PFAS is highly complex, and we need to tackle this in a comprehensive manner that doesn’t cause confusion or waste effort. PFAS industry lobbyists are working hard to introduce weak PFAS laws or undermine and block strong PFAS laws in states across the country. Coordinated actions (research, testing, treatment, and policymaking) that use a class-based definition of PFAS are both scientifically accurate and a critical defense against the PFAS industry push to look at each PFAS separately, and only permit treatment or regulation when a significant body of evidence of harm for that one specific PFAS exists. We must address PFAS as a class to (1) prevent decades of additional harm to our communities as PFAS manufacturers create new PFAS to escape the chemical-by-chemical regulation and (2) avoid wasting valuable research and testing energy in a Red Queen style race to nowhere instead of focusing on the entire class and making significant progress.
Key actions we can work together on:
- Stop the land application of PFAS-contaminated sludge (to stop continued contamination of our food supply and soil/water)
- Research / implement remediation on already-contaminated farmland (soil and water)
- Research / implement farming interventions to reduce PFAS transfer to milk, meat, and crop farm products
- Pass class-based PFAS phase-outs in all consumer and industrial products (with limited temporary exemptions for currently unavoidable uses of PFAS where the use of PFAS in a product is essential to the function of the product, unable to be currently replaced, and where the product itself is critical to the functioning of the economy, society, or human health)
- Research and market implementation of safer chemistry PFAS alternatives to replace currently unavoidable PFAS uses
- Drinking water standards and treatment systems that address PFAS as a class including precursors
- Wastewater effluent / landfill leachate treatment standards and systems that address PFAS as a class including precursors
- PFAS destruction technologies / approaches that actually eliminate PFAS (not false solutions like incineration that convert the currently-regulated PFAS into unregulated PFAS)
- Collection, storage, disposal, and remediation of PFAS AFFF firefighting foam
- Food and drink PFAS testing and standards
- Phase out of PFAS from all food packaging / food contact materials including processing equipment
- Low-cost, effective, rapid testing for PFAS in soil, water, effluent/leachate, and food/milk (class-based test results)
- Research and implementation of broadly available/affordable medical testing / monitoring for highly exposed or sensitive groups (pregnant people, infants, farmers, firefighters) and medical interventions to reduce PFAS body burden
