Inside EPA is reporting that the Association of State Drinking Water Administrators (ASDWA) and New England Interstate Water Pollution Control Commission (NEIWPCC), among others, are complaining that the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's (EPA) draft human health criteria for per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) are below the concentrations reliably detectable in a laboratory and would require oppressively expensive treatment by their members, if they could be met at all.
EPA is receiving comments on the draft until April 29, 2025. Earlier this month, EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin recognized that many municipalities can't bear the cost of meeting EPA's draft criteria but what might be done about that remains highly uncertain.
To put a finer point on the concerns expressed about the draft human health criteria, they range between 0.0009 parts per trillion and 0.06 parts per trillion. How small is that? One part per trillion is equivalent to one second in more than 31,000 years. For comparison, 0.0009 parts per trillion is roughly equivalent to one second in more than 3.4 million years. One can see why those responsible for treating water might be nervous about meeting these specifications.
The Drinking Water Administrators and others say that a more appropriate response to the threat posed by PFAS is to keep them from getting into the water in the first place, including by eliminating PFAS in consumer products. But that, too, is easier said than done. Just ask regulators in Maine, who have struggled for four years to implement Public Law 2021, c. 477, An Act To Stop Perfluoroalkyl and Polyfluoroalkyl Substances Pollution.
And so EPA finds itself in the jam predicted when EPA's PFAS Road Map was unveiled in the fall of 2021. The more EPA suggests that PFAS are a matter of grave concern, at concentrations so minute they can't be reliably measured, the more pressure it faces to quickly address that concern and pretty much everything one might do to address that concern costs a staggering amount of money.
The billions of dollars committed to treatment of drinking water in the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law were a good start. So are the billions more resulting from class action settlements in the multidistrict litigation being managed by Judge Richard Gergel of the U.S. District Court for the District of South Carolina.
But it took the better part of 75 years to create the PFAS quandary in which we now find ourselves, and getting where EPA has said we need to get when it comes to PFAS is going to cost billions, if not trillions, more. So it is certainly fair for the ASDWA, NEIWPCC and others to point out that all of us, including EPA, need to consider the sources of those billions as EPA reconsiders what can realistically be done about PFAS and when.
