A new Trump administration plan to ditch Pfas drinking water regulations and instead attempt to destroy “forever chemicals” on a wide scale tears a page from the fossil fuel industry’s carbon capture playbook, and will benefit the industry while harming public health.
The US Environmental Protection Agency last week announced it is moving to kill strong Biden-era drinking water limits around four Pfas compounds, and delaying implementation for two more. It represented a blow to public health – advocates say strong limits and a dramatic cut in the production of the dangerous chemicals are imperative.
Still, the press conference was billed as a “Pfas destruction event”, and administration leaders largely spent their time touting an “explosion in destruction technology”, and EPA investment in industry efforts to protect public health by eliminating the chemicals.
They were, in effect, suggesting they had a solution to a crisis that did not require the drinking water regulations. The problem with the Trump plan: technology that fully destroys Pfas does not exist, and while progress is being made in its development, it is unclear when – if ever – it may be deployed on an industrial scale.
The idea that the administration is going to destroy its way out of the Pfas problem is “nonsensical”, said Kyla Bennett, a former EPA scientist. It parallels fossil fuel industry attempts to use unreliable carbon capture technology as a solution – both offer the appearance of meaningful action while allowing industry to continue to profit and pollute at the expense of public health.
“No one has said they can destroy Pfas on a large scale,” said Bennett, who is now with the Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (Peer) non-profit. “From what we know about Pfas, this is not going to work, and to say ‘We’re going to destroy it so we don’t need to regulate it’ is bullshit.”
Pfas are a class of at least 16,000 compounds most frequently used to make products water-, stain- and grease-resistant. They have been linked to cancer, birth defects, decreased immunity, high cholesterol, kidney disease and a range of other serious health problems. They are dubbed “forever chemicals” because they can persist for thousands of years in the environment, and are designed to be indestructible.
Pfas are thoroughly contaminating the planet – they have been found in virtually every recent rainwater sample, even in remote areas. They are in an estimated 200 million Americans’ drinking water, polar bears’ blood and every soil sample taken across New Hampshire in 2023. They are increasingly detected in food. The planet is filling up with these chemicals like a bathtub, public health advocates warn, and the solution is to “turn off the tap”.
Instead, the Trump administration is angling to keep the tap on. Society needs to figure out how to destroy Pfas, just as it needs to figure out how to capture carbon, if it is to survive. However, industry in both cases is wielding these still unreliable technologies as a solution in lieu of reducing pollution and production, advocates say.
At last week’s event, Lee Zeldin, the EPA administrator, and Robert F Kennedy Jr, the health secretary, trotted out industry leaders to tout their advances in destruction technology. Kennedy claimed their destruction plan was built on “honest science”.
Yet advocates say there is a ruse. Current technologies used to destroy Pfas, from incineration to thermal oxidization, often fail to fully destroy a Pfas compound, instead essentially breaking it into smaller bits, or byproducts. But the smaller Pfas “bits” may be just as dangerous as their parent chemical. Most regulators’ tests cannot detect many of these byproducts, but that does not mean they do not exist or harm people.
A 2023 Guardian sample of air around a Chemours Pfas plant illustrated this issue. The company and regulators claimed a thermal oxidizer was destroying “99.999%-plus” of Pfas. But when the Guardian, working with independent Pfas experts, measured the air with a method that looks for evidence of all Pfas, it found evidence of chemicals that regulators missed. The Pfas were not fully destroyed, our testing suggested.
The same problem also plays out in the more than 200 garbage, hazardous waste and sewage sludge incinerators spitting Pfas into the nation’s air at alarming levels, despite claims to the contrary. If the Trump administration gets its way, these facilities will proliferate.
Laura Orlando, a waste management systems engineer with Boston University, said one can explain the Trump administration’s moves by “following the money”. Pfas contaminate sewage sludge, the byproduct of water treatment, at high levels. Sludge is either put in hazardous waste landfills, or used as fertilizer on cropland, which poisons food. Instead of reducing chemicals or waste, industry is proposing unproven new methods of destroying sludge and Pfas.
The processes are extremely expensive. One study found Pfas can be bought for $50-$1,000 per pound, but it costs as much as $18m a pound to remove from water – and that does not include destruction. Taxpayers shoulder most of the cost, and the powerful waste management industry gets paid.
Ultimately Pfas destruction has all the same problems as carbon capture – it is inefficient, expensive, unreliable, prone to technical failures and clearly not an alternative to regulations.
“We need to continue to research Pfas ‘destruction’ by funding entities without a profit motive, who work in a transparent environment, with the public’s health front and center,” Orlando said. “Right now the fox is guarding the hen house, and it’s not looking good for the hens.”
