Giving Compass' Take:
- At The Counter, Rachel Becker details California's ambitious plan to neutralize contaminated drinking water and its carcinogenic effects for all citizens.
- How can we ensure California's purification plan reaches all communities equitably? What will it take to negate the disproportionate impact that contaminated drinking water has already had in certain communities?
- Read about the driving factors behind contaminated drinking water in the United States.
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California took a major step today towards regulating dangerous “forever chemicals” in drinking water by proposing new health limits for two of the most pervasive contaminants.
State environmental health officials recommended goals of one part per trillion and less — a minuscule amount 70 times smaller than the federal government’s non-binding guideline for drinking water nationwide.
Called “forever chemicals” because they persist in the environment, the contaminants are ubiquitous. Traces of two — perfluorooctanoic acid (PFOA) and perfluorooctane sulfonate (PFOS) — are in the well water of 146 public water systems serving nearly 16 million Californians, a CalMatters analysis found last fall.
Long used to make non-stick and stain-proof coatings, firefighting foams and food packaging, the perfluorinated chemicals have been linked to kidney cancer and other serious health conditions in people drinking contaminated water.
Today’s announcement sets in motion a multi-year process to develop enforceable state regulations to replace California’s guidelines.
The health goals are based on concentrations that would pose “no significant health risk” to people, according to the report by the Office of Environmental Health Hazard Assessment. Attaining them would limit Californians’ risk to one case of cancer per one million people over a lifetime, based on studies of people and lab animals.
“Keeping levels low will ensure that those who are most likely to experience adverse health outcomes, like children or people … who live in areas of high exposure, will be adequately protected,” said Jamie DeWitt, a professor of pharmacology and toxicology at East Carolina University.
But cleaning up water to meet stringent standards for perfluorinated chemicals would be expensive. At military sites alone, the US Government Accountability Office estimates that investigating and cleaning up the contamination will cost far beyond the $3.2 billion that the Department of Defense spent in 2020 and expects to pay in 2021.
Read the full article about contaminated drinking water by Rachel Becker at The Counter.