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A new study has found that nearly 7 percent of Americans may be exposed to dangerous levels of “forever chemicals” through treated municipal wastewater.
Those roughly 23 million people may be consuming these toxic compounds, also known as per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS), in their drinking water, according to the study, published Monday inProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
They are doing so because of the failure of wastewater treatment facilities to effectively remove PFASs from their purified water streams, which eventually reenter municipal drinking water networks, the authors found the study
And that number is only likely to rise as treated wastewater continues to represent an increasingly important share of drinking water resources, the researchers warned.
There are thousands of types of PFAS, synthetic compounds found in a variety of household products, waterproof clothing, industrial discharge and certain types of firefighting foam.
These so-called forever chemicals persist in both the human body and the environment, and many have been linked to cancers and other serious diseases.
While the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) set drinking water regulations for six types of PFAS last year, that’s only six of the 15,000.
A team of scientists led by Bridger Ruyle, an environmental engineer at New York University, set out to track the presence of organofluorines, a family of compounds that includes PFAS and are often ingredients in prescription drugs, in the waters residuals from eight large municipal treatment systems. .
Ruyle and colleagues found that up to 75 percent of the extractable organofluorine present in the treated wastewater contained pharmaceuticals that are not currently subject to EPA regulations. Meanwhile, the six regulated PFASs accounted for less than 10 percent of extractable organofluorines, the study found.
Although these systems, which resemble those serving about 70 percent of the US population, use advanced wastewater treatment technologies, their maximum efficiency rate for removing organofluorines was lower than 25 percent.
Based on the results of a national wastewater dilution model, the authors calculated that PFAS discharges into wastewater may be permeating the drinking water supplies of up to 23 million Americans.
“These results emphasize the importance of further curbing ongoing PFAS sources and additional assessments of the fate and toxicity of fluorinated pharmaceuticals,” the authors stated.
However, the researchers also acknowledged that achieving these goals will be complex, as US regulators tend to consider the risks associated with individual toxicants, rather than the complex mixtures that exist in wastewater.
“This poses a challenge to regulating PFAS, pharmaceuticals, and other organofluorinated compounds because there are tens of thousands of these chemicals in commerce,” the authors noted.
While the researchers emphasized that experts have widely called for a class-based method to regulate PFASs, industry voices have long opposed this approach.
The authors also acknowledged that the US Food and Drug Administration “does not consider environmental persistence and secondary human and ecological exposures to pharmaceuticals.”
Finally, the scientists called for further research involving random sampling of a wider range of various wastewater treatment plants, as well as improvements in wastewater quality management and infrastructure.
“Pharmaceuticals persistent enough to re-enter the drinking water supply, such as the highly recalcitrant organofluorinated compounds in this study, could otherwise affect healthy and/or sensitive human populations,” added the researchers
