WASHINGTON (Legal Newsline) - The federal government has finally completed its assessment of chemicals known as PFAS, pushing forward regulations that one group calls "rushed" and "unscientific."
More than a year after announcing limits on chemicals in the PFAS group, the Environmental Protection Agency on April 8 signed its final rule establishing drinking water standards for six PFAS.
Those maximum contaminant levels declare water unsafe if four parts per trillion of PFAS are found in it. Public water systems will conduct initial monitoring within three years and make necessary capital improvements to comply.
Many of those water systems are using private lawyers to sue companies like 3M and DuPont, which have agreed to settlements worth billions of dollars combined.
Plenty of critics have spoken out against a rush to regulate, arguing the science on the subject is nowhere near complete. One of them is the American Chemistry Council.
“Since this proposal was first announced, new real-world data has become available through national monitoring that confirms the rationale for this proposal is based on inaccurate and out-of-date information," the ACC said in a statement.
"Failure to incorporate this data into the final rule means that the number of small water systems that will be impacted by the new standard is three times higher than EPA estimated, forcing them to divert critical resources away from other higher-priority drinking water needs."
Saying it supported a science-based standard, the ACC added "this rushed, unscientific approach is unacceptable when it comes to an issue as important as access to safe drinking water."
PFAS are known as "forever chemicals" because the human body can't rid itself of them. Some research, funded by a DuPont settlement, suggests links to six diseases, including kidney and testicular cancers.
Litigation has sprung up in recent years, including private lawyers aligning themselves with government officials to represent them on contingency fees. Many of the cases are in a multidistrict litigation proceeding in South Carolina federal court, while consumer class actions are also being filed around the country.
DuPont is paying $1.185 to settle claims in the South Carolina MDL, while 3M is set to pay at least $10.5 billion. Lawyers will make around $1 billion in fees from those two settlements.
3M still faces lawsuits by individuals and others over PFAS, which it manufactured for years and is found in everything from nonstick pans to cosmetics.
Other defendants range from firefighting products manufacturer Kidde-Kenwal, which filed for bankruptcy over the cost of PFAS lawsuits; National Foam; Tyco Fire Products; BASF; Carrier Global; W.L. Gore Associates; and state and federal governments.
The EPA's own Science Advisory Board has been critical about the research used to establish its new rules. That group wrote "the limitations of the current database on associations of human PFAS exposures... indicate that more evidence is required to select immunomodulation as a critical endpoint for human PFAS risk assessment."
The ACC added: "The American Water Works Association has also found that this will cost almost $4 billion annually – several times more than what EPA estimated. These new regulations also fail to accurately assess the benefits to local communities and don’t take into account other higher-priority water and infrastructure issues for local water systems."