The Environmental Protection Agency is changing how it regulates PFAS, or “forever chemicals.” The recent announcement rescinds the enforcement of four of these man-made chemicals and delays the enforcement of limits on two others.
Last year, the EPA set legal, enforceable limits on six types of PFAS. It would have required drinking water systems to take action on getting them out of their water by 2029.
For two of these chemicals, PFOS and PFOA, the rule is still in place, but the compliance date has been pushed back to 2031.
There was also a limit on chemicals called PFHxS, PFNA, and HFPO-DA (or Gen-X), as well as on mixtures containing at least two or more of these or a chemical called PFBS.
Missouri has been testing these chemicals for years, and has found some of them in water systems, such as in the Maries County town of Vienna.
“We are still planning on moving forward with that plan, so that by the end of this year, we should have a sample from every water system in the state,” said Eric Medlock, the monitoring section chief for Missouri’s public drinking water program.
Medlock said there hasn’t been a lot of PFAS found in Missouri so far. The Department of Natural Resources maintains a database of its water lab results, but Medlock said there are some technical issues that are causing some samples not to be shown on the map — he said those should be resolved soon.
While the new rules won’t change how the samples are tested, it’s possible that it could change which results are reported.
“Typically, when you have a rule, the laboratory certification process only certifies those regulated contaminants,” Medlock said. “We're not 100% sure what this new decision will mean for laboratory certification.”
“In the case of the current rule, where laboratories were being certified for six PFAS (chemicals), that's all they had to report,” he added.
As long as the labs continue to send them the full results, the department will continue publishing them, Medlock said.
“Since the news release was just released yesterday, we're still trying to digest it ourselves,” he added.
The removal of limits on some PFAS has been met with criticism from environmental advocates, including the Natural Resources Defense Council.
“Those chemicals have also been studied for quite some time now, and we now know that the health harms associated with those chemicals are the same as what we see for PFOA and PFOS, so they impact many of the same systems in our bodies,” Katie Pelch, a senior scientist with the NRDC, told KBIA.
“We know that PFAS exposure is linked to serious health concerns like kidney and testicular cancer, thyroid disease, decreased fertility, decreased response to vaccines and other concerns as well,” she added.
The NRDC said in a press release that the EPA’s actions violate an anti-backsliding provision found in the Safe Drinking Water Act, “which says the agency cannot legally weaken these rules.”
The EPA didn’t answer why specifically PFOS and PFOA was being treated differently than the other chemicals, only reiterating that they want to “ensure that the determinations and any resulting drinking water regulation follow the legal process laid out in the Safe Drinking Water Act.”
Medlock — and a lawsuit from the American Water Works Association — criticized the prior rule for hurrying the process of creating rules for those chemicals.
“The rule that was finalized previously took into account the additional four PFAS (chemicals) that were not completely vetted or streamed through the normal Safe Drinking Water Act process,” he said.
In a brief filed by the NRDC as an intervenor to that lawsuit, they argue the 2024 rule “reflects rational, well-supported EPA decisions that are consistent with the best available science and the best reading of the Safe Drinking Water Act.”
Medlock also said the delay in enforcement for PFOS and PFOA is welcome, as the earlier timetable put local water systems “in a bind.”
“There is a process of determining which treatment is best suited; then you have to do pilot testing to make sure what you're choosing actually works for that specific contaminant at that specific water system,” Medlock said. “It is a process that takes not just months, but typically years, to put in place.”
