chemicals, which have been used in consumer products for decades. Since their invention in the 1940s, the compounds - known by the nickname "forever chemicals" because they do not break down quickly - have been used in household and industrial products, including carpets, waterproof clothing and nonstick cookware.

The presence of PFAS in firefighting foam, food packaging and even dental floss poses an ongoing challenge. And efforts to reduce PFAS are similar to the often frustrating, decades-long campaign to eliminate another environmental hazard - lead - from homes, soil and water.

“There has been a dramatic increase in advocacy and public awareness of PFAS,” said Alissa Cordner, a chemicals expert and professor of environmental sociology at Whitman College in Walla Walla, Washington.

In their report, researchers at the National Academies said they found links between exposure to PFAS and four health conditions: decreased immune response, increased cholesterol, decreased infant and fetal growth, and increased risk of kidney cancer. The report also found a possible link between the chemicals and breast cancer, changes in liver enzymes, an increased risk of testicular cancer and thyroid disease.

And EPA officials said the agency's latest recommendations are based on new science and consider evidence "that some adverse health effects may occur at near-zero concentrations of PFOA or PFOS in water."

However, most states do not regulate PFAS.

That makes the EPA recommendations important, said Jamie DeWitt, a professor of pharmacology and toxicology at East Carolina University. “The message from the EPA is that these PFAS, if they can be detected in drinking water, pose a health risk,” she said.

The American Chemistry Council, an industry trade group, pushed back against the recommendations and recently asked a federal court to overturn them, saying the agency's process was "scientifically flawed, procedurally inadequate" and "set impossibly low standards for PFOA and PFOS in drinking." Water." In a June statement, the council said PFAS have important uses, including in renewable energy efforts and medical supplies.

One maker of PFAS, 3M, said in a statement that the company "has acted responsibly with respect to products containing PFAS and will vigorously defend its record of environmental stewardship."

The development of the compounds started with the first hits in Teflon and later in Scotchgard. There are currently 12,000 variations of it, but only about 150 are being studied by scientists and government agencies, DeWitt said.

U.S. manufacturers have voluntarily phased out PFOS and PFOA, the two most commonly produced, but they are still found in drinking water. The city of Rome is among 10 communities in north Georgia where PFOS or PFOA have been found in drinking water supplies at levels higher than EPA recommendations make safe, the state environmental regulator said.

Six years ago, officials in Rome were forced to switch the city's water supply from the Oostanaula to the nearby Etowah River, a brownish tributary that flows into the Oostanaula near a downtown bridge. Years of chemical contamination in the Oostanaula, which Rome officials said begins dozens of miles upstream in Dalton, made the water potentially dangerous. They said that in Dalton, the epicenter of U.S. carpet manufacturing, industrial waste containing PFAS was leaching into the Conasauga River, which flows into the Oostanaula.

Officials in Rome plan to build a $100 million reverse osmosis filtration system to remove the chemicals from the city's water supply. Ratepayers will foot the bill, although a lawsuit filed by the city against carpet manufacturers and their chemical suppliers aims to recoup those costs. A separate lawsuit filed by a Rome resident and taxpayer makes similar allegations against the upstream companies. The defendants in the two Rome-based lawsuits have denied the allegations.

This was announced by the EPA $1 billion in grants so states can address PFAS and other contaminants in drinking water. But changes to public water systems across the country will likely quickly exceed that allocation.

Downstream from Rome, officials in the Alabama towns of Center and Gadsden have reported high levels of PFAS in the Coosa River and filed lawsuits against carpet manufacturers. The Gadsden lawsuit is expected to go to trial in October.

The chemicals have sparked a series of legal battles over the past two decades. A Bloomberg Law analysis found more than 6,400 PFAS-related lawsuits filed in federal courts between July 2005 and March 2022.

Significant payouts followed. DuPont and Chemours, which made PFAS products for decades, settled more than 3,500 lawsuits in 2017 for more than $670 million. Both companies denied wrongdoing. And 3M settled a lawsuit filed by the state of Minnesota for $850 million. The same company settled a lawsuit in the Decatur, Alabama area for $98 million.

The EPA should now cast a wider net to account for the wide variety of chemicals, Cordner said. “The persistence of PFAS means we will be dealing with this for a long time,” she said. "Because of their sheer quantity, we must treat PFAS as a class. We cannot go chemical by chemical."

EPA spokesman Tim Carroll said in an email to KHN that the agency is working to divide the large class of PFAS into smaller categories based on similarities such as chemical structure, physical and chemical properties, and toxicological properties. This work, he said, would “accelerate the effectiveness of regulations, enforcement actions, and the tools and technologies needed to remove PFAS from air, land and water.”

Meanwhile, some companies and the military have taken steps to stop using the chemicals.

The Green Science Policy Institute, an environmental advocacy group, has developed a list of PFAS-free products including rainwear and clothing, shoes, baby products, cosmetics and dental floss.

Two years ago, Home Depot and Lowe's said they would not sell carpets or rugs with PFAS in them. This year, textile manufacturer Milliken announced it would eliminate all PFAS from its facilities by the end of 2022.

A handful of flooring companies have followed suit. Dalton-based Shaw Industries, a defendant in the Rome lawsuits, said it has stopped using PFAS in soil and stain treatments for residential and commercial carpet products.

The Coosa River Basin Initiative, a Rome-based environmental organization, has been closely following the PFAS issue. Its executive director, Jesse Demonbreun-Chapman, said the EPA has moved "lightning quickly" on PFAS compared to other agency actions.

But if eventual regulations aren't comprehensive and cleanup efforts aren't extensive, he said, "we the people will be guinea pigs for PFAS-related health problems."

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