The Environmental Protection Agency said on Wednesday that drinking water standards would maintain two harmful ‘forever chemicals’, present in the tap water of millions of Americans. But it said it would slow down deadlines to meet those standards and roll back limits for four other related chemicals.
Known as chemicals forever because of their almost indestructible nature, PFAs are a class of thousands of chemicals that are widely used in everyday products such as anti-bin cooking utensils, water-repellent clothing and spot-resistant carpets, as well as in firefights.
Exposure to PFAS, or per- and polyfluoralkyl substances, is associated with metabolic disorders, reduced fertility in women, developmental disadvantages in children and an increased risk of some prostate, kidney and testicular cancers, According to the EPA.
President Joseph R. Biden Jr. Needed for the first time to start water aid programs to lower the levels of six types of PFAS chemicals to almost zero. He stated a particularly strict limit of four parts per trillion for two of those chemicals, PFOA and PFOs, which are usually found in drinking water systems.
The Trump administration said it would maintain the limits for those two types of PFAs, but would postpone a deadline for water aid programs to get those boundaries by two years until 2031.
The EPA said it would withdraw the boundaries for the other four chemicals.
“We are on our way to maintaining the national standards of the agency to protect Americans against PFOA and PFOs in their water,” said Lee Zeldin, the EPA manager, in a statement. “At the same time, we will work to offer a common sense flexibility in the form of extra time for compliance,” he said. “EPA will also continue to use its legal and enforcement instruments to keep polluters responsible.”
The switch to weaken some PFAS limits came after trade groups representing the chemical industry, as well as water facilities, had challenged the limits of the Biden era and said they created an impossible standard that would cost municipal water agencies billions of dollars to meet.
The chemicals are so omnipresent that they can be found in the blood of almost every person in the United States. Government studies from private wells and public water systems have detected PFAS chemicals In almost half of the tap water in the country.
In 2022, the EPA found that the chemicals could cause damage at levels “much lower than previously understood” and that almost no exposure level is safe.
According to the rules of the Biden era, water aid programs were required to check their water resources for PFAS chemicals. And they had to inform the public and work to lower the pollution levels, if levels exceed the set of thresholds: four parts per trillion for PFOA and PFOs, and 10 parts per trillion for four others.
These four chemicals include GenX, once considered a safer alternative to PFOA, but that is now linked to animal studies to damage to the liver, kidneys and immune system, as well as for developmental problems and cancer. The others are PFHXs and PFNA, as well as PFBs, a mixture of the chemicals, all of which are also linked to adverse health effects.
The agency said it was planning to start a new regulation process for the four chemicals in the fall and to publish the new rule next spring.
The plans of the administration were reported for the first time by the Washington Post.
Health and environment lawyers criticized the move.
“This is a clear victory for the chemical industry of trillion dollar, not for public health,” said Emily Donovan, co-founder of Clean Cape Fear, an environmental group that has worked on tackling GenX and PFAS infection of the Cape Fear River in North Carolina.
“This current administration promised voters that it would” make America healthy again, “but withdrawing part of the PFAS drinks standards is not doing something like that,” she said. “It is disrespectful for PFAS -Besmette communities that have suffered due to debilitating diseases and devastating losses.”
Erik D. Olson, senior strategic director of Health at Natural Resources Defense Council, said that the plan of the EPA offered ‘modest comfort’.
But he also said that the desk’s efforts to reverse the standards of drinking water, a no-backliding determination in the Safe Drinking Water Act violated.
“The law is very clear that the EPA cannot withdraw or weaken the drinking water standard,” he said. “This action is not only harmful, it is illegal.”
Industrial groups that sue the agency about the PFAS rules from the BIDen era-including the American Water Works Association, the American Chemistry Council and the National Association of Manufacturers Gates.
But in a statement with the announcement of the EPA, Alan Roberson, executive director of the Association of State Drinking Water Administrators said, which he supported the approach of the Trump government. The association represents managers of drinking water programs in 50 states.
Mr. Roberson said that states and water systems “struggled with the time frames” under the rules of the Biden era to test on PFAs and to build the necessary filtration infrastructure to rid the chemicals of the chemicals.
The movements came only a few weeks after Mr. Zeldin had announced A wave of measures to tackle PFAs Contamination, including the designation of an official to lead the efforts of the office over the chemicals.
The agency said it would also create guidelines for how many PFAS factories could release in their waste water and enter into the congress to come up with ways to keep polluters responsible.
Mr. Trump and the White House have also weighed the health shades of PFAS, albeit in a document that is explained A strategy to free the land of paper straws.
Maintaining the strict limits for PFOA and PFOS was still expected to translate into a considerable cost burden for water aid programs. The EPA had estimated that utilities would cost around $ 1.5 billion per year to meet the rule. Utility companies had said that the costs could be twice that amount and that the public would eventually pay the bill in the form of increased water rates.
James L. Ferraro, an environmental lawyer that represents various water utility programs, said that the approach of the Trump administration, although he represented a compromise, was “not one utility companies necessarily hoped for.”
PFOA and PFOs, for which EPA maintained strict limits, “are by far the most detected, because of their decades of, widespread use” and the cleaning of them “remains a serious challenge for many utilities,” he said.
Many environmental groups say that the costs for cleaning up PFAs must ultimately be worn by the manufacturers of the chemicals. They point to how chemical companies have hidden proof of the dangers of PFAS for decades, according to court cases, industrial documents and Peer-Reviewed Studies.
- Advertisement -
