‘Forever Chemicals’ In Washington's Water: New Research Offers Hope

WASHINGTON — Scientists think they’ve come up with a way to break down “forever chemicals” — a class of chemicals found in Washington and water systems nationwide that are associated with low birth weight, thyroid disease, certain types of cancers and other serious health issues.

In June, the Environmental Protection Agency said PFAS are far more dangerous than previously thought, and local utilities should install filters to remove them or at least tell customers how dangerous they are.

U.S. manufacturers have phased out PFAS and PFOS, once an attractive choice for packaging and other products because they don’t react with other molecules and repel stains, grease and water. A few uses remain, and they’re ubiquitous in the environment, having accumulated since the 1940s.

In Western Washington, PFAS have been detected in the drinking water in Issaquah and DuPont, as well as several military sites, including Joint Base Lewis-McChord, Naval Base Kitsap, and the Montesano Armory. Many locations remain untested.

Northwestern University researchers said in a study published this month in Science that the forever chemicals were destroyed when boiled in a solution of water, sodium hydroxide (lye) and dimethyl sulfoxide (a chemical solvent approved by the Food and Drug Administration to treat chronic bladder inflammation).

Chemicals started breaking down into harmless byproducts within hours. Within days, they were gone completely. The method isn’t perfect. Not all PFAS were destroyed but the research could lead to cheap approaches to remove the forever chemicals that put millions of Americans at risk for cancer and other diseases, Science reported.

• Related: ‘Forever Chemicals’ More Dangerous Than Previously Thought, EPA Says

Tasha Stoiber, an environmental chemist at the Environmental Working Group, a U.S.-based nonprofit that closely tracks the issue, told Science the research is “encouraging and promising.”

Stoiber said current approaches are both expensive and ineffective. Filtering systems can help, but the residue can still end up in the landfill and leach into groundwater, and incineration at super-high temperatures above 1,832 degrees Fahrenheit (1,000 degrees Celsius) consumes vast amounts of energy and cost millions of dollars, she said.

"The current way that people will try to dispose of firefighting foams that contain PFAS is to incinerate them, but there has been evidence that these incinerators are actually just blowing the PFAS around the community in which the incinerator is located,” Brittany Trang, an environmental chemist at Evanston, Illinois–based Northwestern University and one of the lead authors of the study, said in a conference call with reporters, NBC News reported.

“So there’s a need for a method to get rid of PFAS in a way that does not continue to pollute,” she said.

“This is the first time I’ve seen a degradation mechanism where I thought, ‘this could actually make a difference,’” Shira Joudan, an environmental chemist at York University in Toronto, Canada, who wasn’t involved in the study, told Nature News.

At least 3,000 PFAS-contaminated sites have been identified nationwide, and studies show them to be toxic even in minute quantities, according to Science. The National Institutes of Health estimates PFAS can be found in the bloodstreams of 97 percent of Americans.

“We’ve really polluted the whole world with this stuff,” Northwestern chemist William Dichtel, the co-author of the study, told The New York Times.

The research isn’t a “silver bullet” and will take some time to scale for widespread use, according to Chris Sales, an environmental engineer at Philadelphia’s Drexel University who wasn’t involved in the study, NBC reported.

“The big question is whether or not this process could be scaled up,” Sales said.

Right now, the best thing people in the communities identified at risk for forever chemicals by the Environmental Working Group can do is install one of several commercially available filters, but they need to make sure the filter removes PFAS.

Melanie Benesh, legislative attorney for the EWG, told The Washington Post the EPA’s advisory earlier this summer “should set off alarm bells for consumers and regulators.”

“These proposed advisory levels demonstrate that we must move much faster to dramatically reduce exposures to these toxic chemicals,” Benesh said.

Even at levels so low they can’t be detected in drinking water, these compounds pose a health risk, the EPA said in the revised advisory. The agency lowered the allowable limits of these two compounds, immediately drawing fire from the chemical industry

The American Chemical Council, which represents PFAS producers such as 3M and Dupont, said Wednesday the EPA’s new standards “will have sweeping implications” on public policy, and “cannot be achieved with existing treatment technology and, in fact, are below levels that can be reliably detected using existing EPA methods.”

Further, the industry group questioned the science behind the revised drinking water health advisory, saying it should have been delayed until the agency’s own Science Advisory Board could review dramatically reduced toxicity levels that are “3,000 to 17,000 times lower” than those set in 2016.

“Getting the science right is of critical importance,” the American Chemical Council said in a statement.

Health advocates say the problem can’t be overstated. Forever chemicals have already prompted officials in Wisconsin, Minnesota and Michigan to issue advisories against eating certain fish caught in Lake Superior.