In the interest of full disclosure, I’m about to take on a topic that can be incredibly boring and try to make it endlessly fascinating. There’s no guarantee I’m going to succeed, but we’ve all heard the famous quote, “Shoot for the moon. Even if you miss, you’ll land among the stars.” Or, if you miss really badly, crash through the earth’s atmosphere and die a horrible death as you land on some parking lot in Topeka. I’m sure that’s not going to happen.

This past week, the EPA made news. Or they tried to and mostly failed, I think. They issued a press release on new drinking water standards for PFAS chemicals. More on what those are in a bit, but I was particularly impressed with the press release itself. The statement had more high fives and self-congratulation than a college basketball game. In addition to quoting the President and the EPA director, it quoted a number of politicians. And then there was this hidden gem in the middle of the statement:

“After decades of delay, President Biden’s EPA has delivered a drinking water standard for PFOA and PFOS which, when finalized, will be the toughest in the nation,” said activist and actor Mark Ruffalo. “By proposing to regulate four other PFAS as a mixture, the Biden EPA is also putting our communities ahead of the polluters. President Biden and his team pledged to make PFAS a priority and he has delivered. No Administration has done more to address the urgent threat posed by these toxic forever chemicals than the Biden Administration. My message to polluters is simple: after poisoning your workers and neighbors for decades, it is time to make our public health, not your profits, our top priority. My message to communities devastated by PFAS pollution is equally simple: help is finally on the way.”

That’s a direct quote from noted environmental scientist Mark Ruffalo. I’d tell him he needs to stay in his lane, but then he’d just turn into the hulk and beat me senseless, so I think I’ll pass. Do you know what wasn’t in the press release? Quotes from actual environmental scientists or links to studies about PFAS. As an environmental engineer, I was hoping for more.

Now I need to step back and do some explaining. PFAS stands for per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances. It’s a family of man-made chemicals that can do some pretty amazing things. PFAS chemicals are what make your no-stick pan surfaces no-stick. PFAS chemicals are key ingredients in dental floss and some deodorants and a whole host of other household goods. They are ubiquitous in your home and on the job and at the grocery store. The wrapper the fast food joint just wrapped your burger in may have a PFAS chemical.

So does that mean you need to make a trip to your trash bin with a whole bunch of household goods that you previously thought you couldn’t live without? Well, no. Or maybe I should say, probably not. These chemicals have been around now for 80 years or so and we’ve only spent the last 25 years or so doing the research, although it appears that DuPont started getting concerned about their money machine in the ’70s and started doing their own research. Some of these chemicals are currently thought to be safe. Some of them we are pretty sure are a problem. To date, no one has proven that any of them are actually dangerous, but the research continues. The EPA press release focused on two chemicals in particular, PFOS and PFOA (I won’t bore you with what these actually stand for) and four other chemicals that are also being limited, although how they are being limited is a little less clear. The health concern is all over the map. Possible cancers, infertility, kidney problems… the list of potential concerns is quite long.

Those two particular chemicals are in a few household products, like Scotchgard and floor wax, but they are most prevalent in the environment through their use as a fire suppressant. The chemicals are surfactants, which for firefighting purposes, means that if you shoot them through a nozzle they form a foamy substance that smothers fires. These are particularly useful for large fuel fires like what you get when your extremely expensive military aircraft catches fire. As you can imagine, they are particularly useful at airports or Air Force bases and many bases in the other services used them as well. For this purpose, they worked great, but military brass can read the handwriting on the wall as well as the next guy and their use in the military has now been banned. The math calculation was simple. We can either save our aircraft worth hundreds of millions of dollars or we can let it burn and avoid the lawsuit. It was an easy choice.

Nonetheless, this surfactant, called AFFF (aqueous film forming foam, if you’re interested), has been used for forty years now and it is found in groundwater and stormwater near most of these installations and airports. If you watch late-night television, I’m sure you are familiar with AFFF, as legal firms across the country are jumping in on the potential gravy train. Incidentally, I find myself irrationally irritated by how these commercials pronounce AFFF. They all pronounce it “A-eff-eff-eff.” Before these ads, I’d never heard it pronounced as anything other than “A-triple-eff.” If they are shooting for the golden payout, at least they could at least get their nomenclature right.

EPA has been struggling with how to regulate PFAS chemicals for nearly a decade. Around five years ago, EPA finally arrived at a not particularly scientifically relevant lifetime health advisory of 70 parts per trillion in drinking water. That’s a very small number. Let’s say you’ve got a standard-size swimming pool in your backyard and you want to put 70 parts per trillion of PFAS in the pool. You’ll need to put in about 0.003 milliliters of PFAS in your pool, or considerably less than one droplet. That’s a difficult standard and it didn’t really have a scientific basis, but for those of us trying to deal with the crisis, at least we finally had something tangible to work with. We could start figuring out how to clean up the mess.

For many environmental groups, a few of which believe that PFAS is horribly toxic at any level, that was not nearly good enough and some were stating that the limit should be zero. They found a sympathetic ear in Joe Biden’s EPA, which led to the announcement in the press release. The new limits are at 4 parts per trillion which, as it happens, is exactly the lowest we can measure. The EPA has essentially set the limit at zero. It could have been worse. Originally, they were pushing for a limit in the lower parts per quadrillion.

So what can be done? One of the biggest selling points for PFAS chemicals was that they never wear out or break down, which is why environmental groups like to call them (not inaccurately, I might add) “forever chemicals.” Now, that characteristic is understood as a serious roadblock to their elimination from contaminated water supplies. You can’t readily break them down into harmless constituents. They also easily mix with water, making them even more difficult to remove and nearly impossible to contain. Getting them out of contaminated water supplies is going to be very difficult and very expensive, when it can be done at all. The systems currently on the market to treat contaminated water are nearly the same ones they use to remove radioactive contaminants from cooling water in nuclear reactors. That works okay when you’re treating a few thousand gallons of purified water, but it’s quite another to take the chemicals out of a drinking water well or a lake. In other words, if you have any good ideas about how to treat for PFAS contamination, you are about to become extremely wealthy. Sadly, I am not going to become extremely wealthy.

The takeaway from all of this is that the EPA announcement is going to have a huge impact for your life, far more than the publicity it got. And it’s going to have an impact even if you aren’t living near a military base or fire station.

And as for making this post interesting, I think I just heard a loud thud coming from Topeka.