The scary reality of 'forever chemicals'
The scary reality of 'forever chemicals'
The Biden administration is moving to regulate PFAS, an important start.
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-Daniel
Around this time last year, I became immersed in the world of PFAS policy. Nevada regulators were taking samples across the state to better understand the distribution of PFAS in the environment. PFAS, an artificial class of “forever chemicals” that do not break down once released, have been linked to health issues, including cancer.
Reno city and county officials had just held a press conference announcing that PFAS had been detected in Swan Lake, near residencies and the site of extensive flooding in 2017. It’s a closed basin, meaning water gets trapped in place. At the press conference, there were more questions than answers. More investigation was necessary, they said.
At the same time, I was monitoring a bipartisan bill moving through the statehouse. It aimed to ban the sale of certain consumer products known to contain these chemicals and require labeling when PFAS was used for cookware. Before then, I knew what I’d read: That PFAS was everywhere in our environment. The artificial compounds — per and polyflouroalkyl — were something of a miracle for manufacturers, repelling water and grease. But I had no sense of how ubiquitous they were until I started listening to testimony on the bill: PFAS in food wrappers, carpets, rugs, toys and even cosmetics.
I’d recently switched from glasses to soft contact lenses, and remember reading soon after that PFAS (of course) was used to make them. I was a little unnerved, though I shouldn’t have been surprised. But I did start seeing things more clearly. Apparently others shared the concern: The bill passed with bipartisan support (only four no votes in both chambers). Gov. Joe Lombardo still vetoed it, saying in a message that “it is more prudent to await federal guidance on this matter before placing a substantially increased regulatory burden on manufacturers and retailers across the state.”
The whole process was illuminating, and I’ve been thinking about it this week as the Biden administration moved forward this month with a) making polluters financially responsible for the cleanup of these chemicals and b) a drinking water rule requiring they be removed from the tap. From Alan Halaly in the Las Vegas Review-Journal (who, along with the Reno Gazette Journal, reports more on the situation in Nevada):
The finalized EPA regulations on PFAS in drinking water are the first of their kind to be implemented across the nation. It’s the final step of a federal effort to begin addressing these so-called “forever chemicals,” which have alarmed chemists and environmental justice advocates for years.
“Drinking water contaminated with PFAS has plagued communities across this country for too long,” agency administrator Michael Regan said in a statement, adding that the regulations will save lives and protect the long-term health of young people.
Action is being taken now, but a fix is unlikely to come overnight. And the magnitude of the problem is hard to grapple with. To really understand why, I recommend this excellent Atlantic piece by Zoë Schlanger who looks at the PFAS crisis unfolding in Maine. It’s about a couple who woke up to learn of the contamination that had lurked around them for three decades, as suspected PFAS-tainted sewage sludge was used as fertilizer for nearby corn fields. “Maine is one step ahead in facing PFAS head-on—but also one step ahead in understanding just how hard that is,” Schlanger writes.
The story quotes a UNR professor who is working on a solution, but it illuminates how difficult it is, and the staggering cost, resources and energy it could take:
David Hanigan, an environmental engineer at the University of Nevada at Reno, is studying whether burning PFAS at ultrahigh temperatures can break the carbon-fluorine bond completely. He once thought that PFAS researchers were out of their minds to be testing such wildly expensive solutions, he told me…
Hanigan does think this engineering problem of PFAS will be solved, eventually. “We can do it,” he said. But he wonders what else we might have been able to do with that amount of human effort. And until chemists and engineers can undo PFAS, more places will start to see that they’re caught in a cycle in which these compounds move from water to soil to bodies to water.
Great Basin tribes push for a national monument
Last week, High Country News and The Nevada Independent published a piece I wrote about Western Shoshone and Goshute (Newe) tribes urging the Biden administration to designate Bahsahwahbee National Monument outside of Great Basin National Park:
The Western Shoshone and Goshute (Newe) people have long cherished Bahsahwahbee for the special healing properties of its water. Historically, it was a place for dances and religious ceremonies; people would camp out at Bahsahwahbee for weeks at a time. It was, for hundreds and hundreds of years, “like a little oasis — with all the water and animals you need,” said Alvin Marques, chairman of the Ely Shoshone Tribe.
It was also the site of three massacres: In 1859, 1863 and 1897, the U.S. military and well-armed vigilantes killed an estimated 1,000 Newe people at religious gatherings. The 1859 massacre alone killed between 500 to 700 people.
For the past three years, the Duckwater Shoshone Tribe, the Ely Shoshone Tribe and the Confederated Tribes of the Goshute Reservation have urged the Biden administration to create a national monument at Bahsahwahbee, just outside of Great Basin National Park. The tribes are campaigning for co-management of it, hoping to work with the National Park Service to tell the history of the sacred site and the massacres.
Some other threads I’m following:
After a hearing last week, California water regulators took an unprecedented step in managing groundwater overuse. With land sinking due to groundwater pumping and domestic wells at risk of running dry, regulators voted to put the Tulare Lake basin on “probationary” status under the Sustainable Groundwater Management Act, or SGMA. The Los Angeles Times’ Ian James reported: “Now that the area in the southern San Joaquin Valley has been placed on probation, large agricultural landowners will be required to start reporting to the state how much water they pump from wells and paying fees based on how much they use.”
How bulldozing a closed Motel 6 could help improve Lake Tahoe’s water clarity. The Nevada Independent’s Amy Alonzo looks at a California Tahoe Conservancy project to restore wetlands to reconnect habitat around the Upper Truckee River.
U.S. Senator Elizabeth Warren and Rep. Ro Khanna re-introduced legislation to prohibit trading water as a commodity and financial instrument (taking aim at California’s water-futures trading), Maanvi Singh of The Guardian writes.
“The quest to control nature is elusive. And maybe that’s okay,” Erica Gies writes in Hakai Magazine. Gies looks at the difficulty of rebuilding marshland without undermining the ecosystems and habitat restorationists want to protect.
“A bill to overturn a state ban on new subdivisions in parts of the Phoenix area and Pinal County that rely on groundwater is moving through the Legislature,” reporter Tony Davis writes for the Arizona Daily Star.