EPA issues final rules for limiting “forever chemicals” in water supplies
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Thanks Dupont... hope the increased shareholder value was worth it for poisoning everyone.
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This is really great news. I've been pleasantly surprised by how good this administration has been on environmental issues.
I'm hoping this pushes Canadian provinces to take similar action.
I'm hoping this pushes Canadian provinces to take similar action.
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I guess asking the companies who made billions (trillions over the years?) poisoning the water to contribute something to the costs of this cleanup is just totally unreasonable?
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Dupont, 3M, BASF, etc. I assume there's a ton of chemical makers that made them over the years. 3M lead the way of getting rid of them in products, but I would assume all sorts of stuff made overseas still has them.
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Is this saying its possible 65,000 out of 66,000 could potentially need to make modifications? Or is there an extra 0 here? Or something else?
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Now how do people on well water manage? RO isn't cheap to get started and activated carbon has ongoing costs.
I wonder what the new PFAS numbers are for allowed soil contamination. There's probably not a single construction site that's not contaminated with PFAS unless it's on virgin land. For comparison, consider what happens if every construction project has to go through the same remediation process as would happen if one were to dig into the ground of an old gas station.
I grew up with Teflon everything and I loved the stuff. So easy to do cooking cleanup. I'm not worried, the risk is still low on an individual level, but PFAS aren't the absolutely biologically inert substances we thought they were.
I wonder what the new PFAS numbers are for allowed soil contamination. There's probably not a single construction site that's not contaminated with PFAS unless it's on virgin land. For comparison, consider what happens if every construction project has to go through the same remediation process as would happen if one were to dig into the ground of an old gas station.
I grew up with Teflon everything and I loved the stuff. So easy to do cooking cleanup. I'm not worried, the risk is still low on an individual level, but PFAS aren't the absolutely biologically inert substances we thought they were.
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Wow, $150B divided by 250M adults in the US comes out to $600 per person per year. They're not kidding when they say this is expensive.
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In terms of profits being greater than the cost of regulatory fines and lawsuits by a factor of a 100(+++):1, I'm sure it was.
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I’ll watch with interest how people respond to the bill increases. In Canada right now, a parallel is playing out on the climate issue and a carbon tax.
From there we are remind that a perfectly well reasoned case, even where the taxpayer comes out financially ahead, will struggle against zero-thought slogans like “axe the tax”.
From there we are remind that a perfectly well reasoned case, even where the taxpayer comes out financially ahead, will struggle against zero-thought slogans like “axe the tax”.
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Folks on wells will need to install filtering methods. Charcoal, reverse osmosis are two most popular. Water systems that source from wells but serve multiple homes will (above a certain number but I don't remember offhand) will see larger costs for testing and filtering. The real challenge isn't necessarily filtering each home, it's the disposal of the filtering media. Can you dump the 'dirty' charcoal in the trash and move the concentrated PFAS/PFOA to the landfill? For reverse osmosis, the filter periodically flushes the membrane and dumps the water, either into a home septic system (your backyard) or the regional water treatment facility (which generally dumps the treated water into a natural water body).
There are a host of downstream considerations, not just pure water consumption and disposal issues but also implications for livestock (backyard chickens, etc).
If anyone wants a long term job in the cleanup world, this one will be around for awhile...
(source=personal and professional experience)
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In my local area, the Air Force Base nearby was the source of PFAS contamination, and they've done a decent job recently of providing free testing for homes that use Wells in the area. In a lot of cases where contamination was found, they air force footed the bill to connect homes to uncontaminated city water, or when that wasn't possible, bought homeowners bulky filtration systems to attach to their wells.
These new guidelines might spur the Air Force to take another look at the wells that initially passed review, I don't know what they considered acceptable levels at the time.
While the Air Force might have used the chemicals that contaminated the water, the companies that made the chemicals for the Air Force should have been part of the mitigation efforts, and if it turns out more homes need these mitigations after these new recommended levels are in effect, I hope those companies can be on the hook, too.
These new guidelines might spur the Air Force to take another look at the wells that initially passed review, I don't know what they considered acceptable levels at the time.
While the Air Force might have used the chemicals that contaminated the water, the companies that made the chemicals for the Air Force should have been part of the mitigation efforts, and if it turns out more homes need these mitigations after these new recommended levels are in effect, I hope those companies can be on the hook, too.
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Let's put aside the value of life and do some math. That math doesn't add up (well, maybe with US healthcare prices it does - I wouldn't know). At $150B that's $440 per person per year. Over 80 years, it's $35k per person. Assuming that exposure to current level of those chemicals gives you 1% chance (a figure totally off the top of my head) of getting some health condition, it would mean that the cost of contracting that condition must exceed $3.5M to make the effort economically viable.
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Sorry for the nitpicking, but I really, really wish we could dispense (pun not intended) with all the "parts per million, parts per trillion, parts per thousand" in news articles. They are still really nice in some fields as dimensionless units, but not really helpful in common use, given the other problem of Short and Long scale.
First, at least one aircraft very nearly crashed because of parts per... usage instead of g/l (or oz/gallons or whatever is your preference) printed on the fuel‑tank biocide instructions, when both of their engines flamed out due to a foreign tech misunderstanding the units and adding a lot more biocide than needed, gunking up all the fuel pumps.
Second, it always gives me a headache when converting, since I am natively Long scale, yet some English‑speaking countries use both the Long scale and the Short scale, while some use only the Short scale. My trillions are your billions. Cue in much confusion. Can't imagine how the above near crash would have gone if the aircraft tech confused their Long scale with the Short scale, as that is three orders of magnitude difference.
Mass fraction per mass or volume (µg/kg, µg/l or even oz/fl.oz or per gallons) is so much easier when imagining concentrations to me, apologies...
Don't get me wrong, I love dimensionless units, it's just that they don't carry over that well into newspaper articles, IMHO. Especially as ambiguous as ppm or ppt can be...
First, at least one aircraft very nearly crashed because of parts per... usage instead of g/l (or oz/gallons or whatever is your preference) printed on the fuel‑tank biocide instructions, when both of their engines flamed out due to a foreign tech misunderstanding the units and adding a lot more biocide than needed, gunking up all the fuel pumps.
Second, it always gives me a headache when converting, since I am natively Long scale, yet some English‑speaking countries use both the Long scale and the Short scale, while some use only the Short scale. My trillions are your billions. Cue in much confusion. Can't imagine how the above near crash would have gone if the aircraft tech confused their Long scale with the Short scale, as that is three orders of magnitude difference.
Mass fraction per mass or volume (µg/kg, µg/l or even oz/fl.oz or per gallons) is so much easier when imagining concentrations to me, apologies...
Don't get me wrong, I love dimensionless units, it's just that they don't carry over that well into newspaper articles, IMHO. Especially as ambiguous as ppm or ppt can be...
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People on personal water wells won't have to comply. There may also be a small size exemption, like fewer then x customers means can ignore.
There may be a bunch of people that get cut off by systems that shut down rather then deal with the cost and complexity of trying to comply with this. Wonder if that is factored in to the EPA's cost/benefit calculations?
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If I understand it correctly, EPA is also limiting all other Per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances to at most 10 parts per trillion? And that it would involve most of the PFCs?
That's a rather bold and really, really welcome move from them (applause), as the industry tried to circumvent a lot of the PFOA and PFOS limits previously, just by baking up new "different" fluoropolymers like Gen‑X PFCs and such. Somewhat similar to how the synthetic drug industry always tried to stay abreast of any regulation by shifting the molecules just a tiny bit around.
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I remember as a kid the local firehouse would occasionally, in the summer, cover a field in a local park with fire-foam for us all to play in. Good times. I'm, somehow, still alive... but at what cost?
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Privatize the profits and nationalize the losses! Welcome to end-stage capitalism!
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PFAS is transmitted from the mother to the fetus so every generation starts their lives with an ever higher level of PFAS. Which probably continously increaes the risk of having a detrimental health effect for every passing generation.
If it's in the body it's not coming out. Thus it makes sense to minimize people's ability to ingest it as soon as possible.
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$3.5 million is not a lot to treat a chronic condition in the US. You're also not taking into account the non-medical costs. Being sick instead of healthy sucks. It's hard to value the costs of diminished quality of life but it's silly to pretend it doesn't exist.
$3.5 million, not setting aside potential years of lost life, diminished quality of life, and medical costs seems pretty low bar to clear to me.
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Considering a number of companies did their own studies about these chemicals and knew their harms ahead of time, I'm going to assume they did, in fact, decide it was worth every bit of it. This is in no way isolated, either.
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Ouch. The older members of my family still remember "voluntarily" gathering pests like the "American beetle" (Colorado potato beetle, L. decemlineata) just hours after the fields were sprayed with DDT, happily playing around in the white "snow". Seriously, with enough DDT that it looked like fresh snow to the happy teens.
I wonder if some of their cancer cases there might have been linked to that, as environmental regulations in then Warsaw Pact countries were pretty much zero or even negative back then (environmental protests and grassroots movements were actually a really big part of why the Wall came down, as they made the anti‑Soviet protests more widespread and palatable to even more unconcerned citizens – I heard of some rivers almost catching fire from industrial effluents back then).
I guess all the Capitalist and Soviet governments gave around as much fuck to the health of their citizens both. A not‑so‑very‑rare case of runaway Capitalism meeting runaway "Communism" all the way around and both fucking up their peoples...
If it's any consolation, there is still a possibility the fire‑fighting foams they sprayed on you as a kid weren't PFC‑based at all, just some common harmless polymer or soap. PFC foams were probably more expensive to just waste on kids back then. Who knows... ;-(
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Disposal is a nontrivial issue. Imagine all the activated charcoal that municipal water treatment facility will generate. And of course once it gets wet again in a landfill or wherever there will be some leachate. So it might be necessary to dispose of it in concrete sealed locations or to take some other approach to keeping the adsorbed chemicals out of the groundwater. The dissociation equilibrium is small, but there would be a lot of PFAS.
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Too bad this wasn't in time for this election:
https://www.wpr.org/news/wausau-mayor-katie-rosenberg-loses-reelection-bid
The incumbent mayor spent on a PFAS treatment system for the city. Everybody's water bill went up. The challenger used the increased bills an election issue (big gubmint!), and they won the election, likely because of it.
The mayor did the right thing by protecting the people from it, and lost the election because of it.
https://www.wpr.org/news/wausau-mayor-katie-rosenberg-loses-reelection-bid
The incumbent mayor spent on a PFAS treatment system for the city. Everybody's water bill went up. The challenger used the increased bills an election issue (big gubmint!), and they won the election, likely because of it.
The mayor did the right thing by protecting the people from it, and lost the election because of it.
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I dunno, I think more people can wrap their heads around "parts per trillion" than "nanograms per liter." I work at a water district that has PFAS in one of our supply sources, and our lab people use µg/L internally but we're reporting and communicating in ppt. FWIW, we use metric for concentrations of various things in our water, but customary units when we measure production and distribution. Grams per liter, acre-feet... honestly it's all just going to get converted to Olympic swimming pools when we communicate with the public. We have 0.067 Olympic swimming pools' worth of concrete being poured right now at our upcoming ion exchange facility, which will be able to remove PFAS from 12 Olympic swimming pools' worth of groundwater per day. When it's done I will celebrate with 0.000001 Olympic swimming pools' worth of ale.
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The appropriate question isn't "Will spending $150B on this save lives?" the question should be "Will this be the most helpful thing we can spend $150B on?"
The threshold they set of 4 part per trillion is so extraordinarily low, that as the article points out, it is at the threshold of our ability to measure anything. The level of care and handling you need to prevent any cross-contamination is quite high. This is certainly not a test that the average small town municipal water treatment plant is going to be able to perform.
While I am open to the idea that this may be the best use of the money, I am highly skeptical. As levels of contamination go down, the cost of further remediation sky rockets, while the benefits tend to drop precipitously. e.g. how many cancer cases are saved at 4ppt vs. a 0.04ppb threshold? How many cancer cases would be prevented if some of this money was allocated to the "cancer alley" cases described in another article on Ars? And, while we can do somethings simultaneously, we can't go everything simultaneously. There needs to be prioritization to get the most bang for the buck.
The threshold they set of 4 part per trillion is so extraordinarily low, that as the article points out, it is at the threshold of our ability to measure anything. The level of care and handling you need to prevent any cross-contamination is quite high. This is certainly not a test that the average small town municipal water treatment plant is going to be able to perform.
While I am open to the idea that this may be the best use of the money, I am highly skeptical. As levels of contamination go down, the cost of further remediation sky rockets, while the benefits tend to drop precipitously. e.g. how many cancer cases are saved at 4ppt vs. a 0.04ppb threshold? How many cancer cases would be prevented if some of this money was allocated to the "cancer alley" cases described in another article on Ars? And, while we can do somethings simultaneously, we can't go everything simultaneously. There needs to be prioritization to get the most bang for the buck.
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'm, not very impressed. PPM and others are always on a molecular scale, so when you think that is not long enough, try gram- or kmols.
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I've been in more than passive contact with (allowable toxic) concentrations. Used to be ppm, ppb is/was rather remarkable, ppt is a first for me. Sure have to read up on the EPA publications. Had to check whether there's an ambiguity (europe - US) about billion and trillion...
I think there must be a credibility gap here for anyone trying to make sense of the numbers.
Not saying any of it is wrong, but it feels far-fetched.
I think there must be a credibility gap here for anyone trying to make sense of the numbers.
Not saying any of it is wrong, but it feels far-fetched.
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Almost certain every system will need to make modifications - but some already have. That's been one of the real challenges with these chemicals - they require specific efforts to treat the water, and in many cases it's really just detection and shutting down of wells.
My county (Orange County, CA) is one of the best in the country on these things and one of the few water treatment systems in the US that do return-to-tap (and I think the largest in the world?) Instead of treating water to be dumped into the environment, they can return it directly to households in a closed-loop manner. We started PFAS treatment 3 years ago. At least as of 3 years ago there were not accepted standard processes for treating these chemicals. Everyone was still trying to figure it out. The county shut down a number of wells for excessive PFAS contamination.
A pretty simple change the EPA and Congress could make is that industry could not use chemicals that did not have a published and accepted process for treatment from drinking water. Put the burden on the chemical company to build and test that process before they can sell the product rather than selling it for a few decades and leaving it to municipal water districts to figure out how to deal with their shit. This holds for almost any industry - requiring them to address the externalities goes a rather long way to not being stuck with problems down the road. See, for example, the plastic industry having no responsibility to actually recycling plastic, so they don't and they don't care if the stuff they make can't be recycled. Again, a problem for municipal waste to deal with which is why plastic is almost never recycled.
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It seems odd to me that as a country we would have a
"do whatever you want to our drinking water unless we say otherwise"
attitude when it comes to our water.
"do whatever you want to our drinking water unless we say otherwise"
attitude when it comes to our water.
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I don't understand this line of reasoning, as if the EPA is completely detached from what is happening in the industry more broadly. As if no municipal water treatment experience has already been implemented for these chemicals. There has, there's been industry feedback. My county has already done this work, before the feds required it. Maybe not at the 4 ppt level, but the sensors are in place, as are treatment processes so it's really more a matter of scaling. The actual cost are known.
Water districts have two paths here - they can detect the presence of the chemicals with sensors (cheap) and simply shut down wells that fail the standard. Most districts will do this because they have adequate, broad sources for water and losing a well sucks, but they have other options. In larger districts like mine, you can do some of that and you can do treatment to remove it from the water altogether, which we're doing. And note, my county is made up a of a lot of water districts, but with a consolidated treatment agency for the entire county. You rarely, if ever, have 'average small town municipal water treatment' because the overhead costs of running it is too high for a small town to support - so they attach themselves to a nearby city, combine with other towns, or more likely for small town - almost everyone sinks their own well.
And I think you are misreading the article. The article doesn't just say it will cost $150B to solve, it says it's already costing more than that. You may be okay externalizing a persons death as having no value, but when a worker dies all the tax revenue from that worker is lost, the GDP from that worker is lost, and so on. The reason that government spends money on the citizenry is because the citizenry provide value to the government. The US has F-35s because there are workers and products and services to tax. If you don't care for them, you lose some of that ability. The US lost a lot of permanent revenue from the 1.1 million Americans who died of Covid - almost certainly more than it would have cost to save their lives (considering how cheap preventing Covid is).
Plus, the government always has the option of taxing the industry who makes the chemicals to recover the cost of remediating them. That is a perfectly normal and sensible thing to do. It's why a pack of cigarettes is so expensive.
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Having lived in this country for 55 years, seems perfectly normal to be honest. We have a VERY long history of externalizing current costs to future generations.
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PFAO has a biological half-life of about 4 years in humans. PFAS about 5 years - so nope. Assuming constant intake, the human body will contain ~8x yearly intake. That's still a lot, but nothing like what you describe.
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If I understand correctly, the EPA wanted to say “zero” but the current testing tech is +-4 ppt, so the EPA said “4 ppt.” Just a concession to reality, not because 4ppt is itself a meaningful threshold concentration for any particular reason.
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