12/09/2024

‘Forever Chemicals’ Pollute our Water and Soil. Who Will Clean Them Up?

Houston Chronicle | Rebekah F. Ward | Dec. 6, 2024

‘Forever Chemicals’ Pollute our Water and Soil. Who Will Clean Them Up?

Houston Chronicle | Rebekah F. Ward | Dec. 6, 2024

The petite French chief executive of waste processing giant Veolia walked between the towering silos and 60-foot rotary kiln of her company’s Port Arthur facility, tailed by an army of visitors wearing suits with their hard hats.

Estelle Brachlianoff was showing off. Veolia’s flagship plant east of Houston in Port Arthur had been central to research on breaking down PFAS, the notoriously stubborn family of “forever chemicals” that have become the target of a slew of new Environmental Protection Agency rules this year.

Now, she expected the tougher regulations to drive sharp growth for the company as customers scrambled to safely destroy the toxic substances.

“It’s moving fast,” Brachlianoff said in a presentation the day before the tour earlier this year, adding that PFAS chemicals were rampant in the environment and processing them could create a $200 billion dollar market in the U.S. alone.

“The question this country is debating, in a way, is who’s going to pay for that decontamination?” she added.

Months later, questions still hang over the massive cleanup endeavor. Water systems and chemical manufacturers have sued the EPA, and one another, trading fire over who will pay.

Some commentators have speculated that the incoming Trump administration will weaken oversight of the pervasive chemicals. The Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, which was written in part by former Trump officials, proposes revisiting the recent categorization of two specific PFAS as “hazardous chemicals.”

But in an interview with the Houston Chronicle, former EPA administrator Andrew Wheeler pointed out that the original plans to clean up PFAS were released in 2019 – while he was leading the EPA for Trump.

“If we hadn’t started that process under the Trump administration, the Biden administration would not have been able to finalize it,” Wheeler said.

Jennifer Orme-Zavaleta, a career EPA researcher who served as the agency’s science advisor before retiring in 2021, said many of the political appointees during Trump’s first term were engaged and supportive of plans to clean up PFAS, though a few interfered with scientific assessments on acceptable risk levels.

“I would anticipate the incoming administration to still see PFAS as a priority, but may look to different ways for addressing it,” she said. “I would expect a rollback of existing regulations and modification to what is currently in the pipeline.”

Trump-Vance Transition spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt did not respond to specific questions about the incoming administration’s PFAS plans, though she said Trump would “deliver clean air and water for American families while making America wealthy again.”

Veolia’s growth projections have not changed, either. Since cleaning up PFAS was initially proposed under Trump, Veolia spokeswoman Carrie Griffiths said, the company was “proud to be the industry leader” still positioned to tackle it.

After decades of inaction, both technology and regulations may be catching up to the prevalence of PFAS – but is the problem too big to tackle?

EPA clamps down on ‘forever chemicals’

When DuPont trademarked Teflon in the mid-1940s, its water-repellent PFAS component was heralded as a “miracle of modern chemistry” for its heat resistance and ability to repel oil and water without breaking down.

Soon, similar chemicals were used in products such as firefighting foam and rain jackets, multiplying the “forever chemicals” in American water and soil — and the human body

The chemical components of forever chemicals take years to break down. Concentrations of PFAS caused cancer clusters and premature deaths across the country before research pinpointing their deadly impact was finally made public.

“The manufacturers of PFAS have been aware for many decades of the harmful health effects of these chemicals, but they’ve downplayed that information and not been forthcoming about what they’ve known about health effects,” said Laurel Schaider, an environmental engineer who researches PFAS at the Silent Spring Institute. “So regulators and scientists have had to play catch-up.”

The EPA’s answer, years in the making, came in 2024. The agency rolled out a series of new rules for chemical producers and public water systems. The measures included new limits on PFAS in drinking water, new rules to eliminate certain PFAS safely, and new processes to review and report on the chemicals.

The EPA also signed off on major funding for research, including a joint project to test PFAS on U.S. Army bases, which had for years conducted frequent training exercises with a firefighting foam developed by 3M.

The foam used both PFOA and PFOS, two forever chemicals, to quickly suffocate flames – an especially crucial function for petroleum-based fires.

Another decision by the EPA to list both PFOA and PFOS as hazardous substances drew criticism from former manufacturers of the chemicals.

Wayne D’Angelo, an environmental and energy lawyer with the Washington firm Kelley Drye who counsels industrial clients, said that PFAS were used legally in many contexts across the country for years. Now, under the EPA’s new rules, federal officials put all PFAS producers and handlers on the hook retroactively for old contamination.

“It’s an incredibly broad statute,” D’Angelo said. “If a dozen or more contributed to a release, each one of those entities can be liable for cleaning up or reimbursing the EPA for 100% of it.”

A lawsuit filed by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and industry groups in July challenged the EPA’s decision. In their opening brief, petitioners argued the EPA “failed to adequately consider the enormous costs of its novel rule,” among other concerns.

Despite the pushback, most types of forever chemicals are still exempt from the EPA’s new clean-up push. The EPA’s regulation applies to relatively few specific PFAS compounds.

In total, the forever chemicals now in circulation number over 12,000.

New rules tackle tiny percentage of PFAS

PFAS are actually a family of man-made chemicals, short for per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances. These persistent chemicals all contain long chains of carbon atoms with fluorine bonded to them, a chemical step that keeps them resistant to degradation.

When trying to make sense of risk levels, the EPA reached out to Philippe Grandjean, head of the environmental medicine research unit at the University of Southern Denmark with longstanding ties to Harvard University.

One of the pioneers of PFAS research, Grandjean said that looking at the impacts of individual PFAS in humans is tricky since most people are exposed to a mixture of the substances.

“We should not get lulled into believing that it’s only the old PFAS that are dangerous,” Grandjean said.

Still, while significant research now links a few longstanding PFAS to human health problems, thousands of similar chemicals in circulation are not tested thoroughly enough for the EPA to rule them out as health risks.

CLOSE TO HOME: Does Houston tap water contain ‘forever chemicals’?

Liz Hitchcock, the director of federal policy for environmental group Toxic-Free Future, is one of many advocates saying the EPA’s rules have not gone far enough to protect the public.

If the government cherry-picks certain PFAS and fails to regulate the entire class of chemicals, they argue, it will be caught playing perpetual whack-a-mole. Slight chemical variations will allow many substances to slip through the cracks unchecked, even if they could have very similar effects.

“Why regulate them as a class? The recognition that all of these chemicals share the long-lasting effects of a very, very tough carbon fluorine bond,” she said. “They’re all dangerous in the same way.”

Some states have already begun regulating PFAS as a class of fluorinated chemicals, rather than one by one. But according to Arlene Blum, a chemist and leader of the Green Science Policy Institute, the EPA’s own requirements make the strategy difficult at the federal level.

“There are regulations that the EPA has to meet to make those designations,” Blum said. “The specific information doesn’t exist for all the PFAS.”

Detractors of sweeping class-based regulations, including companies that developed new PFAS variations and marketed them as safe alternatives to proven risks like PFOA and PFOS, insist that different chemicals likely carry different health risks and should not be lumped together.

Current science leaves lingering questions

Back at the Port Arthur facility, Bob Cappadona paused beside a towering combustion chamber, where partially processed material was funneled from the incineration line.

Cappadona, head of Veolia’s Environmental Solutions and Services in North America, said the designation of two types of PFAS as hazardous chemicals would change the game. He said it could shift how companies processed their PFAS-contaminated waste, discouraging them from leaving it in landfills as many have been doing for years.

He said Veolia had been preparing for this moment, and gestured to the tarnished exterior of the company’s looming solution. Among the web of oversized pipes sat a giant kiln, 60 feet long and 16 feet in diameter, cordoned off with a yellow safety rail. The kiln incinerates toxins in a controlled process that reaches 2,100 degrees — about as hot as some types of lava.

The process is hot enough to break down PFAS entirely, Cappadona said. Less intensive incineration processes could break down some of the chemicals; but without destroying them entirely, new PFAS could form.

“In breaking seven compounds, you may have created 200 others,” Cappadona said.

This risk of creating toxic byproducts is one of the unintended consequences academics and industry researchers are hoping to avoid as they hone the most promising PFAS-destroying technologies. Besides incineration, studies have examined solutions like blasting the chemicals with cold plasma gas; oxidizing them with an electric current; activating a catalyst with light, which then destroys the PFAS; using ultrasonic waves; and heating water to supercritical levels. All still come with major disadvantages.

While scientists struggle to find efficient ways to rid the environment of chemicals engineered for their staying power, many Americans have been left wondering how the country’s rampant PFAS contamination has already affected their lives.

Message boards like Reddit are filled with people “freaking out” about the PFAS in everything they own, and puzzling over how much they should worry. And Texans like Kathleen Dorothy Blackburn are left wondering about the untimely deaths of family members living on PFAS-contaminated land, never knowing for sure if the chemicals killed them.

Blackburn recently wrote a memoir about her military father – an evangelical marathon runner who died of colorectal cancer at 38 – and the mystery of his early death. After searching for two decades for any missing piece that could explain his illness, she learned about the heavy PFAS contamination from firefighting foam around former air force bases.

“That day I got online and I Googled ‘Air Force base, PFAS, and Texas,’” Blackburn said. “The cover photo was Reese Air Force Base, which is the shuttered base in my hometown of Lubbock. And I just started crying,” she said.