Following through on a campaign promise, President Joe Biden’s administration is limiting toxic forever chemicals in drinking water for the first time, a sweeping policy change intended to protect Americans from widespread threats to human health and the environment.

New regulations to be announced Wednesday will require every U.S. water utility to begin routinely testing for several of the chemicals. Any that exceed federal limits will get five years to overhaul their treatment plants to reduce, if not eliminate, alarming concentrations of the compounds in tap water.

More than 100 million Americans are expected to benefit, including at least 660,000 in Illinois who get their drinking water from a utility that violates the new standards for per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, commonly known as PFAS.

In 2022, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency declared there effectively is no safe level of exposure to perfluorooctane sulfonic acid (PFOS), used by 3M for decades to make Scotchgard stain repellent, or perfluorooctanoic acid (PFOA), sold to DuPont by 3M to manufacture Teflon coatings for cookware, clothing and wiring.

These versions of the chemicals build up in human blood, cause cancer and other diseases and take years to leave the body.

Water utilities will need to limit concentrations of the forever chemicals to 4 parts per trillion — an amount the EPA said is the lowest at which PFOS and PFOA can be accurately detected. Four other PFAS, including replacements for the original Scotchgard and Teflon chemicals, also will be regulated for the first time.

“There’s no doubt that these chemicals have been important for certain industries and consumer uses,” EPA Administrator Michael Regan told reporters during a Tuesday briefing. “But there’s also no doubt that many of these chemicals can be harmful to our health and our environment.”

Forever chemicals end up in lakes, rivers and wells after flushing through sewage treatment plants and spreading from factory smokestacks. They also leach out of products such as carpets, clothing, cookware, cosmetics, dental floss, fast-food wrappers, firefighting foam, food packaging, microwave popcorn bags, paper plates, pizza boxes, rain jackets and ski wax.

Based on limited testing by the EPA and some states during the past decade, thousands of utilities face expensive upgrades to their treatment plants. For now, though, it appears Chicago and other Illinois communities that depend on Lake Michigan for drinking water will not be required to do anything other than test for the chemicals.

Limited testing by the Chicago Department of Water Management and the Illinois EPA has detected forever chemicals in treated Lake Michigan water but at levels below the new federal standards.

...continued

©2024 Chicago Tribune. Visit at chicagotribune.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.