Congressional lawmakers held Tuesday on PFAS, a pervasive group of man-made chemicals known to cause illnesses like kidney cancer and liver disease and damage immune systems in children.
PFAS, or per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, don鈥檛 easily react to things like water and fire, which is why they鈥檝e grown in use since they were first manufactured in the 1940s. They鈥檙e great for non-stick pans, and . But their durability also means they hang around in our water, our food and our bodies.
Research trace amounts are already inside most people in the U.S., if not all of them. A recent analysis of an EPA database that Colorado has about 21,000 industrial sites that "may be handling" PFAS, more than any other state.
Peter Jaff茅 is an environmental engineering professor at Princeton University. He told lawmakers one challenge is simply understanding how different PFAS chemicals operate.
鈥淭here are over 4,700 PFAS compounds that have been synthesized, and the number is growing,鈥� he said. 鈥淭he large number of PFAS and the wide range of properties provide a unique challenge for conducting research on PFAS and regulating them.鈥�
Panelists said we don鈥檛 even know how to monitor all PFAS chemicals yet, not to mention what they all do.
鈥淲e are systematically underestimating these compounds,鈥� said Elsie Sunderland, an environmental chemistry professor at Harvard. 鈥淚ndustry is continuously introducing new ones into our product stream. Standard methods endorsed by EPA and NISS currently do not detect most of the compounds.鈥�
All agree we need solutions soon. Rep. Melanie Stansbury of New Mexico noted that PFAS chemicals from firefighting foam have contaminated groundwater and affected dairy farmers.
鈥� of milk have been dumped and people鈥檚 livelihoods have been destroyed by this contamination,鈥� she said.
Some states already have drinking water standards for PFAS chemicals (like Michigan and New Jersey), but they only measure certain types.
Researchers on the panel called for better identification of PFAS sources, better research on how the chemicals are getting into our bodies (including through foods and packaging), and how to best clean it up.
Amy Dindal of the Battelle Memorial Institute, a research and development organization, told lawmakers that the Ohio-based nonprofit has developed a technology that they say destroys PFAS in water (aptly called 鈥淧FAS Annihilator鈥�) and is now working with federal agencies to test it.
鈥淲e are ready to scale and deploy PFAS Annihilator,鈥� said Dindal, Battelle's director of environmental research and development, who asked lawmakers to approve more pilot-scale field demonstrations.
Dindal says affordable technology will be important given the wide-spread nature of this problem. They are still working on methods to clean solids like dirt or replace PFAS in products like firefighting foam.
The EPA released to taking action on PFAS in October, though lawmakers in the joint committee hearing Tuesday asked what else they can do to create efficiencies in identifying and dealing with this dangerous class of chemicals.
The answer was straight-forward: fund more PFAS research in all sectors, provide more testing grounds for that research and, when possible, hold polluters accountable.
There have been efforts to address PFAS contamination in the Mountain West, including sampling and take-back programs. But the efforts are limited as science, itself, tries to catch up.
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