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Proposed Plastics Law Could Slash Wasteful Packaging

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Friday, May 17, 2024

CLIMATEWIRE | ALBANY, New York — Democratic lawmakers are still fine-tuning a sweeping measure aimed at reducing the amount of plastic and packaging trash headed to the state’s crammed landfills.The rebranded extended producer responsibility bill seeks to reduce the amount of packaging being used, increase recyclability and charge producers of consumer goods for the costs of disposing of packaging that mostly ends up in landfills.But tweaks are still expected to the current version, and some lawmakers have concerns about the costs for consumers with the legislative session set to end June 6.On supporting science journalismIf you're enjoying this article, consider supporting our award-winning journalism by subscribing. By purchasing a subscription you are helping to ensure the future of impactful stories about the discoveries and ideas shaping our world today.Senate Majority Leader Andrea Stewart-Cousins said there are still conversations ongoing.“We want to make sure that we have input so at least whatever we do legislatively not only reflects, to the extent possible, the real concerns that people bring to us and we weigh it against the real results that we’re trying to achieve,” the Democrat from Yonkers said Tuesday.“Obviously, we all are getting all kinds of things that should not be in landfills, so we are trying to get to a point where we’ve got a piece of legislation that will pass.”Broadly, the goal is to mandate producers of packaged consumer goods — think Amazon, Unilever, Procter & Gamble — to fund the recycling or disposal of what they sell. There’s also mandates to stop using potentially harmful substances.Money raised would be used to reimburse local governments for the costs of waste disposal and recycling programs.It’s a big shift in the way recycling is funded in New York.Most costs are currently borne by local governments. The state’s climate plan, approved in late 2022 to map out the path for New York to achieve dramatic emissions reductions, backs sweeping new “extended producer responsibility” legislation to begin reducing emissions from waste in landfills.Industry opponents of the bill warn the measure would increase costs and limit the convenient choices that grocery shoppers have come to expect. They say there aren’t readily available alternatives to some of the chemicals that would be banned.Most supporters acknowledge there would be changes, but argue that habits are already shifting and that healthier, more refillable and less disposable choices would become more widely available because of the new requirements.They’re also emphasizing that customers ultimately pay for sending the trash to the landfill anyway, and that reducing packaging material can lower costs.“You don’t have to wrap everything in plastic,” said Assemblymember Michaelle Solages, a Democrat from Nassau County who is the chair of the influential Black, Puerto Rican, Hispanic, and Asian Legislative Caucus. “I think it is a sin to even wrap fruits and vegetables in plastic.”Solages said there’s still work to do on the details, although there’s support for the spirit of the proposal. She said there are concerns about costs, and there are currently discussions about how to ensure those costs aren’t only on consumers.“We’re just throwing all this waste in our garbage,” Solages said in an interview. “At the end of the day, it’ll cost us more to clean up all the impacts to the Earth.”Under the legislation, companies that are covered would have to reduce packaging by 10 percent within three years, increasing to 50 percent in 12 years. Recycling rates would also have to increase to 75 percent of packing material, including plastic, to be reused or recycled in 2050.Assemblymember Deborah Glick, a Democrat from Manhattan, said there are also health risks from current packaging. Glick sponsors the bill, and as chair of the Environmental Conservation Committee, she has made it her top priority as the end of the legislative session nears.“We have a variety of problems related to the chemicals that are in the plastic that is wrapped around our food,” she said. “We know we have a growing health problem.”Producers could give consumers more options than are currently available, said Vanessa Fajans-Turner, executive director of Environmental Advocates NY.“This is product agnostic. This is not a referendum on how we shop or what we shop for,” she said. “There are alternatives for packaging.”There’s also significant labor opposition to the bill, and supporters recognize the challenge.The New York State Conference of Teamsters and United Steelworkers District 4 oppose the bill, as does the New York State AFL-CIO.The steelworkers oppose the inclusion of paper products, given the high recycling rate already, while the teamsters who represent some sanitation workers have concerns about the potential for new organizations to be responsible for collecting waste.“This legislation is a direct assault on organized labor,” the Teamsters opposition memo states. “This legislation allows municipal waste removal forces, both public employee and currently contracted private companies, to be replaced by a state supervised private collection force without any regard to workers’ rights.”Meera Joshi, New York City deputy mayor for operations, said there have been discussions with organized labor, and the city agrees there might be some protections that could be added.The city estimates it would get $150 million if the bill were enacted, and it would have to pay less to ship waste to landfills, meaning additional savings.“Our sanitation system covers all the cost of packaging that’s not recycled,” Joshi said in an interview. “Many states have adopted this. … We’re not reinventing the wheel here.”Assembly Democrats are sensitive to the prospect of higher costs being passed on to consumers. The Assembly conferenced on the bill earlier this week.Assemblymember Carrie Woerner, a Democrat from Saratoga County, said that any policies that would increase costs in an inflationary environment are a concern. She said she has a “conceptual appreciation” for the goals of the bill.But she said she has questions about the time lines, given how many food suppliers are national brands and would face difficulty specifically making changes in New York. Policymakers should consider aligning implementation with California’s measure, which was signed in 2022, she said.“I think the industry is trying hard to reduce the plastics they use and improve recyclability,” Woerner said. Food suppliers “have to be on a time line that is consistent from state to state. California got there first.”Glick said the gradual implementation of the requirements to reduce plastics and other packaging helps address cost concerns.“We're just giving them an incentive to be innovative,” she said. “The less packaging they use, the less they pay into a fund. So they reduce their costs and the less packaging they use, the less money they spend on that material. So it's just an excuse to raise prices.”The opposition from companies, including makers of plastics represented by the American Chemistry Council, has been consistent since environmental groups began pushing for an extended producer responsibility program several years ago.The chemical industry opposes restrictions on chemical recycling counting as recycling, arguing it unfairly bars the technology.Sen. Peter Harckham, the chair of the Environmental Conservation Committee, has pointed out the bill includes a provision requiring a report every three years that could spur changes to the definition by lawmakers.Business groups, chemical makers and product manufacturers of everything from toys and home appliances to footwear have also objected to a list of chemicals that would bar material from being recycled. There would also be a ban on additional toxic substances in packaging including various chemicals used to make plastics, flame retardants and PFAS.“This overly broad prohibition disregards sound science and could potentially have major unintended socioeconomic, environmental, and public health consequences by arbitrarily eliminating packaging best suited for, among other uses, food preservation, medical supply and device protection and hazardous materials containers,” the groups wrote in a memo opposing the bill.Environmental advocates in the past were split on different versions of the measure and strategies to get it passed. So that has made it even more difficult to get a bill passed.Gov. Kathy Hochul proposed her own version of the extended producer responsibility for packaging plan in her 2022 and 2023 budget proposals, but her administration has concerns about the current version.That includes the large number of staff they expect would be needed to implement it.This year, however, a key organization hired a high-powered and well-connected lobbyist with close ties to Assembly Speaker Carl Heastie to work on the bill.Beyond Plastics retained the firm of Patrick Jenkins, Heastie’s former college roommate, on May 1, according to public records. The group is based at Bennington College in Vermont and led by former EPA regional administrator Judith Enck.“We don’t have the firepower that Albany lobbyists have, but we could only afford him for a month,” Enck said.So far, it appears to have helped: Shortly afterward, the measure moved through several key Assembly committees.But opponents have retained many more lobbyists to block the bill, and national companies have been actively involved in the effort.Enck said she’s open to some changes, including around recycled content requirements for plastics due to potential health concerns about plastic touching food and beverages.One issue she won’t budge on, though: any allowance for chemical recycling. And she’s pushing the Legislature to also keep it out of any final deal.“The industry opposition is ferocious to say the least, and we're trying to counter that with grassroots support,” Enck said. “This is the closest we’ve ever been.”Reprinted from E&E News with permission from POLITICO, LLC. Copyright 2024. E&E News provides essential news for energy and environment professionals.

A law proposed in New York State seeks to reduce plastic packaging, ban certain plastic chemicals and mandate that producers of packaged consumer goods fund the recycling or disposal of what they sell

CLIMATEWIRE | ALBANY, New York — Democratic lawmakers are still fine-tuning a sweeping measure aimed at reducing the amount of plastic and packaging trash headed to the state’s crammed landfills.

The rebranded extended producer responsibility bill seeks to reduce the amount of packaging being used, increase recyclability and charge producers of consumer goods for the costs of disposing of packaging that mostly ends up in landfills.

But tweaks are still expected to the current version, and some lawmakers have concerns about the costs for consumers with the legislative session set to end June 6.

On supporting science journalism

If you're enjoying this article, consider supporting our award-winning journalism by subscribing. By purchasing a subscription you are helping to ensure the future of impactful stories about the discoveries and ideas shaping our world today.

Senate Majority Leader Andrea Stewart-Cousins said there are still conversations ongoing.

“We want to make sure that we have input so at least whatever we do legislatively not only reflects, to the extent possible, the real concerns that people bring to us and we weigh it against the real results that we’re trying to achieve,” the Democrat from Yonkers said Tuesday.

“Obviously, we all are getting all kinds of things that should not be in landfills, so we are trying to get to a point where we’ve got a piece of legislation that will pass.”

Broadly, the goal is to mandate producers of packaged consumer goods — think Amazon, Unilever, Procter & Gamble — to fund the recycling or disposal of what they sell. There’s also mandates to stop using potentially harmful substances.

Money raised would be used to reimburse local governments for the costs of waste disposal and recycling programs.

It’s a big shift in the way recycling is funded in New York.

Most costs are currently borne by local governments. The state’s climate plan, approved in late 2022 to map out the path for New York to achieve dramatic emissions reductions, backs sweeping new “extended producer responsibility” legislation to begin reducing emissions from waste in landfills.

Industry opponents of the bill warn the measure would increase costs and limit the convenient choices that grocery shoppers have come to expect. They say there aren’t readily available alternatives to some of the chemicals that would be banned.

Most supporters acknowledge there would be changes, but argue that habits are already shifting and that healthier, more refillable and less disposable choices would become more widely available because of the new requirements.

They’re also emphasizing that customers ultimately pay for sending the trash to the landfill anyway, and that reducing packaging material can lower costs.

“You don’t have to wrap everything in plastic,” said Assemblymember Michaelle Solages, a Democrat from Nassau County who is the chair of the influential Black, Puerto Rican, Hispanic, and Asian Legislative Caucus. “I think it is a sin to even wrap fruits and vegetables in plastic.”

Solages said there’s still work to do on the details, although there’s support for the spirit of the proposal. She said there are concerns about costs, and there are currently discussions about how to ensure those costs aren’t only on consumers.

“We’re just throwing all this waste in our garbage,” Solages said in an interview. “At the end of the day, it’ll cost us more to clean up all the impacts to the Earth.”

Under the legislation, companies that are covered would have to reduce packaging by 10 percent within three years, increasing to 50 percent in 12 years. Recycling rates would also have to increase to 75 percent of packing material, including plastic, to be reused or recycled in 2050.

Assemblymember Deborah Glick, a Democrat from Manhattan, said there are also health risks from current packaging. Glick sponsors the bill, and as chair of the Environmental Conservation Committee, she has made it her top priority as the end of the legislative session nears.

“We have a variety of problems related to the chemicals that are in the plastic that is wrapped around our food,” she said. “We know we have a growing health problem.”

Producers could give consumers more options than are currently available, said Vanessa Fajans-Turner, executive director of Environmental Advocates NY.

“This is product agnostic. This is not a referendum on how we shop or what we shop for,” she said. “There are alternatives for packaging.”

There’s also significant labor opposition to the bill, and supporters recognize the challenge.

The New York State Conference of Teamsters and United Steelworkers District 4 oppose the bill, as does the New York State AFL-CIO.

The steelworkers oppose the inclusion of paper products, given the high recycling rate already, while the teamsters who represent some sanitation workers have concerns about the potential for new organizations to be responsible for collecting waste.

“This legislation is a direct assault on organized labor,” the Teamsters opposition memo states. “This legislation allows municipal waste removal forces, both public employee and currently contracted private companies, to be replaced by a state supervised private collection force without any regard to workers’ rights.”

Meera Joshi, New York City deputy mayor for operations, said there have been discussions with organized labor, and the city agrees there might be some protections that could be added.

The city estimates it would get $150 million if the bill were enacted, and it would have to pay less to ship waste to landfills, meaning additional savings.

“Our sanitation system covers all the cost of packaging that’s not recycled,” Joshi said in an interview. “Many states have adopted this. … We’re not reinventing the wheel here.”

Assembly Democrats are sensitive to the prospect of higher costs being passed on to consumers. The Assembly conferenced on the bill earlier this week.

Assemblymember Carrie Woerner, a Democrat from Saratoga County, said that any policies that would increase costs in an inflationary environment are a concern. She said she has a “conceptual appreciation” for the goals of the bill.

But she said she has questions about the time lines, given how many food suppliers are national brands and would face difficulty specifically making changes in New York. Policymakers should consider aligning implementation with California’s measure, which was signed in 2022, she said.

“I think the industry is trying hard to reduce the plastics they use and improve recyclability,” Woerner said. Food suppliers “have to be on a time line that is consistent from state to state. California got there first.”

Glick said the gradual implementation of the requirements to reduce plastics and other packaging helps address cost concerns.

“We're just giving them an incentive to be innovative,” she said. “The less packaging they use, the less they pay into a fund. So they reduce their costs and the less packaging they use, the less money they spend on that material. So it's just an excuse to raise prices.”

The opposition from companies, including makers of plastics represented by the American Chemistry Council, has been consistent since environmental groups began pushing for an extended producer responsibility program several years ago.

The chemical industry opposes restrictions on chemical recycling counting as recycling, arguing it unfairly bars the technology.

Sen. Peter Harckham, the chair of the Environmental Conservation Committee, has pointed out the bill includes a provision requiring a report every three years that could spur changes to the definition by lawmakers.

Business groups, chemical makers and product manufacturers of everything from toys and home appliances to footwear have also objected to a list of chemicals that would bar material from being recycled. There would also be a ban on additional toxic substances in packaging including various chemicals used to make plastics, flame retardants and PFAS.

“This overly broad prohibition disregards sound science and could potentially have major unintended socioeconomic, environmental, and public health consequences by arbitrarily eliminating packaging best suited for, among other uses, food preservation, medical supply and device protection and hazardous materials containers,” the groups wrote in a memo opposing the bill.

Environmental advocates in the past were split on different versions of the measure and strategies to get it passed. So that has made it even more difficult to get a bill passed.

Gov. Kathy Hochul proposed her own version of the extended producer responsibility for packaging plan in her 2022 and 2023 budget proposals, but her administration has concerns about the current version.

That includes the large number of staff they expect would be needed to implement it.

This year, however, a key organization hired a high-powered and well-connected lobbyist with close ties to Assembly Speaker Carl Heastie to work on the bill.

Beyond Plastics retained the firm of Patrick Jenkins, Heastie’s former college roommate, on May 1, according to public records. The group is based at Bennington College in Vermont and led by former EPA regional administrator Judith Enck.

“We don’t have the firepower that Albany lobbyists have, but we could only afford him for a month,” Enck said.

So far, it appears to have helped: Shortly afterward, the measure moved through several key Assembly committees.

But opponents have retained many more lobbyists to block the bill, and national companies have been actively involved in the effort.

Enck said she’s open to some changes, including around recycled content requirements for plastics due to potential health concerns about plastic touching food and beverages.

One issue she won’t budge on, though: any allowance for chemical recycling. And she’s pushing the Legislature to also keep it out of any final deal.

“The industry opposition is ferocious to say the least, and we're trying to counter that with grassroots support,” Enck said. “This is the closest we’ve ever been.”

Reprinted from E&E News with permission from POLITICO, LLC. Copyright 2024. E&E News provides essential news for energy and environment professionals.

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EPA to formally review risks of vinyl chloride and other toxic chemicals

Evaluation could lead to limits or bans on substances commonly used in the production of plastic and rubberThe Environmental Protection Agency is launching a formal review of five highly toxic plastic chemicals, including vinyl chloride, the notorious compound at the center of the East Palestine, Ohio, train wreck fire.The move could lead to strong limits or bans on the substances. Continue reading...

The Environmental Protection Agency is launching a formal review of five highly toxic plastic chemicals, including vinyl chloride, the notorious compound at the center of the East Palestine, Ohio, train wreck fire.The move could lead to strong limits or bans on the substances.Vinyl chloride is most commonly used in PVC pipe and packaging production, but is also cancerous and highly flammable. For about 50 years, the federal government has considered limits on the substance, but industry has thwarted most regulatory efforts, hid the substances’ risks and is already mobilizing against the new review.The step is “one of the most important chemical review processes ever undertaken” by the agency, said Judith Enck, president of Beyond Plastics and a former EPA administrator.“I applaud the EPA,” she added.The federal government designates vinyl chloride as a known carcinogen, and the substance is also a neurotoxicant linked to liver damage, permanent changes to bones, and other serious health issues. The EPA is also reviewing acetaldehyde, benzenamine, acrylonitrile and MBOCA, each used in the production of plastic and rubber. All the chemicals are considered to be or are probable carcinogens and linked to other health problems, like anemia, kidney damage and neurotoxicity.The nation’s use of vinyl chloride drew intense scrutiny after dozens of cars on a Norfolk Southern train derailed and burned in February 2023 in East Palestine. The fire burned near tankers carrying vinyl chloride, and, two days later, fearing a “major explosion”, officials conducted a controlled burn of the chemical as a preventive measure.When vinyl chloride burns, it creates dioxins, a highly toxic and carcinogenic chemical class that can stay in the environment for generations. The levels of dioxin found in East Palestine in the days after the wreck were hundreds of times greater than the exposure threshold above which the EPA in 2010 found poses cancer risks. Soil and food contamination are considered to be among the most common exposure routes, and the controlled burn’s towering plume also sent dioxins across 16 states.Vinyl chloride is transported in freight trains that are prone to accidents, and East Palestine was only one in a series of vinyl chloride incidents – experts expect a similar accident. A recent report found more than 3 million Americans live within one mile of railroad tracks on which vinyl chloride is transported.The Vinyl Institute, which represents vinyl chloride and PVC producers, has downplayed the risk, and labeled the reports “publicity stunts”.The EPA’s announcement concludes a year-long period in which it gathered comments from industry, public health advocates, labor and others involved in the substances’ use, as is required under the Toxic Substances Control Act (TSCA), which covers the nation’s use of toxic chemicals.It will spend the next three months gathering more information, and, following that, determine whether to classify the chemicals as high-priority substances under TSCA. That would trigger a formal study to determine if vinyl chloride presents an unreasonable risk to human health or the environment.That assessment could take three years, and, following that, the EPA would establish new rules. But the action faces an uncertain future – incoming Trump allies have already signaled that they will kill any proposed regulations that have not been finalized.Opposition from industry against PVC limits is expected to be stiff in part because the substance is used in medical devices, vinyl siding for buildings, drinking water pipes, electrical wiring, household goods like shower curtains and raincoats. Industry groups have already touted the substance’s ubiquity in a statement on the EPA’s announcement.“[It] presents a welcome opportunity to share our expertise on the many indispensable uses of this highly regulated material,” the Vinyl Institute wrote.

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Food
Health

Rewriting History: King Solomon’s Mines Proven Clean by Modern Science

A groundbreaking study from Tel Aviv University dispels long-standing myths about King Solomon’s Mines, revealing that ancient copper production in Timna Valley caused minimal and localized environmental harm. Researchers used advanced geochemical surveys to determine that pollution levels were far lower than previously assumed and posed no danger to ancient or modern populations. This discovery [...]

A groundbreaking study from Tel Aviv University dispels long-standing myths about King Solomon’s Mines, revealing that ancient copper production in Timna Valley caused minimal and localized environmental harm. Researchers used advanced geochemical surveys to determine that pollution levels were far lower than previously assumed and posed no danger to ancient or modern populations. This discovery [...]

Chemicals
Pollution

Toxic “forever chemicals” could be entering your body from smart watch bands, study finds

New research finds toxins used to make some brands of smart watch wrist straps are able to seep through the skin

Most people who own a smart watch or fitness watch use a band made of synthetic rubber to hold the device on their wrist. Although the bands are designed to feel comfortable against the skin, a recent study in the journal Environmental Science & Technology Letters found that they may be harmful. This is due to the substances they are made from — known as fluoroelastomers — which can contain large quantities of a dangerous so-called “forever chemical” known as perfluorohexanoic acid (PFHxA); it is unclear the extent to which this can be absorbed through the skin. PFHxA belongs to a classification of industrial products known as per and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS), which do not biodegrade and resist breaking down after exposure to water and light, hence the nickname forever chemicals. They have been linked to extreme health problems like cancer, high blood pressure and infertility. Despite these risks, PFAS are widely used in products like non-stick cookware, umbrellas, cosmetics, furniture, cleaning chemicals, water-resistant fabrics and stain-resistant coatings. PFHxA specifically is commonly used in pizza boxes, rain jackets, firefighting foam and waterproofing sprays. While the scientists behind the study weren’t originally looking for PFHxA, the forever chemical “was the most frequently detected compound” within the 22 watch bands analyzed across numerous brands and price points. Lead author Graham F. Peaslee, a physicist at the University of Notre Dame, told Salon that the researchers had not even been aware that PFAS were used in the watch bands until they saw a full-page ad touting them for being made of fluoroelastomer. "The good news is that the consumer can opt for alternative wrist bands to avoid potential PFAS exposure risks." “We realized that the general public didn't recognize fluoroelastomers as a type of PFAS,” Peaslee said. “Like all other forms of polymeric PFAS, we suspected that these materials would also have ‘other’ PFAS readily available together with the fluoropolymer, and we searched for 20 common PFAS.” That’s when they found the surprisingly high concentrations of PFHxA, a forever chemical that can enter the body after being eaten, inhaled, consumed through drinking or absorbed through the skin. “This was unique in the sense that it was the first time we had found only one PFAS, and that it was at such high concentrations — much higher than we typically find in consumer products,” Peaslee said. While the scientists didn’t test this with humans, they still reported that the high levels of PFAS in these products “poses an opportunity for significant transfer to the dermis [skin] and subsequent human exposure. Additionally, several of these watch bands were advertised as ‘sports and fitness’ monitors, implying that the wearer may be exercising with them, which means additional sweat contact and open skin pores.” Want more health and science stories in your inbox? Subscribe to Salon's weekly newsletter Lab Notes. Importantly, Peaslee noted that this is one instance in which a forever chemical was not necessary to include as an ingredient. “There were many wrist bands available that don't use PFAS and without concern for the toxic shorter-chain PFAS that can be in direct contact with the consumer's skin,” Peaslee said. “The good news is that the consumer can opt for alternative wrist bands to avoid potential PFAS exposure risks.” He added, “It is just a question of knowing that they are present — and it is possible to avoid those with fluoroelastomer materials.” In addition to PFHxA, the nearly endless varieties of PFAS include perfluorooctanoic sulfonic acid (PFOS), hexafluoropropylene oxide dimer acid (HFPO-DA, commonly known as GenX Chemicals), perfluorooctanoic acid (PFOA), perfluorooctane sulfonic acid (PFOS) and perfluorononanoic acid (PFNA). As of 2019, there were more than 4,700 documented PFAS, even though most of them perform the same basic function — making products more resistant to stains, grease and other kinds of damage. According to Dr. Anna Reade, senior scientist at the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), chemical engineers have created this wide variety of forever chemicals to engage in a practice known as “regrettable substitution.” When certain forever chemicals face increased regulation or notoriety, manufacturers try to have their cake and eat it too (often successfully) by swapping out the specifically banned compound for a slightly different alternative. "There are two really good examples that are supported by just a ton of evidence now," Reade told Salon in July, mentioning the two different PFAS known as PFOA (which was used to make teflon) and PFOS (which was used to make Scotchgard). "When those came under scrutiny, one of the big substitutions was to use a four-carbon version of PFOS instead,” Reade said. “What they did was they just used a different chain length, exactly the same molecule, but just a shorter version of it, a smaller version." The final result was that "they switched to that and said it was safe because there wasn't any data on it," Reade said. The practice of engaging in regrettable substitution is still prevalent today.

Chemicals
Health
Science

One State’s War on Forever Chemicals in Milk

In late December 2022, a rancher in Johnson County, Texas, called the constable’s office to complain about his neighbor. The neighbor had recently spread a kind of waste-derived fertilizer, known as biosolids, over his land, the caller said, and the piles were smoking. The caller and his wife were struggling to breathe, the fish in his pond had died, and he thought the biosolids were making him, his wife, and their animals sick.Dana Ames, the county’s environmental crimes investigator, had gotten complaints about biosolids before—the human waste product also known as sewage sludge has a particularly noxious smell—but this felt different. She did some research and found news articles about a dairy farmer in the state of Maine who had used biosolids on his land and whose milk showed sky-high levels of per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, or PFAS.Known as “forever chemicals” because of how long they persist in our environment, PFAS have been linked to a wide variety of human health concerns—and are also present in a range of industrial and consumer products, from firefighting foam to nonstick frying pans. While industry has known about the harms of these chemicals for decades, the government is just catching up: In April of this year, the Environmental Protection Agency set a first-ever drinking water standard for some of the most common forever chemicals, setting a maximum enforceable level of just four parts per trillion for PFOA and PFOS, the two most studied compounds. Some states, meanwhile, have taken regulation into their own hands. Because sludge can accumulate high levels of forever chemicals from municipal sewage, Maine banned the use of biosolids on farmlands entirely in 2022.After the rancher made his complaint, Johnson County tested his property and animals. A drinking water well tested at 268.2 parts per trillion of PFAS, more than 65 times over the new EPA standards. The flesh of a fish taken from the property tested at 74,000 parts per trillion of PFAS. (One 2023 study found that eating just one serving of fish with 11,800 parts per trillion of PFAS would be the equivalent of drinking water contaminated with more than 10 times the new EPA levels of PFAS for a whole month.) The liver of a stillborn calf, meanwhile, tested with more than 610,000 parts per trillion of PFOA, indicating that its mother was routinely exposed to the chemicals in her environment.The company that produced the biosolids applied to the neighbor’s land, Synagro, had recently distributed samples of sludge at the grand opening of its Fort Worth location. Ames was able to get a jar to test. The biosolids tested at 35,610 parts per trillion of total PFAS. “You can make a scary movie out of this,” Ames says.For years, farmers around the country have used biosolids on their fields, a practice touted by industry interests and the government as a safe, environmentally friendly use of waste. But recently, a handful of farmers in different states hundreds of miles apart have seen products from their farm—and even their own bodies—test positive for worrying levels of forever chemicals. Biosolids, a growing number of experts say, are likely to blame, endangering these farmers’ livelihoods and health.Regulators in Maine are some of the only ones in the country to take aggressive action, but those closest to the issue say it’s time for the federal government and other states to follow suit. Earlier this year, a group of Johnson County residents, including those who originally called Ames in 2022, filed a lawsuit against Synagro, North America’s largest biosolids producer, alleging that the PFAS seeping into their land may have caused serious medical issues and the deaths of multiple animals. (A company spokesperson said in an email to The New Republic that Synagro denies the “unproven and unprecedented” allegations, that the biosolids applied to the land in Johnson County “met all USEPA and Texas Commission on Environmental Quality (TCEQ) requirements,” and that subsequent test results showing lower PFAS levels on the farm with the biosolids “strongly suggest that the farm where biosolids were used cannot be a source for the PFAS allegedly found on the plaintiffs’ farms.”) Johnson County, meanwhile, has teamed up with a farmers’ advocate group in Maine to sue the EPA for its lack of regulation on PFAS in biosolids. And in Congress, Maine legislators in both houses are trying to pass national legislation to make sure farmers affected by PFAS can access funds for support. The question now is whether anyone will listen.One of the first phone calls that Nancy McBrady got when she joined Maine’s Department of Agriculture in 2019 was from the commissioner of the Department of Environmental Protection. “She said, ‘Do you know about PFAS?’” McBrady recalls. “I really had to jump in and get smart.”McBrady found herself in the middle of a mounting agricultural crisis that had begun just a few years before. In late 2016, Maine regulators had found PFAS contaminating water wells on the property of dairy farmer Fred Stone in Arundel, Maine. Stone voluntarily tested his milk, finding PFAS levels so high that his purchaser, Oakhurst Dairy, stopped buying his product. In early 2019, as Stone was losing hundreds of dollars a day and dumping dozens of gallons of milk in an attempt to fix the problem, Maine’s new governor formed a task force to investigate the larger issue of PFAS pollution in the state—an effort McBrady was pulled into.In order to see if Stone’s farm was an anomaly, regulators designed a sampling scheme for milk available for sale in Maine. The tests traced PFAS pollution back to another farm—this time in Fairfield, about 100 miles north of Stone’s property. This farm, like Stone’s, had a history of using biosolids on its land.“We did the testing with the expectation that we wouldn’t find much,” McBrady says. “In hindsight, that was incorrect thinking.”McBrady and her colleagues were facing a peculiar vacuum of information when it came to PFAS. While the government has been aware of the potential harms of forever chemicals since the 1990s, there are few definitive federal standards in place for safe human consumption. What’s more, PFAS is not just one chemical but rather a class of thousands; many of the lesser-studied PFAS have been almost totally ignored by regulators.In 2016, the same year that Stone’s farm was tested, the federal government had just set a standard for drinking water for the two most studied types of PFAS at 70 parts per trillion. The new four parts per trillion level set in April tightens this dramatically. But to this day, the EPA does not set any official limits for PFAS levels in sewage sludge applied to farms, nor does it regulate the presence of PFAS in sludge in any way.When McBrady started her job, no states required that products from farms that used biosolids be tested for PFAS. On the federal side, the nation’s milk supply is regulated by the Food and Drug Administration, while meat is regulated by the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Both agencies regularly test samples of food products for PFAS and other contaminants, but those tests are designed in such a way that they may miss intense spots of pollution at the local level. (When it comes to the FDA’s food testing of products grown in areas with known PFAS pollution, for instance, the agency says on its website that “technical support generally occurs at the request of states and before the food enters the market”—meaning that states have to raise the alarm first.) Each agency has intervened in instances where high PFAS levels have shown up in food products, but neither the FDA nor the USDA maintains specific standards for how much PFAS in milk, beef, or any kind of food is safe for human consumption. In an email to The New Republic, an FDA spokesperson said that “understanding PFAS exposure from food is an evolving area of science and more data are needed.”McBrady and her colleagues began working with Maine’s Center for Disease Control and Prevention to create action levels for PFAS in beef and milk in the state. “We just had to start building this program on the fly,” McBrady says.Maine’s environmental agencies found allies in the statehouse. In 2021, the legislature created a fund to enable the Department of Environmental Protection to test land and water at farms that had spread sewage sludge before 2019. Thus far, the investigation has found more than 60 farms where PFAS contamination was high enough that action needed to be taken. At one vegetable farm in Unity, Maine, the owners’ blood levels tested with PFAS levels hundreds of times over the safe limit. In 2022, Maine banned biosolids application altogether. That same year, Mills’s administration created a $60 million support fund for farmers whose land was contaminated; the first payouts from that fund were distributed earlier this year. “We cannot be in the position of telling people that something is contaminated and then just not be able to help them,” McBrady says.When Representative Chellie Pingree, who represents the first of Maine’s two congressional districts, talks to other politicians in Washington about PFAS on farms, her warnings often fall on deaf ears. “There’s a sense of, well, that’s too bad, but it’s not my problem,” she tells me. “If you don’t have a constituent in your district who’s got a huge problem on their farm, you may not have heard about it, or you think it’s only happening somewhere else.”In 2023, Maine’s representatives in Washington joined together to introduce dual legislation in the House and Senate to provide the same kind of support Maine offers farmers on a national level. The Relief for Farmers Hit with PFAS Act, which is designed to be included in the Farm Bill, would allow states to allocate money for PFAS testing and supporting farmers whose farms have been contaminated.“We’ve set up this model, and we know it can work—but unfortunately, we’re the only state that has this safety net in place,” Sarah Alexander, the executive director of the Maine Farmers and Gardeners Association, or MOFGA, says. “More farms are going to keep finding contamination. We need a federal safety net.”It’s not just Maine and Texas with a toxic sludge problem. In 2022, Michigan officials shut down a 400-acre cattle farm after biosolids applied on that farm—and, subsequently, the meat, which was sold directly to farmers’ markets and schools—tested with high levels of PFAS. While Michigan routinely tests sludge from its wastewater treatment plants that it sends out for application, it only banned the application of biosolids with high levels of PFAS in 2021. It also does not test farms with a previous history of sludge applications like Maine does; there’s no way of knowing if other farms that spread biosolids in the past also have contamination. Earlier this year, Harvest Public Media surveyed 13 states across the Midwest, finding that only Michigan had any limits on the allowable amount of PFAS in biosolids. “Commissioners of agriculture would rather not have this seen as a big problem, because nobody wants to be the state where people say, ‘Oh, you can’t buy soybeans from Kansas now, they’re all contaminated,’” Pingree says. “Nobody wants to be tagged with the PFAS label.”To its credit, the Biden administration made significant strides on PFAS. In addition to tightening the new drinking water standards, the EPA this spring designated two of the most common PFAS chemicals as hazardous substances under the Superfund program, meaning that companies, not taxpayers, would be on the hook for cleaning up major spills.The new federal movement on PFAS, especially the drinking water standards, may help raise the bar for gauging safe consumption of other substances, like milk. In April, Consumer Reports conducted its own PFAS testing of milk available for sale in five states. While only six of the 50 samples tested positive for PFAS, those samples all tested several times over the new EPA standards for drinking water, and all tested high enough that they would trigger an investigation in the European Union. One of the samples, Kirkland Signature milk from California, tested with 84 parts per trillion of PFOA.Most experts agree that any additional action or information at the federal level on PFAS would help shed some light on just how much of a problem sewage sludge is. Biosolids, after all, aren’t the only potential source of PFAS pollution on farms: In 2018, water well testing of a dairy farm in New Mexico found that firefighting foam from a nearby Air Force base had polluted the water supply. The FDA determined that the milk from the dairy tested with high enough PFAS levels to be a human health concern, and the farm subsequently went out of business.But while the EPA may be making progress on some PFAS research, advocates say it’s lagging when it comes to biosolids, and putting farms at risk in the process. The agency says on its website that it is currently conducting a risk assessment for PFAS in biosolids—due at the end of this year—and suggests that states monitor sludge for contamination. In June, the farmers in Johnson County in Texas, represented by Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility, or PEER, an advocacy group, filed a lawsuit against the EPA, alleging that the agency is neglecting its duty under the Clean Water Act to regulate PFAS in biosolids. (Maine’s MOFGA later joined the suit.) In a response filed in September, the agency pushed to dismiss the lawsuit, arguing that it actually has no current responsibility to regulate biosolids at all. “That’s not our understanding of the Environmental Protection Agency,” Alexander says.There are some good signs. Only five of the more than 60 farms that Maine has found contaminated with PFAS have had to shut down. The rest have, with significant help, been able to find a way to survive: to shift crops, clean up their water and soil, and protect their families and animals from further contamination.Through trial and error, Maine regulators are figuring out how PFAS works. Leafy greens, for instance, tend to be more vulnerable to contamination; McBrady says that fruit plants, by contrast, seem to store PFAS in the plant material, while the fruit remains relatively PFAS-free. One Maine farm with PFAS-contaminated soil successfully switched from growing foraging grasses for cattle to growing grains, whose stalks seem to protect the harvestable material from PFAS contamination. The farm now raises pigs who eat the safe grains.But Maine is still the only state doing regular testing of farms that applied biosolids. Without widespread local testing like the kind Maine is providing, it’s difficult to get a grasp on how pervasive the problem is. “It’s not like it makes your food taste funny,” Pingree says.How the Trump administration will handle PFAS remains an open question. The EPA has told advocates that its risk assessment on PFOA and PFOS in biosolids—the required first step to create more regulations—is due at the end of this year, but any further regulations will be out of Biden bureaucrats’ hands. Lee Zeldin, Trump’s pick to lead the EPA, has a history of voting in favor of PFAS protections. Project 2025, meanwhile, explicitly calls for the EPA to reverse its designation of PFAS as hazardous chemicals under the Superfund law. Environmental advocates worry that the administration could prolong the implementation of the new drinking water standards, even if it ultimately decides not to roll them back. One waste management executive told the trade publication WasteDive that he foresees a “patchwork quilt” of regulations cropping up as states continue to regulate PFAS without federal input.For an agency that seems to just now be finding its stride on regulating PFAS, an industry-friendly administration could spell trouble for the crucial early work.“If I were EPA right now, I would be very worried that [the work on the PFAS risk assessment] would all be scrapped,” says Laura Dumais, an attorney at PEER involved in its lawsuit against the EPA. “I cannot imagine this next administration, based on the positions that it took last time around, would go against industry and for public health.”Even with an agency committed to regulating the chemicals in our environment, the problems posed by PFAS seem to just keep getting bigger. Public awareness of PFAS, until recently, has mostly focused on large-scale pollution from industrial facilities or military bases making it into the water supply. But removing PFAS from biosolids isn’t as simple as removing a single point of industrial pollution. Because biosolids are made from municipal waste—what we flush down the toilet—they serve as a terrifying indicator of just how pervasive forever chemicals really are in our everyday life. We, ourselves, now shed a chemical that doesn’t degrade, that intensifies in our wastewater, and then is spread on our food. Even if all states banned biosolids use tomorrow, it wouldn’t solve the problem of eliminating PFAS within our waste system—or even help us to understand basic facts about how these chemicals contaminate our environment and affect our bodies.“You start legislating one thing, and it’s going to have effects on another thing—that’s the case with biosolids,” McBrady says. “There’s hesitancy on the parts of some states because it’s such an intractable, big problem—where do you begin?”

In late December 2022, a rancher in Johnson County, Texas, called the constable’s office to complain about his neighbor. The neighbor had recently spread a kind of waste-derived fertilizer, known as biosolids, over his land, the caller said, and the piles were smoking. The caller and his wife were struggling to breathe, the fish in his pond had died, and he thought the biosolids were making him, his wife, and their animals sick.Dana Ames, the county’s environmental crimes investigator, had gotten complaints about biosolids before—the human waste product also known as sewage sludge has a particularly noxious smell—but this felt different. She did some research and found news articles about a dairy farmer in the state of Maine who had used biosolids on his land and whose milk showed sky-high levels of per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, or PFAS.Known as “forever chemicals” because of how long they persist in our environment, PFAS have been linked to a wide variety of human health concerns—and are also present in a range of industrial and consumer products, from firefighting foam to nonstick frying pans. While industry has known about the harms of these chemicals for decades, the government is just catching up: In April of this year, the Environmental Protection Agency set a first-ever drinking water standard for some of the most common forever chemicals, setting a maximum enforceable level of just four parts per trillion for PFOA and PFOS, the two most studied compounds. Some states, meanwhile, have taken regulation into their own hands. Because sludge can accumulate high levels of forever chemicals from municipal sewage, Maine banned the use of biosolids on farmlands entirely in 2022.After the rancher made his complaint, Johnson County tested his property and animals. A drinking water well tested at 268.2 parts per trillion of PFAS, more than 65 times over the new EPA standards. The flesh of a fish taken from the property tested at 74,000 parts per trillion of PFAS. (One 2023 study found that eating just one serving of fish with 11,800 parts per trillion of PFAS would be the equivalent of drinking water contaminated with more than 10 times the new EPA levels of PFAS for a whole month.) The liver of a stillborn calf, meanwhile, tested with more than 610,000 parts per trillion of PFOA, indicating that its mother was routinely exposed to the chemicals in her environment.The company that produced the biosolids applied to the neighbor’s land, Synagro, had recently distributed samples of sludge at the grand opening of its Fort Worth location. Ames was able to get a jar to test. The biosolids tested at 35,610 parts per trillion of total PFAS. “You can make a scary movie out of this,” Ames says.For years, farmers around the country have used biosolids on their fields, a practice touted by industry interests and the government as a safe, environmentally friendly use of waste. But recently, a handful of farmers in different states hundreds of miles apart have seen products from their farm—and even their own bodies—test positive for worrying levels of forever chemicals. Biosolids, a growing number of experts say, are likely to blame, endangering these farmers’ livelihoods and health.Regulators in Maine are some of the only ones in the country to take aggressive action, but those closest to the issue say it’s time for the federal government and other states to follow suit. Earlier this year, a group of Johnson County residents, including those who originally called Ames in 2022, filed a lawsuit against Synagro, North America’s largest biosolids producer, alleging that the PFAS seeping into their land may have caused serious medical issues and the deaths of multiple animals. (A company spokesperson said in an email to The New Republic that Synagro denies the “unproven and unprecedented” allegations, that the biosolids applied to the land in Johnson County “met all USEPA and Texas Commission on Environmental Quality (TCEQ) requirements,” and that subsequent test results showing lower PFAS levels on the farm with the biosolids “strongly suggest that the farm where biosolids were used cannot be a source for the PFAS allegedly found on the plaintiffs’ farms.”) Johnson County, meanwhile, has teamed up with a farmers’ advocate group in Maine to sue the EPA for its lack of regulation on PFAS in biosolids. And in Congress, Maine legislators in both houses are trying to pass national legislation to make sure farmers affected by PFAS can access funds for support. The question now is whether anyone will listen.One of the first phone calls that Nancy McBrady got when she joined Maine’s Department of Agriculture in 2019 was from the commissioner of the Department of Environmental Protection. “She said, ‘Do you know about PFAS?’” McBrady recalls. “I really had to jump in and get smart.”McBrady found herself in the middle of a mounting agricultural crisis that had begun just a few years before. In late 2016, Maine regulators had found PFAS contaminating water wells on the property of dairy farmer Fred Stone in Arundel, Maine. Stone voluntarily tested his milk, finding PFAS levels so high that his purchaser, Oakhurst Dairy, stopped buying his product. In early 2019, as Stone was losing hundreds of dollars a day and dumping dozens of gallons of milk in an attempt to fix the problem, Maine’s new governor formed a task force to investigate the larger issue of PFAS pollution in the state—an effort McBrady was pulled into.In order to see if Stone’s farm was an anomaly, regulators designed a sampling scheme for milk available for sale in Maine. The tests traced PFAS pollution back to another farm—this time in Fairfield, about 100 miles north of Stone’s property. This farm, like Stone’s, had a history of using biosolids on its land.“We did the testing with the expectation that we wouldn’t find much,” McBrady says. “In hindsight, that was incorrect thinking.”McBrady and her colleagues were facing a peculiar vacuum of information when it came to PFAS. While the government has been aware of the potential harms of forever chemicals since the 1990s, there are few definitive federal standards in place for safe human consumption. What’s more, PFAS is not just one chemical but rather a class of thousands; many of the lesser-studied PFAS have been almost totally ignored by regulators.In 2016, the same year that Stone’s farm was tested, the federal government had just set a standard for drinking water for the two most studied types of PFAS at 70 parts per trillion. The new four parts per trillion level set in April tightens this dramatically. But to this day, the EPA does not set any official limits for PFAS levels in sewage sludge applied to farms, nor does it regulate the presence of PFAS in sludge in any way.When McBrady started her job, no states required that products from farms that used biosolids be tested for PFAS. On the federal side, the nation’s milk supply is regulated by the Food and Drug Administration, while meat is regulated by the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Both agencies regularly test samples of food products for PFAS and other contaminants, but those tests are designed in such a way that they may miss intense spots of pollution at the local level. (When it comes to the FDA’s food testing of products grown in areas with known PFAS pollution, for instance, the agency says on its website that “technical support generally occurs at the request of states and before the food enters the market”—meaning that states have to raise the alarm first.) Each agency has intervened in instances where high PFAS levels have shown up in food products, but neither the FDA nor the USDA maintains specific standards for how much PFAS in milk, beef, or any kind of food is safe for human consumption. In an email to The New Republic, an FDA spokesperson said that “understanding PFAS exposure from food is an evolving area of science and more data are needed.”McBrady and her colleagues began working with Maine’s Center for Disease Control and Prevention to create action levels for PFAS in beef and milk in the state. “We just had to start building this program on the fly,” McBrady says.Maine’s environmental agencies found allies in the statehouse. In 2021, the legislature created a fund to enable the Department of Environmental Protection to test land and water at farms that had spread sewage sludge before 2019. Thus far, the investigation has found more than 60 farms where PFAS contamination was high enough that action needed to be taken. At one vegetable farm in Unity, Maine, the owners’ blood levels tested with PFAS levels hundreds of times over the safe limit. In 2022, Maine banned biosolids application altogether. That same year, Mills’s administration created a $60 million support fund for farmers whose land was contaminated; the first payouts from that fund were distributed earlier this year. “We cannot be in the position of telling people that something is contaminated and then just not be able to help them,” McBrady says.When Representative Chellie Pingree, who represents the first of Maine’s two congressional districts, talks to other politicians in Washington about PFAS on farms, her warnings often fall on deaf ears. “There’s a sense of, well, that’s too bad, but it’s not my problem,” she tells me. “If you don’t have a constituent in your district who’s got a huge problem on their farm, you may not have heard about it, or you think it’s only happening somewhere else.”In 2023, Maine’s representatives in Washington joined together to introduce dual legislation in the House and Senate to provide the same kind of support Maine offers farmers on a national level. The Relief for Farmers Hit with PFAS Act, which is designed to be included in the Farm Bill, would allow states to allocate money for PFAS testing and supporting farmers whose farms have been contaminated.“We’ve set up this model, and we know it can work—but unfortunately, we’re the only state that has this safety net in place,” Sarah Alexander, the executive director of the Maine Farmers and Gardeners Association, or MOFGA, says. “More farms are going to keep finding contamination. We need a federal safety net.”It’s not just Maine and Texas with a toxic sludge problem. In 2022, Michigan officials shut down a 400-acre cattle farm after biosolids applied on that farm—and, subsequently, the meat, which was sold directly to farmers’ markets and schools—tested with high levels of PFAS. While Michigan routinely tests sludge from its wastewater treatment plants that it sends out for application, it only banned the application of biosolids with high levels of PFAS in 2021. It also does not test farms with a previous history of sludge applications like Maine does; there’s no way of knowing if other farms that spread biosolids in the past also have contamination. Earlier this year, Harvest Public Media surveyed 13 states across the Midwest, finding that only Michigan had any limits on the allowable amount of PFAS in biosolids. “Commissioners of agriculture would rather not have this seen as a big problem, because nobody wants to be the state where people say, ‘Oh, you can’t buy soybeans from Kansas now, they’re all contaminated,’” Pingree says. “Nobody wants to be tagged with the PFAS label.”To its credit, the Biden administration made significant strides on PFAS. In addition to tightening the new drinking water standards, the EPA this spring designated two of the most common PFAS chemicals as hazardous substances under the Superfund program, meaning that companies, not taxpayers, would be on the hook for cleaning up major spills.The new federal movement on PFAS, especially the drinking water standards, may help raise the bar for gauging safe consumption of other substances, like milk. In April, Consumer Reports conducted its own PFAS testing of milk available for sale in five states. While only six of the 50 samples tested positive for PFAS, those samples all tested several times over the new EPA standards for drinking water, and all tested high enough that they would trigger an investigation in the European Union. One of the samples, Kirkland Signature milk from California, tested with 84 parts per trillion of PFOA.Most experts agree that any additional action or information at the federal level on PFAS would help shed some light on just how much of a problem sewage sludge is. Biosolids, after all, aren’t the only potential source of PFAS pollution on farms: In 2018, water well testing of a dairy farm in New Mexico found that firefighting foam from a nearby Air Force base had polluted the water supply. The FDA determined that the milk from the dairy tested with high enough PFAS levels to be a human health concern, and the farm subsequently went out of business.But while the EPA may be making progress on some PFAS research, advocates say it’s lagging when it comes to biosolids, and putting farms at risk in the process. The agency says on its website that it is currently conducting a risk assessment for PFAS in biosolids—due at the end of this year—and suggests that states monitor sludge for contamination. In June, the farmers in Johnson County in Texas, represented by Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility, or PEER, an advocacy group, filed a lawsuit against the EPA, alleging that the agency is neglecting its duty under the Clean Water Act to regulate PFAS in biosolids. (Maine’s MOFGA later joined the suit.) In a response filed in September, the agency pushed to dismiss the lawsuit, arguing that it actually has no current responsibility to regulate biosolids at all. “That’s not our understanding of the Environmental Protection Agency,” Alexander says.There are some good signs. Only five of the more than 60 farms that Maine has found contaminated with PFAS have had to shut down. The rest have, with significant help, been able to find a way to survive: to shift crops, clean up their water and soil, and protect their families and animals from further contamination.Through trial and error, Maine regulators are figuring out how PFAS works. Leafy greens, for instance, tend to be more vulnerable to contamination; McBrady says that fruit plants, by contrast, seem to store PFAS in the plant material, while the fruit remains relatively PFAS-free. One Maine farm with PFAS-contaminated soil successfully switched from growing foraging grasses for cattle to growing grains, whose stalks seem to protect the harvestable material from PFAS contamination. The farm now raises pigs who eat the safe grains.But Maine is still the only state doing regular testing of farms that applied biosolids. Without widespread local testing like the kind Maine is providing, it’s difficult to get a grasp on how pervasive the problem is. “It’s not like it makes your food taste funny,” Pingree says.How the Trump administration will handle PFAS remains an open question. The EPA has told advocates that its risk assessment on PFOA and PFOS in biosolids—the required first step to create more regulations—is due at the end of this year, but any further regulations will be out of Biden bureaucrats’ hands. Lee Zeldin, Trump’s pick to lead the EPA, has a history of voting in favor of PFAS protections. Project 2025, meanwhile, explicitly calls for the EPA to reverse its designation of PFAS as hazardous chemicals under the Superfund law. Environmental advocates worry that the administration could prolong the implementation of the new drinking water standards, even if it ultimately decides not to roll them back. One waste management executive told the trade publication WasteDive that he foresees a “patchwork quilt” of regulations cropping up as states continue to regulate PFAS without federal input.For an agency that seems to just now be finding its stride on regulating PFAS, an industry-friendly administration could spell trouble for the crucial early work.“If I were EPA right now, I would be very worried that [the work on the PFAS risk assessment] would all be scrapped,” says Laura Dumais, an attorney at PEER involved in its lawsuit against the EPA. “I cannot imagine this next administration, based on the positions that it took last time around, would go against industry and for public health.”Even with an agency committed to regulating the chemicals in our environment, the problems posed by PFAS seem to just keep getting bigger. Public awareness of PFAS, until recently, has mostly focused on large-scale pollution from industrial facilities or military bases making it into the water supply. But removing PFAS from biosolids isn’t as simple as removing a single point of industrial pollution. Because biosolids are made from municipal waste—what we flush down the toilet—they serve as a terrifying indicator of just how pervasive forever chemicals really are in our everyday life. We, ourselves, now shed a chemical that doesn’t degrade, that intensifies in our wastewater, and then is spread on our food. Even if all states banned biosolids use tomorrow, it wouldn’t solve the problem of eliminating PFAS within our waste system—or even help us to understand basic facts about how these chemicals contaminate our environment and affect our bodies.“You start legislating one thing, and it’s going to have effects on another thing—that’s the case with biosolids,” McBrady says. “There’s hesitancy on the parts of some states because it’s such an intractable, big problem—where do you begin?”

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The perfect humidifier doesn’t exist

It’s winter, which means it’s humidifier season. If you struggle with dry skin, allergies, or you’re currently dealing with a cold, you might be leaving yours on all the time — or you’re scrolling through yet another humidifier review roundup to choose a model to purchase. Should you buy an ultrasonic or evaporative? Warm mist […]

The hunt for the least-annoying humidifier can lead to contentious debates online. | Elena Bondarenko/Getty Images It’s winter, which means it’s humidifier season. If you struggle with dry skin, allergies, or you’re currently dealing with a cold, you might be leaving yours on all the time — or you’re scrolling through yet another humidifier review roundup to choose a model to purchase. Should you buy an ultrasonic or evaporative? Warm mist or cool? Should it be a top-fill design? Are all the parts dishwasher safe? How big of a tank should you look for? In a marketplace full of new-fangled, hyperspecific home gadgets, the humidifier is a classic appliance with modern(ish) incarnations available since the 1960s. Over 20 million were sold in the US in 2019, according to Statista, but they’ve only grown more popular and sleeker in the last few years, as people have become more concerned with the quality of the air in their homes. According to Amazon, over 100,000 units of this popular humidifier were purchased in the past month. But while most of the sleek gizmos we love to buy during Black Friday sales exist to, in theory, optimize our lives, the humidifier adds a bunch of hassle — taking care of it becomes another irritating chore in the never-ending wrangling of your household, requiring a thorough scouring every few days to ensure no mold or bacteria is growing. There’s no shortage of humidifier models on the market, but you might be hard-pressed to find one you genuinely love rather than merely tolerate. Those looking for buying advice online often qualify their query: How do I not only wade through the options to find a humidifier that works well for my space, but also one that isn’t a complete pain to clean? The short answer is that there isn’t a magical way to avoid humidifier maintenance. A humidifier is supposed to be full of liquid, and where there’s moisture, mold and bacteria will grow. What’s more, there are real dangers to misusing a humidifier. More research is needed on the long-term health impacts of using them, which is a little disturbing considering how commonplace it is as a household object. The worst mishap that might occur with a robot vacuum is that it runs over an unpleasant surprise your dog left on the floor. With humidifiers, you could be breathing in particulate matter that causes more serious health issues than the device purports to solve. Yet for how risky and frustrating they are, consumers remain obsessed with looking for, testing out, and debating what the least worst humidifiers on the market.  Why we love to hate humidifiers The humidifier, in its basic form, is extremely simple — you can increase humidity simply by setting out a bowl of water near a radiator. (Whether this will make a meaningful difference is another matter.) Dry air can worsen any congestion you’re dealing with, sap moisture from your skin, exacerbate your asthma, and even hurt your house plants. Humidity falls in the winter because the colder the air, the less water vapor it can hold. But it’s not just the frigid conditions outside that contribute to unbearably dry air in the winter. “It’s the heat that you’re using in your domicile that ends up often reducing the humidity,” says Allen St. John, senior tech editor at Consumer Reports, noting that he sometimes turns down the heat to bump up the humidity rather than using a separate machine to do so. (If you don’t control your own heat, this may not be an option.) Older humidifiers often looked like terrifying contraptions and were used mostly in hospital settings to help people with respiratory conditions. In the latter half of the 20th century, they started being advertised as consumer-grade products to use at home. Today there are three types available: the ultrasonic, which uses vibrations to turn water into mist; evaporative, which uses a fan to help evaporate water into the air; and the warm mist humidifier, which boils water to produce steam.  “Most of the stuff that’s on the market tends to be ultrasonic at this point,” St. John says. They’re generally easier to use, and typically quieter. But all kinds of humidifiers come with trade-offs. Ultrasonics appear to emit a lot more particulate matter than evaporatives do (more on that later); evaporatives can not only be louder, but might also require you to buy and replace a filter or wick. With warm mist models, you run the risk of scalding yourself (or a pet or child in the house) if you knock over the humidifier. None are particularly easy to maintain: The Environmental Protection Agency advises cleaning a humidifier every three days, which requires taking it apart and getting into every little crevice to remove grime, and emptying the tank daily to reduce the growth of microorganisms. “You don’t want to leave a humidifier around that’s just kind of wet,” St. John says. The area around the machine should be wiped down if there’s moisture around it. It’s also important, though, to be careful about what cleaning agents you use and how well you rinse the humidifier before turning it on again — you don’t want to inhale any harmful chemicals. In South Korea, humidifier disinfectants that were widely available until 2011 have been linked to the deaths of over 1,800 people. Given how frustrating they can be to own, people often have impassioned opinions on humidifiers, according to Thom Dunn, who writes Wirecutter’s humidifier guide. “It’s a perennial thing — I’m always hearing reader feedback about it,” he tells Vox.  A few years ago, there was a considerable amount of reader complaints and discourse around the fact that Wirecutter had named the Honeywell HCM-350 humidifier, currently $67.99 on Amazon at time of publication, their top pick for several years. The humidifier guide is “easily one of the most volatile reader comment sections,” Dunn says. The team eventually removed the HCM-350 from their recommendations. The top pick now is the $109.99 Levoit LV600S. Unsurprisingly, several recent comments disagree with the choice. One of the latest comment reads: “I think it’s crazy the Honeywell HCM 350 is no longer the top pick.” (McSweeney’s even lampooned how even the most recommended humidifier will inevitably disappoint.) This constant debate about the least-annoying humidifier may also be fueled by the fact that it’s a product some replace every few years. Many models are relatively inexpensive, and “it’s easy to get to the point of, ‘I didn’t really clean it, now this thing looks like a science experiment,’” St. John says. In the “introvert economy,” humidifiers are becoming more popular (and slightly less ugly) There’s another obvious reason humidifiers cause so much consumer disdain: Many of them are big, clunky, and frankly, ugly. The good news is that the age of marginally more attractive design may be upon us. We’ve already seen the premiumization of kitchen gadgets, from toaster ovens to espresso machines, and a few years back, window air conditioners started getting the minimalist edit too. Now, more brands are giving the humidifier the millennial-sleek update thanks to a broader “air care” wellness trend — which includes not just humidifiers, but candles, diffusers, air purifiers — that’s turning anything that treats your indoor air into a premium product that should also blend into your home decor. “It does go along with a certain influencer wellness aesthetic.”Thom Dunn, Wirecutter writer Some consumers are shelling out a lot of money for these prettier, more expensive models that can cost upward of $150 while not holding as much water or humidifying as well as experts’ recommended picks. “It does go along with a certain influencer wellness aesthetic,” Dunn says. Consumers with discretionary income are investing more money into creature comforts for the home in general. “One of the things we’ve seen that sort of started with the pandemic — and that I don’t think has completely disappeared — is something we refer to as the introvert economy,” says Amy Eisinger, head of content at the wellness digital publication Well+Good. People are “investing in really making their space feel like a sanctuary.” Some are even installing infrared saunas in their homes, Eisinger notes.  Even if you’re not quite bed rotting, chances are you’re spending more time at home these days than, say, a decade ago — and what we spend money on may be shifting alongside that fact. There’s a whole TikTok genre advertisements featuring a woman coming home from work and embarking on a convoluted ritual using niche smart home gadgets: She sanitizes her clothes with a UV light wand in the foyer, runs her earrings through a jewelry cleaner, washes vegetables for dinner with some kind of ultrasonic device, gives herself a foot bath while watching a show on her phone, and pours herself a glass of something stiff from a rotating decanter. Everything is clean and nothing hurts. Presumably, in such a world of ultra-modern optimization, your indoor air is always the perfect humidity, too. The potential danger of humidifiers may not outweigh its benefits The real issue with humidifiers isn’t just the annoyance of taking care of them, though, it’s that they can be a serious health hazard. “What most people don’t know about ultrasonic humidifiers is that they will create a lot of small particulate matter,” says Jonathan Jarry, a science communicator at McGill University’s Office for Science and Society. They “aerosolize minerals that are present in the water,” which means the purity of the water you’re using in a humidifier can drastically impact your home’s air quality. A few years ago, University of Alberta scientists published research showing that ultrasonic humidifiers using both filtered and unfiltered tap water released high concentrations of particulate matter seen “during extreme air pollution events in major metropolises.” A 2023 paper published in the journal Science of the Total Environment found that safe-to-drink tap water used in ultrasonic humidifiers could spew out dangerous levels of metals that are more harmful inhaled than when ingested, such as manganese. In short, using anything but distilled water in your humidifier means you could be inhaling a lot of stuff you probably don’t want in your lungs. (Evaporative humidifiers can also emit particulate matter, but to a lesser extent.) The EPA recommends using only distilled water in humidifiers, but acquiring large enough quantities of it cheaply is easier said than done. To be clear, boiling water is not the same as distilling it, and bottled drinking water isn’t usually distilled either. Distillation requires boiling water “into a vapor and leaving behind any impurities, and then taking that vapor and recondensing it back into a liquid,” Jarry says. How much distilled water you’ll need depends on how dry the air currently is and the size of the room you’re humidifying: A small space under 400 square feet might need a machine with a 1.5 gallon tank, according to CNET, while a bigger space over 1,000 square feet could require a 3-gallon one. Two five-gallon barrels of distilled water sell for $42.99 on Amazon at time of publication; a much cheaper option might be to buy a water distiller for your home, or signing up for a distilled water delivery service, but that still adds another step and expense to using your humidifier. It’s unclear how much public awareness there is about the harm of particulates released by humidifiers. According to a recent Centers for Disease Control and Prevention report, many Americans have misperceptions about the purity of tap water. A third of respondents to a survey thought that tap water was sterile, and a quarter said they used it for humidifiers. (An unscientific Reddit poll on r/NewParents a few years ago shows the majority of 228 respondents saying they used tap water in humidifiers as well.) The big question mark around the safety of these popular products adds yet another hurdle for consumers half-heartedly trawling the market for a humidifier that won’t make them miserable. The perfect all-in-one portable humidifier that distills water for you, cleans itself, and sings a lullaby for you at night does not yet exist. (The Dyson air purifier and humidifier combo does, but its regular price is $999.) If you’re not prepared for the commitment of bringing a humidifier into your home, the healthiest option — for both your lungs and your sanity — might just be to opt out.

Chemicals
Health
Pollution

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