WASHINGTON, DC — The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has lowered what’s considered a safe level of toxic PFAS in drinking water to virtually zero in a move that’s expected to produce wide regulatory ripple effects.
The EPA dropped its lifetime health advisory levels for PFOS and PFOA, the two most well-known individual compounds in the huge chemical family, by orders of magnitude from thresholds the agency has relied on for the past seven years.
New advisory levels are also being set for two compounds, PFBS and GenX, developed by chemical manufacturers to replace PFOS and PFOA in the marketplace.
The EPA announcement was made Wednesday, June 15 during the first day of the third National PFAS Conference happening this week in Wilmington, North Carolina.
“Today’s actions highlight EPA’s commitment to use the best available science to tackle PFAS pollution, protect public health, and provide critical information quickly and transparently,” said Radhika Fox, EPA Assistant Administrator for Water, in a statement.
Whereas EPA previously considered PFOS and PFOA exposure unsafe when consumed in water at 70 parts-per-trillion (ppt) or more, the agency now says the compounds are unsafe at the parts-per-quadrillion level, which translates to 0.020-ppt for PFOS and 0.004-ppt for PFOA.
Those new concentrations are so small they’re below the current minimum reporting level that most drinking water analysis labs use as a baseline for any PFAS detection. They also are far lower than any state regulatory standards for the compounds in drinking water or groundwater, including standards enacted two years ago in Michigan.
In a release, EPA said the advisories are “based on new science and consider lifetime exposure.” They also “indicate that some negative health effects may occur with concentrations of PFOA or PFOS in water that are near zero and below EPA’s ability to detect at this time.”
Although EPA advisory levels are not enforceable in court, they have been used as de-facto standards around the country in states which have not passed their own rules.
The U.S. Department of Defense has also long relied on the previous level of 70-ppt, which EPA issued in 2016, as a threshold for cleanup or connecting people to safe water in areas near military bases contaminated by PFAS-based AFFF firefighting foam.
For GenX, the EPA is setting the advisory level at 10-ppt. For PFBS, the level is 2,000-ppt. The EPA did not previously have an advisory level for either compound, which were marketed as “safer” alternatives when PFOS and PFOA were phased out in the early 2000s.
Activists cheered the news and urged the EPA to go further by developing regulations for PFAS as a chemical class, rather than on a one-by-one basis over time.
“The science is clear: these chemicals are shockingly toxic at extremely low doses,” said Erik Olson, a PFAS policy expert at the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC). “EPA’s new health advisories for PFOA, PFOS, and GenX reflect this robust science and will send a welcome signal that government and industry must do more to protect public health.”
Anthony Spaniola, a metro Detroit attorney and Michigan PFAS activist who co-chairs the Great lakes PFAS Action Network, urged the military to begin using the new levels.
“This is an important step from the Biden administration in the fight to protect public health,” said Spaniola. “EPA has confirmed that there are effectively no safe levels of PFOA or PFOS, and it has shot down the notion that newer PFAS chemicals, like GenX, are harmless.
“Now more than ever, it’s time for the Department of Defense to act with urgency to clean up the decades old PFAS mess that it created for service members and host communities like Oscoda all across America,” said Spaniola, who owns a home near the former Wurtsmith Air Force Base in Oscoda, where an achingly slow PFAS cleanup is crawling forward.
The Michigan Department of Environment, Great Lakes and Energy (EGLE), which developed enforceable PFAS standards for drinking water that were enacted in 2020, released a statement Wednesday saying it “welcomes” the EPA announcement as a “step toward a more unified and consistent approach to addressing PFAS compounds nationwide.”
Michigan’s own drinking water standards for PFOS, PFOA and five other PFAS compounds were finalized in August 2020. The toxicology reviews for those began in 2018 and the process resulted in limits of 8-ppt limit for PFOA and 16-ppt for PFOS, among others, which public water supplies must adhere to. The requirements are mirrored for site cleanups.
Department spokesperson Scott Dean said EGLE and its internal Michigan PFAS Action Response Team (MPART) “looks forward to reviewing the new EPA health advisory levels to help inform our evaluation of Michigan’s current and future standards.”
Sandy Wynn-Stelt, a Michigan PFAS activist who is attending the conference in Wilmington, said the widespread impact of the new levels is gradually dawning on attendees.
“It’s going to have huge ripple effects,” said Wynn-Stelt, who lives across from the House Street dump north of Grand Rapids, where shoemaker Wolverine Worldwide landfilled PFAS-laden tannery waste in the 1960s causing severe contamination in northern Kent County.
She said the state Citizen Advisory Workgroup on PFAS in Michigan, named the CAWG, is “definitely” going to want to discuss adopting the state adopting the new EPA levels.
“I don’t see any way we can’t follow the lead from EPA,” she said.
On the flip side, the American Chemistry Council (ACC), a trade group which represents chemical manufacturers, issued a statement criticizing the move as “a failure of the agency to follow its accepted practice for ensuring the scientific integrity of its process.”
“ACC is concerned that the process for development of these LHAs is fundamentally flawed,” according to a statement shared by spokesperson Tom Flanagin. “We will continue to engage with EPA and policymakers at the state and federal level to advocate for strong, science-based policies that are protective of human health and the environment.”
Flanagin shared a copy of a June 8 letter sent to Shalanda Young, director of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) in which the ACC argued the advisories should have been subject to interagency review as well as public comment under the Administrative Procedures Act because the new advisory levels are expected to have a “clear and substantial impact on regulations and policies at the state and federal level.”
Thew new advisories follow draft toxicity analyses EPA released in November suggesting PFOS and PFOA — which have been found in many drinking water supplies and surface waters in Michigan and around the country — are far more toxic than previously thought.
The changes are based on the reliance of epidemiological studies that assess actual exposure in humans rather than solely on studies of animals exposed to the chemicals in a lab.
The EPA analyses are part of the process by which the agency is developing national drinking water standards for PFOS and PFOA. In regulatory terms, such standards are called “maximum contaminant levels” or MCLs, which are developed under the Safe Drinking Water Act for pollutants the agency considers to be widespread in U.S. water supplies.
In October, as part of a “strategic roadmap” for tackling PFAS contamination around the country, the EPA announced its intent to propose MCLs for PFOS and PFOA by this fall with the hope of finalizing those standards in late 2023.
According to the ATSDR, research involving humans suggests high exposure to PFAS may lead to increase cholesterol levels, changes in liver enzymes, deceased vaccine response in children, increased risk of high blood pressure or pre-clampsia in pregnant women, decreases in infant birth weight and increased risk of kidney or testicular cancer.
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