The New York Food and Chemical Safety Challenge: How the FDA is proposing to solve the PFAS pollution problem for all humankind and how it will come crashing down
Water utilities will soon have to meet the toughest drinking water standards, of 4 parts per trillion, or ppt, for two of the most notorious and best-studied PFAS compounds: PFOA, formerly used to make DuPont’s Teflon, and PFOS, formerly an ingredient in 3M’s Scotchgard. The agency also set a separate standard for a witches brew of four other PFAS compounds: GenX, PFBS, PFNA and PFHxS. By doing so, the EPA will help protect millions of Americans from exposure to these toxic chemicals.
Crimi, an environmental engineer at the Clarkson University in New York, said that this is a huge deal in terms of protecting public health, but also in regards to what it will take to accomplish.
FDA Commissioner Robert Califf recently told veteran food reporter Helena Bottemiller Evich that we need to address food chemical safety “for all humankind” and has made food chemical safety reviews a big focus of his proposed reorganization of the FDA’s food program, and rightly so. But, so far, many PFAS are still considered “safe” for use in food packaging, at least according to the FDA’s career staff.
The movements to bring about changes to the system are being looked atInternationally. Legislation is being contemplated by the European Union that would ban the production of PFAS.
Many of these polluters are still making the PFAS problem even bigger. Experts estimate that more than 30,000 companies could be using PFAS and dumping their PFAS wastes into rivers, landfills and sewers, or pumping them into the air.
The EPA estimates that implementing its proposal nationally would cost around US$782 million annually, but a study commissioned by the AWWA shows the price tag could be as high as $3 billion a year. The EPA says that more than $9 billion is already available through a US infrastructure law enacted in late 2021, but Moody stresses that this is just a start: the AWWA-estimated cost over 20 years is $58 billion.
If history is any indicator, however, costs will probably come down over time, says Melanie Benesh, vice-president of government affairs at the Environmental Working Group. “With regulation often comes market innovation,” she adds.
Environmental Working Group Analysis of the PFAS3 Reactor Test Program at Peterson Space Force Base in Colorado Springs, Colo., Jan. 12, 2015
The US Department of Defense is testing a technology that could allow for the removal of pollutants in the air before they reach drinking-water supplies. Starting as early as this year at Peterson Space Force Base in Colorado Springs, groundwater will be collected inside a horizontal well and funnelled through a reactor developed by Crimi’s team that uses ultrasound waves to break the carbon–fluorine bonds in PFAS3.
Editor’s Note: Scott Faber is senior vice president of government affairs at the Environmental Working Group (EWG), which is a nonprofit environmental health research and advocacy group. He is an instructor at the Georgetown University Law Center. The views expressed here are his own. CNN has an opinion on it.
Exactly how many Americans have been drinking unsafe levels of these chemicals is hard to know, because our drinking water utilities were only recently required to test for their presence. But, according to research estimates, it’s likely that more than 200 million Americans have been drinking a chemical linked to an increased risk of cancer, reproductive harm, immune system damage and other serious health problems, even at low levels.
It will be no surprise that polluted areas will complain and seek to escape responsibility, because they are accustomed to doing so. They always do.
They did not wait to argue that the science is not strong enough or that protecting ordinary people from cancer and other harms is too costly. Many of the companies which are already fighting Biden’s win for consumers have for decades hid just how dangerous they are from their workers and neighbors.