With PFAS Science, the More We Know, the Worse It Gets

the environmental podcast from Bloomberg Law. I'm your host, David Schultz, and as I mentioned up at the top, we are now in parts per quadrillion territory when it comes to measuring the safe levels of certain p fast chemicals. Earlier this month, the ep OF lowereded standard for the amount of safe exposure to two substances within this broader class

of so called forever chemicals. Previously, according to figures set just in sixteen, the threshold was at seventy parts per trillion for both substances, known as p FOSS and p FOA. Now it's thousands of times smaller than that, at twenty parts per quadrillion for p FASS and four parts per quadrillion for p FOA. It's hard to wrap your head around what that means. I mean, what even is a quadrillion?

But I did a back of the envelope calculation, and four parts per quadrillion is like taking half a cup of water and pouring it into Lake Mead. Seriously, it was a reminder that even though we've been talking about p fast chemicals for years now, we're still learning new things about them, and those new things are pretty alarming.

To find out what this means and where the sciences is heading, I rang up our ace chemicals reporter Pat Razzuto and had her walk with me through why the e p A said the safety standard so mind bogglingly low.

It issued four health advisories for four different p fast chemicals, and those dealt with the amount of those chemicals that the ep A thinks a person could drink in water for their entire life, which is estimated to be seventy years without being harmed, and that it's the whole purpose of them is to let states, drinking water utilities the public know what EPA's latest thinking about the sciences. It's information I see. And they did this, uh in so I guess they felt that in you know it, and

they just needed updating. Is that why they issued these new numbers. So the ones that updated and really ratcheted down. The numbers were for UM, the oldest and best known of the chemicals. Let's get into that, because when you say ratcheted down, I mean this, that's an understatement. These new numbers are some of the smallest numbers I've ever seen on any type of environmental document. We're talking about, you know, basically four parts per quadrillion for one of them.

Why are these numbers so low? I mean it used to be of inde parts per trillion, which itself was very low, and now we're just getting it seems like we're thousands of times lower. Well, I understand the numbers are beyond human scale. We can't understand how tiny these numbers are. UM. One analogy I heard that I just kind of liked was that, UM, the PFOA advisory of fur parts per quadrillion would be like four kernels of corn in the fifty two million acres of corn fields

across the corn belt. That's you know, Indiana, Illinois, Iowa, Minnesota, Nebraska, and Wisconsin. UM. But what I was really helped to see by people who have a simpler vision than I do at a conference I attended last week is e p A is essentially saying there is no safe level to drink those particular two chemicals over a lifetime. These are these levels that it issued were below what laboratory technology can measure. But um, yes, So what e p A it was saying is ideally there shouldn't be any

in the water. Now e p A has actually said that for other chemicals. E p A says that for lead, it doesn't want any lead in the drinking water, It doesn't want any radionucleoides like uranium in the drinking water. But that's not where it regulates. Um. It says the goal is zero, but then it uses you know what technology can do? How expensive is that technology factors like that to actually set a regulatory level. So this is

not as bizarre as it comes across. But that's and that's one thing I'm eager to hear from you, is that why didn't it do that for for these chemicals, to say the goal of zero, no amount is safe, but practically we want you to get to this level. It seems like it didn't do that here, Well why not? Um it sends the same message. It just sends it based on the science, because apparently it's you can't say there's absolutely no amount that's safe. The science isn't there

for that, I see. So yeah, I mean I guess if you can get that precise, why not get that precise? Um So, let's talk about the reaction to this, because you know, this is a pretty shockingly low number, as you mentioned, hard to comprehend. What was the action from

the chemical industry. Imagine they weren't too thrilled with this. Well, actually, I think the people who are hit who are in the front lines with this, the drinking water utilities, because suddenly what they're being told is that no amount of this that they can measure in their drinking water is safe. Right if you if you test your drinking water and any amount of these chemicals comes up, you have a problem, exactly. And that's a hard message to deliver to your water customers. Um. So,

I think that they're in the front lines. And um since they are providing a public service, they don't make these chemicals. They actually just receive them and remove them out of the water when they can, and when they reach a high enough level that they've got a big challenge.

Between next January and December five, EPA is going to require drinking water utilities of basically any significant size to be measuring PFOA p FAST the other two, Um, there are twenty nine fast that you drinking water utilities are going to have to measure and report to e p A and they'll need to you know, that information will become public and people will have questions about that, and those questions are going to trigger legislators, you know, asking you what do we need to do? Um, do we

need to be installing more drinking water control technologies? So there are there are a few things. This all sounds doom and gloom. On the one hand, by putting these super extraordinarily low health advisories out, e p A send a really strong signal to everybody it's going to be some years before the e p A can regulate PFOA and p FASE in drinking water. In the meantime, it told everybody the regulatory level that's coming is going to be a lot lower than the advisory we've been using.

Get ready for it. So there's actually a logic to e p A releasing these advisories as a signal right now on. But that doesn't change the fact that drinking water utilities have this signal and with it. There's not a strong um direction from the agency. This is the best drinking water clean up technology to use to meet a regulatory standard. It will have to do that in the future. Yes, so right now they have a target to meet, but they don't have a lot of direction

on how to meet that target. You know, it's interesting You're you're bringing up water utilities and how this is affecting them, and it sounds like it's affecting them pretty seriously. You're not talking about the chemical manufacturers, the companies that made these these chemicals. Is it because these don't affect them? Or is it because they're already in such deep trouble

that things can't get possibly get worse for them. No, I think they're absolutely I was trying to talk about frontline first, drinking water utilities next in line um not only the manufacturers of p fast but also the companies that use them because what the health advisory will also likely spur. And I heard an attorney say this at

a webinar yesterday. The Drinking Water Act allows drinking water utilities if their states agree to act as regulators, they can go upstream and slap effluent limits on the companies who are putting problematic calm pounds into their source water. So if states and drinking water utilities didn't have a good incentive already to be regulating those upstream companies, they

certainly do now. Um. So I would expect more states and more drinking water utilities to be exploring that particular authority.

I'd be expecting companies upstream to be getting more permit limits. Um. And I would expect attorneys who represent injured parties to be absolutely using the new health advisory in the thousands upon thousands of legal cases that are you know, have been filed against three M du Pont Comorris Tycho fire Products, and and and and and yeah, definitely alright, So finally

wrapping things up, where's the p FAST science heading? I mean, I know that's an impossible question to answer, but you know, are we It seems like we're having a trend here where the more we learn about p fast, the worse it gets. The more concerning things we discover and the more avenues of research that we have. Are we getting to a point where that won't be happening and we are kind of reaching a plateau? Or have we not

even approached the science plateau yet. For p Fass, I don't think we've even approached the science plateau yet because there are thousands upon thousands of these chemicals out there. Most of what we know is based on the older, longer ones, but there's enough information about the newer ones that concerns have been raised about them as well. Your

question gets a really important noub many scientists, say. Ma Halfriedoff, who's the chief hunt O over chemicals at e p A, said this morning, we can't study the p fast chemicals one at a time. It's just impossible. So how do you get the information? Becomes the question. E p a s approach is to try and break them into categories

and try and get information about categories. Um. The European Union's approach is to aim for some type of regulation that says, unless the chemicals are essential to society, you can't use them. Now, there are absolutely essential uses. If I have a heart stent, I want it to have p fast chemicals on it because that enables the heart

stent to last in my body for decades. But there is a huge divide between the affected communities in particular and some scientists who strongly feel the default approach, which has to be regulate them as one consider them bad unless proven innocent, and then the other um view says, wait, it's like the term feelines. Okay, fee lines are not all alike. One's a lion, one's a panther, one's a jaguar, one's my kitty cat. They don't all act alike. We

can't handle them as the equivalent. That's a good point, although I will say sometimes my kitty cat does think he is a panther, so that's that's another story. But now the metaphor holds um. That's really fascinating stuff. Thank you Pat so much for talking about this, and uh, you know, I'm just so fascinated to see where this goes in the future. It sounds like we're gonna be talking about it for a very long time, forever conversation,

forever conversation about for every cat calls. Thanks and that's it for today's Out of Parts per Billion. If you want more environmental news, check us out on Twitter. We use a pretty easy to remember handle at environment It's just that environment. I'm at David B. Schultz if you want to chat with me about anything and everything. Today's episode of Parts per Billion was produced by myself, David Schultz.

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