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EPA Promoting Fertilizer Full of PFAS Despite Knowing Risks
New reporting shows the EPA was warned over 20 years ago that sewage sludge contained high levels of so-called "forever chemicals."
Dec 27, 2024
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency continues to promote a commonly used commercial fertilizer despite being informed over 20 years ago that its key component contained high levels of so-called "forever chemicals," a New York Times investigation revealed Friday.
The
Times' Hiroko Tabuchi reviewed thousands of pages of decades-old documents and found that scientists at chemical giant 3M discovered high levels of per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) in U.S. sewage during the early 2000s. Sewage sludge is in widespread use as farm fertilizer. PFAS are called forever chemicals because they do not biodegrade and accumulate in the environment and the human body. They have myriad uses, from nonstick cookware and waterproof clothing to firefighting foam and pesticides.
Officials at 3M—whose researchers had already linked PFAS to cancer, birth defects, and other ailments—informed the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) of its findings in 2003.
"The EPA continues to promote sewage sludge as fertilizer and doesn't require testing for PFAS."
However, as Tabuchi noted, "the EPA continues to promote sewage sludge as fertilizer and doesn't require testing for PFAS, despite the fact that whistleblowers, academics, state officials, and the agency's internal studies over the years have also raised contamination concerns."
According to the U.S. Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry, PFAS are linked to cancers of the kidneys and testicles, low infant weight, suppressed immune function, and other adverse health effects. They are found in the blood of around 99% of people around the world. EPA data show there's PFAS in the drinking water of tens of millions of Americans.
According to Tabuchi, EPA experts raised concerns about PFAS as far back as the 1990s, but their warnings went unheeded.
The
Times investigation follows reporting earlier this month led by Prism's Rebecca Barglowski showing that EPA and state officials in New Jersey have known about PFAS-contaminated water for nearly two decades.
Tabuchi noted that "the country is starting to wake up to the consequences" of PFAS' ubiquity. However, only one state—Maine—has begun systematically testing farms for PFAS. It has also banned the use of sewage sludge to fertilize fields.
At the federal level, the Biden administration in 2021 published its first "PFAS Strategic Roadmap" and designated forever chemicals "an urgent public health and environmental issue." Earlier this year, the EPA finalized a new Superfund rule meant to "help ensure that polluters pay to clean up their contamination" across the nation.
However, the chemical industry is fighting efforts to tackle PFAS, including through the use of research experts have called biased. Experts have also warned that the incoming administration of Republican President-elect Donald Trump will roll back Biden-era regulations, disempower agency specialists, and let political appointees make crucial regulatory decisions.
Even under Biden, the EPA is arguing that it cannot be sued for taking inadequate action to protect the public from PFAS contamination.
In June, Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER)
sued the EPA on behalf of a group of farmers, ranchers, and green groups "for failing to perform its nondiscretionary duty to identify and regulate toxic pollutants in sewage sludge" used as fertilizer. In September, the EPA moved to dismiss the lawsuit, arguing that it has complete discretion regarding the identification and listing of pollutants.
"EPA seems to have lost any sense of its legal and moral obligation to protect public health," attorney and former EPA scientist Kyla Bennett said at the time. "Under the plain language of the Clean Water Act, EPA has a mandatory duty to identify and regulate substances that are a threat to human health and the environment—not just to issue a report about it."
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Documents Reveal Plan to Fight PFAS Regulations With Industry-Backed Research
"They're trying to undermine the EPA's science, make it sound like there's uncertainty where there isn't, and make it sound like there's disagreement within the scientific community where there's not," an expert said.
Aug 27, 2024
An industry-friendly research group has set forth plans to bolster legal challenges to the Environmental Protection Agency's PFAS regulations for drinking water by conducting what experts say is biased research, The Guardian reported Tuesday.
Documents obtained by the newspaper show that the Ohio-based research group Toxicology Excellence for Risk Assessment (TERA), led by controversial toxicologist Michael Dourson, aims to publish peer-reviewed papers by the end of 2024 that can help industry legal challenges to drinking water rules that the EPA finalized in April.
Dourson, some of whose research funding comes from industry groups, sent a fundraising email in July laying out his plans. "Can we count on your group to make a tax-deductible donation to get our team to publish a set of papers by the end of 2024?" he asked.
TERA organized a conference in October at which a pro-industry plan for challenging the EPA's PFAS regulations was laid out—to attack the statistical methods used by the agency and emphasize scientific uncertainty—a conference document obtained by The Guardian shows.
Current and former EPA experts who viewed the email and the conference document sharply criticized Dourson's approach to research on PFAS, which are a set of roughly 16,000 synthetic compounds linked to cancer and a wide range of other serious health conditions.
Maria Doa, a former EPA risk assessment manager who's now a director at the Environmental Defense Fund, told The Guardian that TERA's plans were "not a valid approach to science."
"They're trying to undermine the EPA's science, make it sound like there's uncertainty where there isn't, and make it sound like there's disagreement within the scientific community where there's not," she said.
Experts compared the effort to undermine PFAS regulations with industry-funded science to similar efforts used by the tobacco industry in decades past.
"This is out of the playbook and it's a lot of the same quote-unquote scientists and same hired guns," Erik Olson, a director at the National Resources Defense Council, told The Guardian.
Penny Fenner-Crisp, a former EPA water division manager who worked with Dourson, told The Guardian that she was astounded by the straightforward bias on display in the documents.
"In my 22 years spent in three regulatory programs I came to understand the games [the industry] plays, but this one astonished me because it's unusual to be so blatant," she said.
The EPA regulations set a limit of 4 parts per trillion on two of the main types of PFAS, and up to 10 ppt for other types. Gourson, who previously worked for the EPA but has since shifted his approach and, as he puts it, learned to "honor industry's knowledge," has argued that the limits should be far higher. He and other scientists, some of whom have industry ties, published a study in December that supports a higher limit for a main type of PFAS.
The legal challenges to the EPA's water regulations come from water utilities and chemical manufacturers. At least one lawsuit was brought in part by the American Chemistry Council (ACC), a lobby group that represents companies such as 3M and DuPont, which developed PFAS in the mid-20th century for use in consumer and industrial products, and reportedly hid knowledge of its toxic impacts and widespread distribution.
In the leaked email, Dourson said his forthcoming papers will be published in the first issue of a new journal that aims to "support" the legal challenges to PFAS regulations.
The stakes of the legal cases against the EPA's water rules are extremely high, and not just because of the direct impact they will have on hundreds of millions of Americans who may already have toxic PFAS in their drinking water. A victory for industry could also discourage further regulation of chemicals in drinking water.
"This is pivotal," Betsy Southerland, a former director of science and technology at the EPA's water division, told The Guardian, speaking about the legal defense of the PFAS rules established in April. "If a court strikes this down… then the EPA will say the bar is too high to ever regulate using the Safe Drinking Water Act."
Southerland told The Wall Street Journal in May that Dourson "produces biased science that cherry picks data."
Dourson was named to lead the EPA's chemical safety division in 2017 by then-President Donald Trump but withdrew himself from consideration for the position following criticism over his ties to industry. The New York Times at the time published emails Dourson had exchanged with the ACC that showed a close relationship.
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Trump Would Let Industry Sway PFAS Rules and Endanger Public Health, Experts Warn
"Basically the entire infrastructure of how the EPA considers science and develops rules is very much under attack," a nonprofit director said.
Jul 28, 2024
A second Trump administration would cripple the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's ability to protect the public from toxic "forever chemicals," The Guardian reported Sunday, citing experts inside and outside the agency.
Per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS), a class of about 16,000 synthetic compounds that break down only very slowly, have been linked to a wide array of serious medical conditions including cancer. The EPA under the Biden administration has instituted limits on PFAS levels in drinking water and other PFAS regulations that industry groups oppose.
Experts warn that allies of Republican nominee Donald Trump aim not just to roll back Biden-era regulations but fundamentally reshape the agency.
"Basically the entire infrastructure of how [the] EPA considers science and develops rules is very much under attack," Erik Olson, legislative director at the Natural Resource Defense Council, told The Guardian.
An unnamed EPA employee told the newspaper that a second Trump administration would seek to disempower agency experts and let political appointees make key regulatory decisions.
"They want a small group of 20 people making the rules, and the rest of the agency can go to hell as far as they care," said the EPA employee, who spoke on the condition of anonymity.
Project 2025, a roadmap for Republican governance produced by the right-wing Heritage Foundation, proposes deregulation of PFAS, narrowing the definition of the class of toxic compounds, and elimination of the EPA office that assesses chemicals' toxicity.
Project 2025, to the extent that it's known about, has proven unpopular with the American public, and Trump has tried to distance himself from the plan, but has close links to its authors, at least 140 of whom worked in the former president's administration.
Project 2025's proposals on forever chemicals are aligned with the aims of the American Chemistry Council, the fourth largest lobbying group in the country. During his first term, Trump appointed ACC leaders to key positions in the EPA, and critics of the former president argue that his second administration would be even more unabashedly pro-industry.
"The Trump administration learned some lessons and would be much more surgical and effective at affixation next time," the NRDC's Olson said.
The unnamed EPA employee said a Trump victory might even mean the abolishment of the EPA's entire Office of Research and Development.
ACC members 3M and DuPont developed PFAS in the mid-20th century and used them in a wide range of products, even with knowledge of their toxicity and the way that the accumulate in the human body, according to a series of exposés in recent years, notably by the journalist Sharon Lerner in her work at ProPublica and The Intercept. A recent article of Lerner's in The New Yorker showed that 3M long concealed the dangers of PFAS.
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