Recent Work
New Bans of PFAS
There will be new regulations banning the manufacturing or importing of five chemicals used in the production of many popular products due to their threat to human health, an administrator for the Environmental Protection Agency announced on Tuesday at Boston University.
On April 18, 2023, at Boston University, Lisa Stewart, a spokesperson for the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), announced that within the next six months the EPA will “make it illegal to manufacture or import the most common PFAS chemicals or to add them to consumer products.”
Furthermore, the EPA will “require all public water systems in the United States to effectively eliminate these five PFAS chemicals from their water,” said Stewart.
Drinking water data from 2022 found that a minimum of 18% of the U.S. drinking water had two or more PFAS above the EPA’s health advisory levels, according to the U.S. Government Accountability Office.
This ban has been met with opposition as “an example of government at its worst … based on a misunderstanding of the science. Without [PFAS], many consumer products will become more expensive, and some might be impossible to manufacture,” stated Rochelle Rogers, spokeswoman for the American Chemistry Council, a trade group that represents major chemical companies.
PFAS are necessary to our everyday life and are used in our cell phones, tablets, telecommunications, aircrafts, and both green energy and fossil fuel initiatives, according to Rogers.
Environmentalists are pleased that the EPA has put into place these new regulations but believe “these actions should’ve been taken years ago, and they should be going much further now. We’ve already seen thousands of public water sources around the country polluted with these cancer-causing chemicals,” exclaimed Dr. Kyla Bennett, director of science policy at the Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER), a Washington-based organization that defends whistleblowers in government.
In addition to causing cancers such as kidney or testicular cancer, a 2022 compilation of research demonstrates that PFAS may lead to increased cholesterol levels, changes in liver enzymes, increased risk of high blood pressure in pregnant woman, small decreases in infant birth weight, and a decreased vaccine response in children, according to the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry (ATSDR).
Bennett takes the PEER stance one step further suggesting that the ACC’s scientists are bought and paid for, questioning the results and integrity of the ACC’s scientists.
Rogers does not deny that their scientists are paid to do their work, but states “just because they are paid for does not automatically bring into questioning their results.”
Bennett believes that the manufacturers should be held accountable, incur all the costs to clean up polluted water, and find alternative chemicals to use following a sweeping, class ban on all non-essential PFAS.
Stewart states that the EPA will continue to monitor chemicals that have potential human risk but will take a more cautious approach by continuing “to do risk assessments on other PFAS and add more PFAS to the list that will be banned. [The] EPA needs to investigate each chemical on its own because we don’t want to overregulate chemicals that are benign and useful to society.”
Works Cited
Office, U.S. Government Accountability. “Persistent Chemicals: EPA Should Use New Data to Analyze the Demographics of Communities with Pfas in Their Drinking Water.” Persistent Chemicals: EPA Should Use New Data to Analyze the Demographics of Communities with PFAS in Their Drinking Water | U.S. GAO, https://www.gao.gov/products/gao-22-105135.
“Potential Health Effects of Pfas Chemicals.” Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 1 Nov. 2022, https://www.atsdr.cdc.gov/pfas/health-effects/index.html.