PFAS are like the toxic ex you just can’t seem to get rid of.
PFAS, otherwise known as per- or polyfluoroalkyl substances, are often used in water, oil or heat resistant products. They are found in products ranging from rain jackets to non-stick pans to even firefighting foams. While effective in their designated use, PFAS also travel swiftly through the environment and persist for decades, so long that they are often called “forever chemicals.” We will never be able to prevent future PFAS contamination unless we ban them on a federal level.
And NC State is no stranger to chemical contamination as Poe Hall and Dabney Hall have proven in recent years. NC State’s relationship with chemical contaminants goes further than the construction material of its buildings. Hunt Library’s namesake, former North Carolina Governor James Hunt, was the arbiter of a PCB landfill dispute in Warren County, North Carolina during the 1980s.
Warren County became the designated site for a landfill to house PCB-laced oil dumped along North Carolina roadsides by Ward Transformer in 1978. To this day, PCB contamination continues to affect recreational activities at Lake Crabtree County Park, less than 10 miles away from NC State.
I remember visiting Lake Crabtree County Park as a kid and seeing signs that warned visitors about consumption of fish caught from the lake and prevented swimming due to PCB contamination as a direct result of Ward Transformer’s chemical spills. Chemical contamination impacts more than you may think — and closer to home than you might realize.
Although the fish in Lake Crabtree may not be currently exposed to PFAS contamination, the effects are felt in other bodies of water in North Carolina, and levels of chemical contamination in wildlife continue to rise due to bioaccumulation.
Research is continuing to find stronger links between PFAS and negative impacts on human health. Exposure to PFAS may lead to higher cholesterol, thyroid disease, kidney cancer, testicular cancer and even decreased vaccine response in children.
The correlation between PFAS and health issues throughout several body systems becomes even more alarming when considering PFAS are found in 97% of Americans. This number may have changed since originally reported in 2015, but it is difficult to determine because it is hard to track all the different types of PFAS. We may not have the exact numbers, but given these findings and the widespread contamination of PFAS in our environment, there is still strong cause for concern.
PFAS have been used commercially and industrially since the 1940s, and PCBs were commercially produced in 1929, not much earlier. But while PCBs were banned in 1979 and phased out entirely in the 1980s, there is still a lack of federal regulations regarding the production and use of PFAS. Instead, regulations have been left up to the states to determine.
Over two dozen states have banned PFAS in certain products or begun to phase out the use of PFAS, and several companies are moving away from PFAS. North Carolina has developed an action strategy to address PFAS but has no regulations on its production or contamination level in drinking water.
This is a starting point, but it’s not nearly enough. A state might ban production of PFAS, but that doesn’t ban PFAS from crossing state lines through groundwater or runoff from a neighboring state that doesn’t have the same regulations.
The EPA has only released suggestions on levels of PFAS and has not been able to enforce any of them. In 2023, the agency proposed an enforceable limit of 4 ppt in drinking water for the two most common types of PFAS: PFOA and PFOS.
This would be a huge step in regulating the PFAS we consume, but it doesn’t address PFAS found elsewhere. Another one of the EPA’s proposals will categorize nine types of PFAS as hazardous constituents, which would give the EPA more power to regulate those specific nine PFAS on a federal level.
There needs to be a complete federal ban on all PFAS in order to truly phase out PFAS for good. While PFAS are not all equally bad, it is simply not enough to ban only a handful of PFAS when future PFAS may be just as bad, or worse.
It will then take several more years to implement suggestions and state restrictions before maybe achieving a federal ban for the new group of PFAS, and the process will repeat itself. This is a story we have seen before with PCBs and will be doomed to repeat if we don’t learn from our past mistakes.
In order to learn from our past, we have to take public concern and early warning from scientists on the effects of chemical contamination seriously because that is often the first sign that something is wrong. We already have plenty of evidence about the harm of PFAS and we can’t afford to wait to act any longer to further confirm what scientists have been saying. We have power as voters and consumers to pressure the government and companies into leaving PFAS in the past for good and create a more sustainable planet for the future generations.
To follow what the EPA is doing to address PFAS, updates can be found on the agency’s website.
