CHICAGO — Water utilities will be required to routinely test for toxic forever chemicals, and spend billions upgrading treatment plants to filter them, under the first-ever national limits intended to protect Americans from widespread threats to human health and the environment.
In Illinois alone, the drinking water of more than 660,000 people is contaminated at levels exceeding the proposed standards for per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances or PFAS. The most widely detected versions of the chemicals build up in human blood, cause cancer and other diseases and take years to leave the body.
Last year the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency declared there is effectively no safe level of exposure to perfluorooctane sulfonic acid (PFOS), used by 3M for decades to make Scotchgard stain repellent, or perfluorooctanoic acid (PFOA), which 3M sold to DuPont to manufacture Teflon coatings for cookware, clothing and wiring.
On Tuesday the EPA announced it intends to require utilities to limit concentrations of the two forever chemicals in drinking water to 4 parts per trillion, an amount the agency 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.
“This is a tremendous step forward,” said EPA Administrator Michael Regan. “There is no doubt there is more work to be done.”
Though the new limits will require an expensive overhaul of thousands of utilities across the nation, for now 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.
Limited testing by the Chicago Department of Water Management and the Illinois EPA has 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 process, according to a Chicago Tribune analysis of water testing conducted by the state during the past two years.
In the Chicago area, the state’s testing found PFAS exceeding 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.
President Joe Biden and Regan, a former top environmental regulator in North Carolina appointed to lead the EPA, came into office pledging to make regulating PFAS a priority after years of promises but little action by the federal government. Since the early 2000s, it has largely been left to trial lawyers to pry industry studies and other records from PFAS manufacturers and seek payment and restitution for damages caused by the chemicals.
“Today we can celebrate a huge victory for public health in this country,” said Rob Bilott, a Cincinnati attorney who launched the scrutiny of forever chemicals with lawsuits he filed against DuPont in Ohio and West Virginia during the 2000s.
“It has taken far too long to get to this point,” Bilott said. “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 delay action.”
Once-secret 3M documents unearthed by Bilott and the Minnesota attorney general’s office show top executives at the Minnesota-based conglomerate knew about the harmful effects of forever chemicals as early as the 1950s. 3M didn’t begin telling the EPA what it knew about PFOS and PFOA until 1998 — more than two decades after Congress approved the nation’s first chemical safety law.
3M and DuPont once billed the chemicals as miracles of science. But PFAS end up in lakes, rivers and wells after flushing through sewage treatment plants and spreading from factory smokestacks. Forever chemicals 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.
Nearly every American has PFAS in their bodies, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Babies are born with the chemicals in their blood.
Scientists are finding that tiny concentrations can trigger testicular and kidney cancer, birth defects, liver damage, impaired fertility, immune system disorders, high cholesterol and obesity. Links to breast cancer and other diseases are suspected.
The chief manufacturers, 3M and DuPont, have paid nearly $2 billion combined to settle PFAS-related lawsuits without accepting responsibility for contaminated drinking water or diseases suffered by people exposed to the chemicals. 3M has long maintained the chemicals are not harmful at levels typically found in people.
Under a November agreement between the EPA and 3M, the company is testing wells and public water systems near one of its PFAS manufacturing plants in Cordova, Illinois, where for decades it discharged the chemicals into the Mississippi River without limits about 15 miles upstream from the Quad Cities.
Drinking water in the region’s population center is contaminated with the Scotchgard and Teflon chemicals at concentrations as high as 6.3 ppt, exceeding the standards announced Tuesday.
A 2022 Chicago Tribune investigation identified more than 1,600 other potential sources of PFAS in Illinois through a national analysis of industry codes designating the type of products manufactured or used. Only California, Virginia, Pennsylvania and Florida have more facilities on the list of suspected polluters.
More than 60% of the Illinois facilities are in Chicago and its suburbs, the Tribune found. There is at least one potential industrial source in 85 of the state’s 102 counties, yet there are still no limits on the amount of PFAS pollution released into the air or discharged into sewers.
The new drinking water standards likely will trigger the first-ever national limits on industry pollution and could lead to restrictions on PFAS-contaminated sewage sludge distributed to farmers and gardeners as free fertilizer.
Some industry groups already are chafing about being forced to clean up the mess they blame on 3M, DuPont and other PFAS manufacturers.
Tom Dobbins, chief executive of the Association of Metropolitan Water Agencies, said the trade group for some of the nation’s biggest systems is “concerned about the overall cost drinking water utilities will incur to comply with this proposed rule-making.”
The EPA estimates it will cost utilities $772 million a year to comply with the PFAS standards. Dobbins noted it has cost $43 million for just one system, the Cape Fear Public Utility Authority in North Carolina, to filter PFAS out of drinking water.
Utilities will be eligible to apply for federal grants and low-interest loans through a pot of money Congress earmarks every year for water and sewer improvements. Regan said the EPA will work closely with utilities in low-income and rural areas while distributing some of the $9 billion set aside last year for water projects.
Many utilities already have been planning to address PFAS contamination because states began moving several years ago to adopt their own standards in the absence of federal action. More than 20 states have imposed or proposed limits on PFAS in water, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures.
It remains unclear how federal standards will affect regulations proposed by the Illinois EPA. The state agency is calling for a limit of 2 parts per trillion of PFOA and 7.7 ppt of PFOS in groundwater that supplies public and private wells, and has announced plans to follow up with its own drinking water limits.
For environmental groups and activists who have long clamored for federal action, the Biden administration’s proposal is welcome news.
“During these decades of lax regulatory oversight, scientific studies have discovered an increasing number of ways that PFAS wreak havoc in our bodies and harm our health,” said David Andrews, a senior scientist at the Environmental Working Group, a nonprofit research organization that has studied forever chemicals and advocated for federal regulations since the early 2000s. “Action to reduce exposure cannot come soon enough.”
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