BY REBECCA BEITSCH
A proposal from the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) would absolve the nation’s manufacturers of cancer-linked “forever chemicals” from broad financial responsibility for cleaning up their product as it leaches into the water supply across the country.
The class of chemicals known as PFAS, which are noted for their persistence in both the environment and the human body, are used in a variety of nonstick products.
As PFAS contamination spreads into city water supplies in every state but Hawaii, there has been growing pressure from lawmakers to have manufacturers help fund cleanup efforts.
This will shift the burden of cleaning up the messes off of the polluters and put it squarely on the public to pay the resulting costs. Something our utra-corrupt Banana Republicans would go for.
They have made a mockery of the “Polluter Pays” principle that created the funding for EPA’s “Superfund” for cleaning up pollutants.
BY REBECCA BEITSCH
EPA currently recommends water contain no more than 70 parts per trillion (ppt) of PFAS, but it’s not mandatory, and many health advocates argue that number is too high. In the absence of EPA action, a number of states have passed laws requiring lower levels of PFAS for drinking water.
"Today’s decision shows that an avalanche of public pressure and overwhelming science is finally forcing EPA to act,” Melanie Benesh with the Environmental Working Group said in a statement.
EPA’s decision to regulate PFAS kicks off a two-year period for the agency to determine what the new mandatory maximum contamination level should be. Once that is formally proposed, the agency has another 18 months to finalize its drinking water requirement.
I know from first hand experience that the 70 parts per trillion permissible limit set by the EPA is a ridiculously high level. I experienced symptoms at levels of 43 parts per trillion in my tap water, a level that’s 61% of the permissible limit.
Earlier this year I hat to stop consuming my tap water, switching to 5 gallon bottles. I’ll probably have give up on growing a vegetable garden. I’m even wary of showering, so I cut down on the number of showers I allow myself.
How did this supremely persistent chemical get into my tap water? I have a very noisy and a very dirty neighbor, the US Navy.
Polluting the aquifer on an island with virtually no surface streams leaves local residents in an intolerable predicament. They are adding charcoal filters for the water supply for our county seat’s municipal water supply, a town of 1,800. They are in the process of adding new water mains running up along the state highway. And it looks like my neighborhood may be a candidate for getting hooked up to the filtered town water at some point in the future.
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The Navy’s F -18 Howler jets are flying here at treetop altitude right now.
How widespread is the PFAS problem?
HIGH LEVELS OF FLUORINATED COMPOUNDS HAVE BEEN LINKED TO CANCER, HORMONE DISRUPTION
BY Karen FeldscherHarvard Chan School Communications
DATEAugust 9, 2016
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The study was published Aug. 9 in the journal Environmental Science & Technology Letters. “For many years, chemicals with unknown toxicities, such as PFASs, were allowed to be used and released to the environment, and we now have to face the severe consequences,” said lead author Xindi Hu, a doctoral student in the Department of Environmental Health at Harvard Chan School, Environmental Science and Engineering at SEAS, and
Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. “In addition, the actual number of people exposed may be even higher than our study found, because government data for levels of these compounds in drinking water is lacking for almost a third of the U.S. population — about 100 million people.
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PFASs have been used over the past 60 years in industrial and commercial products ranging from food wrappers to clothing to pots and pans. They have been linked with cancer,
hormone disruption, high cholesterol, and obesity. Although several major manufacturers have discontinued the use of some PFASs, the chemicals continue to persist in people and wildlife. Drinking water is one of the main routes through which people can be exposed.
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The researchers looked at concentrations of six types of PFASs in drinking-water supplies, using data from more than 36,000 water samples collected nationwide by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) from 2013 to 2015. They also looked at industrial sites that manufacture or use PFASs; at military fire-training sites and civilian airports where firefighting foam containing PFASs is used; and at wastewater-treatment plants. Discharges from these plants — which are unable to remove PFASs from wastewater by standard treatment methods — could contaminate groundwater. So could the sludge the plants generate, which is frequently used as fertilizer.
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The study found that PFASs were detectable at the minimum reporting levels required by the EPA in 194 out of 4,864 water supplies in 33 states across the United States. Drinking water from 13 states accounted for 75 percent of the detections: California, New Jersey, North Carolina, Alabama, Florida, Pennsylvania, Ohio, New York, Georgia, Minnesota, Arizona, Massachusetts, and Illinois, in order of frequency of detection.