NEW YORK - State regulators say they need the federal government to direct more financial support to water systems struggling with PFAS contamination. The total costs to implement destruction and control technologies nationwide will be in the billions, speakers at the annual Summit on PFAS Regulation, Compliance, and Litigation in New York City said on Thursday.
Katrina Kessler, a commissioner with the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency, said the federal government may need to consider a fee system or other revenue-generating authority for upstream producers of PFAS chemicals in order to ensure the cost doesn't fall entirely on taxpayers.
While she is "sympathetic" to passive receivers of contaminated material, like wastewater treatment plants and landfills, Kessler said she's worried about shrinking the pool of facilities that can be held responsible for shouldering the cost.
"Frankly, this administration likes to talk about polluter pays, but I'm not seeing a lot of leadership on the polluter pays side," Kessler said. "How are states and local governments going to meet the costs without bankrupting small towns across the country without a true polluter pays model?"
The U.S. EPA is balancing financial support for wastewater treatment plants with upstream reduction measures, Deputy Administrator David Fotouhi told Waste Dive Thursday. The agency also plans to release updated Effluent Limitation Guidelines for industrial facilities that could limit PFAS releases, including a landfill standard scheduled to come out next year.
Fotouhi also said enforcement to compel responsible parties to pay for cleanup through the Superfund program would continue, and he expressed optimism that costs for PFAS treatment technology would come down as research and adoption ramps up.
"It's really about looking at at all parts of the problem," Fotouhi said. “Part of that is through making funding opportunities available to states and local governments and [publicly owned treatment works]. But part of it is, as we identify technologies that we know are effective at removing PFAS in an efficient way, the goal will be to try to bring the cost of that technology down as it's adopted more broadly.”
The agency has also highlighted $1 billion in new funding available through existing drinking water grant programs, and is working to connect more states and local governments with financial resources, Fotouhi said. He noted that the agency has a further $14 billion available through revolving funds that states can draw from to address emerging contaminants like PFAS but have not accessed yet.
Meanwhile, the EPA has continued to assure passive receivers that the agency is not planning enforcement actions targeted to their facilities. The issue has been a longstanding preoccupation of the waste industry, which has sued the EPA due to concerns about liability. But speaking at the event Thursday, Fotouhi reiterated the agency's position that Congress should act to enshrine passive receiver protections into law.
"We will do what we can based on our existing statutory authority," Fotouhi said. "We will need new statutory language from Congress to address all of the concerns that we have heard."
The issue of funding for PFAS cleanup has been contentious around the country, but particularly in Minnesota. The state reached an $850 million settlement with 3M in 2018 in a case tied to the company's manufacture of a wide range of products that contained the materials. PFAS chemicals had left the facility through its effluent and contaminated drinking water systems in more than a dozen surrounding communities.
But Kessler said the settlement money is likely to run out soon, even though it was meant to cover both the initial capital cost to build PFAS treatment systems and operations and maintenance contracts for such facilities. The state again sued 3M this month, seeking damages from additional PFAS contamination stemming from the company's manufacture of firefighting foam at the site.
3M told MPR News it has spent $300 million to build its own wastewater treatment system, and says it is not legally liable for additional costs because it made the foam at the direction of the federal government.
"We're nearing the end of that money, and we're telling you the needs are not met," Kessler told the audience during Thursday’s event.
Other states have also taken companies to court to try to recover costs associated with PFAS cleanup. North Carolina won a consent decree in 2019 with Chemours tied to the company's production of GenX chemicals, a class of PFAS. The consent order required the company to implement a range of pollution control measures, including a mile-long, 70-foot deep barrier around the facility to prevent the leaching of contaminated water into drinking water supplies.
Those measures have brought down contamination, Sushma Masemore, assistant secretary of the environment at the North Carolina Department of Environmental Quality, said at the event.
The state's strategy has included efforts to work alongside companies to reduce PFAS contamination of drinking water, Masemore said.
GFL Environmental reached a settlement with an environmental justice group in the state to essentially end discharge of PFAS-laden leachate to surface waters from its Sampson County Landfill, among other provisions. The state is working with the landfill, North Carolina's largest, to ramp up its granular activated carbon treatment system now. Masemore noted early signs point to success.
"We have been proactively working with that industry. They have been really good partners," she said.
States face other challenges remediating drinking water from private wells. In instances where wells test with concerning levels of PFAS, states often are unsure who the responsible party is to pay for cleanup. Remediation costs thus fall on public entities whose budgets are already stretched thin.
In addition to taking a top-down approach to the state's largest polluters, North Carolina is also doing community-based work to identify hotspots of contamination. The state has so far identified about 230 community water systems, some of them serving schools and daycares, that are above the maximum contaminant level for PFAS, Masemore said.
During the Biden administration, the state secured $38 million through the EPA's Emerging Contaminants for Small or Disadvantaged Communities grant program to assist those systems that needed to install treatment technology. The state has held onto that funding as it identifies areas of greatest need, but Masemore anticipates greater costs are on the horizon.
