A recent study from the U.S.-based environmental nonprofit Waterkeeper Alliance has found “forever chemicals” contamination in 98% of the waterways it tested in the United States.
The findings come at a time when representatives from the world are gathered in Geneva, Switzerland, for the United Nations plastics treaty negotiations to hammer out a plan to address the growing plastic crisis. The issue of addressing the chemicals in plastic has emerged as a sticking point in the negotiations. One of the most widely used chemicals in single-use plastic is per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances or PFAS. Also known as “forever chemicals,” PFAS can persist in the environment for hundreds to thousands of years.
The study sampled both upstream and downstream from 22 wastewater treatment plants in the U.S. The researchers also collected data from waterways upstream and downstream of 10 areas where biosolids — or sewage sludge that is being used as a fertilizer — were applied, Kelly Hunter Foster, a senior attorney with Watekeeper Alliance, said in a video call.
The study focused on low-income and minority environmental justice communities across 19 U.S. states. “Unfortunately Latino and other communities of color are disproportionately faced to bear the burden [of PFAS],” Vanessa Muñoz, waterways program manager with the Hispanic Access Foundation said in a press release.
The researchers found elevated PFAS levels in 95% of sites downstream from wastewater treatment plants, meaning the facilities aren’t effectively removing a class of chemicals linked to health concerns including developmental delays in children, fertility issues and certain cancers.
“The problem is that we have industries discharging PFAS into wastewater treatment plants, and wastewater treatment plants are not designed to treat PFAS,” Hunter Foster told Mongabay.
Elevated PFAS levels were also found downstream of 80% of biosolid application sites.
For all the wastewater treatment plants and at 90% of the biosolid sites, the total PFAS found exceeded the human health standards set by the U.S. nonprofit and advocacy organization Environmental Working Group.
Of the more than 15,000 individual chemicals within the class of PFAS chemicals, just a small fraction have been subject to toxicology studies. The Waterkeeper Alliance report comes on the heels of an announcement from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency that it plans to extend compliance deadlines for some PFAS chemicals and stop enforcement of several others to reconsider how they were established.
“So that doesn’t really bode well for improving and strengthening the standards that we need to have done in order to protect the public,” Hunter Foster said.
Instead, she said we need to move toward stricter regulations for the entire class of PFAS chemicals.
“We really need the regulatory standards to fully address the types of PFAS, which are actually coming out of the plant, not just the two which are the most discussed.”
Banner image: of water sampling in a stream. Image by Iowa State University via Wikimedia. (CC BY-SA 3.0).
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