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The Surprising Link Between Bats Dying and Human Infant Mortality

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Friday, September 6, 2024

Healthy little brown bats in Mt. Aeolus cave in Vermont in 2012 Ann Froschauer / USFWS via Flickr under CC BY 2.0 Bats get a bad rap. Often, the flying mammals are associated with vampiric monsters or the threat of rabies. But ecologists have long known that bats play an important role in maintaining balance in ecosystems by eating insects that would otherwise get out of control. This week, a study published in the journal Science finds that the benefits of bats apply to humans, too. We shouldn’t fear the presence of bats, the research suggests, but their absence. “Bats are a fantastic example of a species that we like to keep a distance from, but are really impactful in terms of the role they play in ecosystems,” Eyal Frank, an environmental economist at the University of Chicago and author of the new study, tells the Washington Post’s Dino Grandoni. Frank found that in U.S. counties where bat populations have been decimated by white-nose syndrome, human infant mortality rates rose by about 8 percent. That equates to 1,334 infant deaths between 2006 and 2017 that Frank says are attributable to a loss of bats. The research began when Frank came across information about white-nose syndrome, a disease caused by the fungus Pseudogymnoascus destructans. Introduced from Europe to the New York area around 2006, perhaps through contaminated hiking or caving gear, the fungus has since spread to at least 40 states. When it infects a colony of bats, their population can plummet or even get wiped out entirely. Frank realized that the well-documented spread of the fungus, and the resulting decline in bat populations, was an opportunity to quantify the impact of bats on their ecosystems and human lives. “Reading how this disease is spreading from county to county, decimating bat populations, made my economist senses go, ‘Oh, this is probably the best natural experiment you can have,’” Frank recalls to the New York Times’ Catrin Einhorn. “It’s the closest we’re going to get to just going out there into the wild and randomly manipulating bat population levels to see what happens at a large, meaningful spatial scale.” A little brown bat in Illinois shows visible symptoms of white-nose syndrome in 2013. University of Illinois / Steve Taylor via Flickr under CC BY 2.0 He compared the spread of white-nose syndrome to county-by-county data of infant mortality. The connection was stunning. Winifred Frick, chief scientist at Bat Conservation International who wasn’t involved in the research, tells Science’s Erik Stokstad that when she saw the study’s findings, her “jaw dropped.” Frank suggests the link is due to the positive impacts of bats’ diets. A single bat consumes up to 40 percent of its body weight in insects every night. In agricultural areas, this means that when bats disappear, farmers might use more insecticides on their fields. In counties with outbreaks of white-nose syndrome, farmers used 31 percent more of these toxic chemicals, on average, per the study. Putting more insecticides into the environment seems to be the cause of the increased infant deaths, Frank writes. To make sure his ideas stood up to scrutiny, Frank tells the Guardian’s Rebekah White that he spent a year “kicking the tires” and ruling out other possible causes of infant mortality, like the opioid epidemic, parental unemployment, genetically modified crops and even the weather. Nothing else fit, showing “compelling evidence … that farmers did respond to the decline in insect-eating bats, and that response had an adverse health impact on human infants,” he adds. Paul Ferraro, a sustainability scientist at Johns Hopkins University who was not involved in the research, tells Science that the study proposes a “pretty dramatic claim that’s going to get a lot of attention.” But, he adds, it’s the “most convincing evidence to date” that losses of a wild species can have huge impacts on the economy and human health. Bats, by eating potentially harmful insects, aren’t the only species with contributions to the environment that benefit humans—a phenomenon some scientists call “ecosystem services.” Frank found earlier this year that the loss of vultures in India led to the death of an extra 500,000 people on the subcontinent between 2000 and 2005. In a more positive example, researchers found that the reintroduction of wolves to Wisconsin reduced car crashes involving deer by 24 percent. The loss of such ecosystem services highlights the potential devastating impact of the extinction of species, which has been accelerating in recent years. But, Frank says, unexpected harms can appear even without a total extinction event, when only local ecosystems are diminished. “We often pay a lot of attention to global extinctions, where species completely disappear,” he tells the New York Times. “But we start experiencing loss and damages well before that.” Get the latest stories in your inbox every weekday.

A new study finds that when bats in U.S. counties were decimated by the deadly white-nose syndrome, human deaths followed closely behind

little brown bat
Healthy little brown bats in Mt. Aeolus cave in Vermont in 2012 Ann Froschauer / USFWS via Flickr under CC BY 2.0

Bats get a bad rap. Often, the flying mammals are associated with vampiric monsters or the threat of rabies. But ecologists have long known that bats play an important role in maintaining balance in ecosystems by eating insects that would otherwise get out of control.

This week, a study published in the journal Science finds that the benefits of bats apply to humans, too. We shouldn’t fear the presence of bats, the research suggests, but their absence.

“Bats are a fantastic example of a species that we like to keep a distance from, but are really impactful in terms of the role they play in ecosystems,” Eyal Frank, an environmental economist at the University of Chicago and author of the new study, tells the Washington Post’s Dino Grandoni.

Frank found that in U.S. counties where bat populations have been decimated by white-nose syndrome, human infant mortality rates rose by about 8 percent. That equates to 1,334 infant deaths between 2006 and 2017 that Frank says are attributable to a loss of bats.

The research began when Frank came across information about white-nose syndrome, a disease caused by the fungus Pseudogymnoascus destructans. Introduced from Europe to the New York area around 2006, perhaps through contaminated hiking or caving gear, the fungus has since spread to at least 40 states. When it infects a colony of bats, their population can plummet or even get wiped out entirely.

Frank realized that the well-documented spread of the fungus, and the resulting decline in bat populations, was an opportunity to quantify the impact of bats on their ecosystems and human lives.

“Reading how this disease is spreading from county to county, decimating bat populations, made my economist senses go, ‘Oh, this is probably the best natural experiment you can have,’” Frank recalls to the New York Times’ Catrin Einhorn. “It’s the closest we’re going to get to just going out there into the wild and randomly manipulating bat population levels to see what happens at a large, meaningful spatial scale.”

bat with white-nose
A little brown bat in Illinois shows visible symptoms of white-nose syndrome in 2013. University of Illinois / Steve Taylor via Flickr under CC BY 2.0

He compared the spread of white-nose syndrome to county-by-county data of infant mortality. The connection was stunning. Winifred Frick, chief scientist at Bat Conservation International who wasn’t involved in the research, tells Science’s Erik Stokstad that when she saw the study’s findings, her “jaw dropped.”

Frank suggests the link is due to the positive impacts of bats’ diets. A single bat consumes up to 40 percent of its body weight in insects every night. In agricultural areas, this means that when bats disappear, farmers might use more insecticides on their fields. In counties with outbreaks of white-nose syndrome, farmers used 31 percent more of these toxic chemicals, on average, per the study. Putting more insecticides into the environment seems to be the cause of the increased infant deaths, Frank writes.

To make sure his ideas stood up to scrutiny, Frank tells the Guardian’s Rebekah White that he spent a year “kicking the tires” and ruling out other possible causes of infant mortality, like the opioid epidemic, parental unemployment, genetically modified crops and even the weather. Nothing else fit, showing “compelling evidence … that farmers did respond to the decline in insect-eating bats, and that response had an adverse health impact on human infants,” he adds.

Paul Ferraro, a sustainability scientist at Johns Hopkins University who was not involved in the research, tells Science that the study proposes a “pretty dramatic claim that’s going to get a lot of attention.” But, he adds, it’s the “most convincing evidence to date” that losses of a wild species can have huge impacts on the economy and human health.

Bats, by eating potentially harmful insects, aren’t the only species with contributions to the environment that benefit humans—a phenomenon some scientists call “ecosystem services.” Frank found earlier this year that the loss of vultures in India led to the death of an extra 500,000 people on the subcontinent between 2000 and 2005. In a more positive example, researchers found that the reintroduction of wolves to Wisconsin reduced car crashes involving deer by 24 percent.

The loss of such ecosystem services highlights the potential devastating impact of the extinction of species, which has been accelerating in recent years. But, Frank says, unexpected harms can appear even without a total extinction event, when only local ecosystems are diminished.

“We often pay a lot of attention to global extinctions, where species completely disappear,” he tells the New York Times. “But we start experiencing loss and damages well before that.”

Get the latest stories in your inbox every weekday.

Read the full story here.
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Related News

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?”

Chemicals
Agriculture
Business

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

Petrochemical plants send millions of pounds of pollutants into waterways each year: Report

Nearly 70 petrochemical companies across the nation, including 30 in Texas, are sending millions of pounds of pollutants into waterways each year due to weak or nonexistent regulations, according to a report published by the watchdog group Environmental Integrity Project.The report analyzed wastewater discharges from petrochemical companies that produce plastics across the U.S., finding that a majority of the facilities had violated Clean Water Act permits and few were punished. In addition, only a few states are regulating some of the hazardous chemicals or substances of concern, and there are currently no limits set from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency for these contaminants in effluent water guidelines for the plastics industry. In the past 30 years, plastic production at petrochemical facilities has skyrocketed. The EPA estimates that plastic production in 1990 was at 17,130 tons, and by 2018 it had doubled, reaching 35,680 tons. Producing these plastics results in industrial wastewater discharges, some of which contain pollutants unregulated by federal wastewater guidelines. If the pollutant does have limits, they have been set by individual states. The report found the following pollutants:Dioxins, recognized as one of the most toxic classes of compounds by the World Health Organization, can be a byproduct of producing plastics like poly-vinyl chloride, or PVC. Out of the 17 facilities that produce PVC, only three have site limits set by states.1,4 dioxane, classified as a potential carcinogen, only had limits set at two facilities.An estimated 9.9 million pounds of nitrogen and 1.9 million pounds of phosphorus (known as nutrient pollution when combined) enter waterways from these plants annually, and can cause toxic algal blooms and fish-killing low-oxygen zones. Only one facility had limits for phosphorus pollution and none had total nitrogen limits. Plastic pellets, known as nurdles, are entering waterways in 27 states. Polyfluoroalkyl substances, or PFAS, are not currently considered in wastewater samples for petrochemical plant permit applications. A majority of the facilities have poor compliance records. Out of the 70 facilities, 83% had violated the Clean Water Act at least once in the last three years (58 facilities violated permits, yet only 8 were penalized). Nearly 40% of the facilities were operating on water pollution control permits that are outdated, “but have been administratively continued by state agencies,” according to the report. Outdated Clean Water Act regulations The Clean Water Act, issued by the EPA in 1972, has historically been enforced through effluent water guidelines. The petrochemical facilities in the report are regulated under a category of guidelines for organic chemicals, plastics and synthetic fibers.“The (plastics) industry has experienced significant, rapid growth in recent decades and is continuing to grow,” lead author of the report and research director at the Environmental Integrity Project, Kira Dunham, told EHN. “But…wastewater discharges are being regulated by standards from over 30 years ago.”This category of guidelines Dunham mentions has not been updated by the EPA since 1993, despite requirements for the agency to “periodically” update guidelines in accordance with technological updates for pollution control.Texas petrochemical pollution With 17 of the 30 facilities in Texas, the Houston area — known as the petrochemical capital of the U.S. — is the number one exporter of petrochemicals in the nation. Nearly one-third of these Texas facilities discharge wastewater into the Houston Ship Channel. Earlier this year, EHN investigated community member concerns about wastewater contamination potentially entering dredge material removed from the channel. Independent analysis from Healthy Port Communities, a collaborative of Houston-based environmental groups, noted high levels of dioxins in the soil surrounding dredge material. “Some of the places touched on in the (Environmental Integrity Project’s) report might have one major facility that has this… pattern of discharging pollutants into waterways,” Kristen Schlemmer, senior legal director of Houston- based water justice group Bayou City Waterkeeper, told EHN. “I don't want to discount that … but it at least makes it clear who you can focus on to address the problem. Whereas in Houston, we have so many different facilities that are polluting into our waterways, that it often just makes it seem like that's normal, and that's just the way things are going to be.” Schlemmer added that these concerns for pollution related to wastewater discharges are heightened by disasters, like this year’s derecho storm and Hurricane Beryl, in which water grows contaminated across large portions of the region. Beyond climate disasters, the Houston region is prone to chemical disasters and the state averages about one chemical release a week based on 2023 data.“I'm hoping through this work to show that this is not normal, and (to) raise the bar in terms of what our expectations are for the facilities that live in our backyards,” Schlemmer said. “If they're not going to comply with the law …I want them to … know that they're going to be facing legal action, either from us or for government regulators.”Earlier this year, the Environmental Integrity Project sued the EPA along with Bayou City Water Keeper, the Center for Biological Diversity and nearly 300 water justice groups in the Waterkeeper Alliance. In the original intent to sue, the group states that the EPA “has failed to perform its mandatory duty under (the Clean Water Act) ... to biennially submit state water quality reports and an analysis thereof … to Congress.”Just last week, the EPA released its biannual preliminary plan for effluent limitations guidelines and the announcement states that the EPA plans to conduct new studies that will clarify the impact of discharges from certain industries on waterways. The plan is open for public comment here.

Nearly 70 petrochemical companies across the nation, including 30 in Texas, are sending millions of pounds of pollutants into waterways each year due to weak or nonexistent regulations, according to a report published by the watchdog group Environmental Integrity Project.The report analyzed wastewater discharges from petrochemical companies that produce plastics across the U.S., finding that a majority of the facilities had violated Clean Water Act permits and few were punished. In addition, only a few states are regulating some of the hazardous chemicals or substances of concern, and there are currently no limits set from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency for these contaminants in effluent water guidelines for the plastics industry. In the past 30 years, plastic production at petrochemical facilities has skyrocketed. The EPA estimates that plastic production in 1990 was at 17,130 tons, and by 2018 it had doubled, reaching 35,680 tons. Producing these plastics results in industrial wastewater discharges, some of which contain pollutants unregulated by federal wastewater guidelines. If the pollutant does have limits, they have been set by individual states. The report found the following pollutants:Dioxins, recognized as one of the most toxic classes of compounds by the World Health Organization, can be a byproduct of producing plastics like poly-vinyl chloride, or PVC. Out of the 17 facilities that produce PVC, only three have site limits set by states.1,4 dioxane, classified as a potential carcinogen, only had limits set at two facilities.An estimated 9.9 million pounds of nitrogen and 1.9 million pounds of phosphorus (known as nutrient pollution when combined) enter waterways from these plants annually, and can cause toxic algal blooms and fish-killing low-oxygen zones. Only one facility had limits for phosphorus pollution and none had total nitrogen limits. Plastic pellets, known as nurdles, are entering waterways in 27 states. Polyfluoroalkyl substances, or PFAS, are not currently considered in wastewater samples for petrochemical plant permit applications. A majority of the facilities have poor compliance records. Out of the 70 facilities, 83% had violated the Clean Water Act at least once in the last three years (58 facilities violated permits, yet only 8 were penalized). Nearly 40% of the facilities were operating on water pollution control permits that are outdated, “but have been administratively continued by state agencies,” according to the report. Outdated Clean Water Act regulations The Clean Water Act, issued by the EPA in 1972, has historically been enforced through effluent water guidelines. The petrochemical facilities in the report are regulated under a category of guidelines for organic chemicals, plastics and synthetic fibers.“The (plastics) industry has experienced significant, rapid growth in recent decades and is continuing to grow,” lead author of the report and research director at the Environmental Integrity Project, Kira Dunham, told EHN. “But…wastewater discharges are being regulated by standards from over 30 years ago.”This category of guidelines Dunham mentions has not been updated by the EPA since 1993, despite requirements for the agency to “periodically” update guidelines in accordance with technological updates for pollution control.Texas petrochemical pollution With 17 of the 30 facilities in Texas, the Houston area — known as the petrochemical capital of the U.S. — is the number one exporter of petrochemicals in the nation. Nearly one-third of these Texas facilities discharge wastewater into the Houston Ship Channel. Earlier this year, EHN investigated community member concerns about wastewater contamination potentially entering dredge material removed from the channel. Independent analysis from Healthy Port Communities, a collaborative of Houston-based environmental groups, noted high levels of dioxins in the soil surrounding dredge material. “Some of the places touched on in the (Environmental Integrity Project’s) report might have one major facility that has this… pattern of discharging pollutants into waterways,” Kristen Schlemmer, senior legal director of Houston- based water justice group Bayou City Waterkeeper, told EHN. “I don't want to discount that … but it at least makes it clear who you can focus on to address the problem. Whereas in Houston, we have so many different facilities that are polluting into our waterways, that it often just makes it seem like that's normal, and that's just the way things are going to be.” Schlemmer added that these concerns for pollution related to wastewater discharges are heightened by disasters, like this year’s derecho storm and Hurricane Beryl, in which water grows contaminated across large portions of the region. Beyond climate disasters, the Houston region is prone to chemical disasters and the state averages about one chemical release a week based on 2023 data.“I'm hoping through this work to show that this is not normal, and (to) raise the bar in terms of what our expectations are for the facilities that live in our backyards,” Schlemmer said. “If they're not going to comply with the law …I want them to … know that they're going to be facing legal action, either from us or for government regulators.”Earlier this year, the Environmental Integrity Project sued the EPA along with Bayou City Water Keeper, the Center for Biological Diversity and nearly 300 water justice groups in the Waterkeeper Alliance. In the original intent to sue, the group states that the EPA “has failed to perform its mandatory duty under (the Clean Water Act) ... to biennially submit state water quality reports and an analysis thereof … to Congress.”Just last week, the EPA released its biannual preliminary plan for effluent limitations guidelines and the announcement states that the EPA plans to conduct new studies that will clarify the impact of discharges from certain industries on waterways. The plan is open for public comment here.

Chemicals
Water
Government

US environmental agency fast tracking new PFAS approvals for semiconductors

Hastened reviews of compounds as industry ramps up could increase pollution from likely toxic chemicalsThe Environmental Protection Agency is quietly fast tracking approval of new PFAS “forever chemicals” for use by the semiconductor industry at the same time the agency is publicly touting increased scrutiny of new PFAS and other chemicals.As US semiconductor production ramps up, the hastened reviews could sharply increase pollution containing little-studied PFAS that are likely toxic, accumulative in the environment and contribute to climate change. Continue reading...

The Environmental Protection Agency is quietly fast tracking approval of new PFAS “forever chemicals” for use by the semiconductor industry at the same time the agency is publicly touting increased scrutiny of new PFAS and other chemicals.As US semiconductor production ramps up, the hastened reviews could sharply increase pollution containing little-studied PFAS that are likely toxic, accumulative in the environment and contribute to climate change.Despite the risks, the EPA is “bending over backwards” for the semiconductor industry, said Mike Belliveau, the founder of the Bend The Curve non-profit who has lobbied on toxic chemical legislation.“We’re going to see more and more [PFAS pollution],” he said. “No one is happy that PFAS is in their drinking water or raining down from the air, and EPA’s permitting runs counter to rising scientific and public concern … so tension is mounting.”PFAS are a class of about 15,000 chemicals often used to make products resistant to water, stains and heat. They are called “forever chemicals” because they do not naturally break down, and are linked to cancer, liver problems, thyroid issues, birth defects, kidney disease, decreased immunity and other serious health problems.Semiconductors are essential to electronics used in defense, medical devices, smart phones, clean energy and more, and the Biden administration has spurred the industry’s onshoring with billions in incentives. But the industry is a prolific polluter and a major source of unregulated and unmonitored PFAS, creating tension with Biden’s sweeping plan to rein in PFAS pollution.The controversy represents a confluence of what environmental advocates have said are major deficiencies in PFAS regulation. It’s generating debate over the definition of PFAS, political meddling in EPA decisions, the rapid accumulation of little-studied PFAS and regulators’ black box decision making around chemical safety and approvals.The EPA in early December announced it would strengthen its review of new chemicals as part of the 2016 rewrite of Toxic Substances Control Act (TSCA), which are the laws governing the nation’s use of toxic substances.Previously, industry could begin selling a chemical if the EPA didn’t review it within 90 days, resulting in thousands of substances being sold with virtually no review.The law also included a “low volume exemption” that allows chemicals to be sent to market in fewer than 30 days with little scrutiny if they’re used in small amounts and do not put workers’ health at risk – over 600 PFAS were given low volume exemptions in recent decades, including those that were “lethal if inhaled” and “corrosive to the skin”.The 2016 TSCA rewrite eliminated those problems, but the first Trump EPA never implemented the law. The Biden EPA published it in early December, stating the agency “should encourage innovation, while also making sure that new chemistries can be used safely before they are allowed to enter commerce”.“Today, we’ve modernized our chemical reviews and continued to protect people from unsafe new PFAS,” said Michal Freedhoff, an EPA chemical safety administrator.But 40 pages into the rule are two paragraphs that advocates say contradicts the rule’s intent. It points to PFAS’s “critical role” in semiconductor production, and states that the agency “prioritizes” those PFAS and “now reviews these new chemicals in a third of the time compared to other sectors” – or as little as 90 days.The EPA further claims it put in place a “framework” to ensure the chemicals are safe, but the details are unclear. It also justifies the decision in part by claiming that semiconductor PFAS are used in a “closed loop”, meaning they are contained in the facility, do not put workers at risk and are properly disposed of.But advocates say that is untrue. While industry uses robots in many chip making processes, the facilities pump an enormous volume of PFAS waste into water or air. Some capture waste and send it to incinerators that are technologically incapable of fully destroying PFAS, and instead send toxic waste into the air around those facilities.The Biden administration has acknowledged the PFAS waste problem, but still claims the process is “closed loop”.“There is no closed system for PFAS,” Belliveau said.It’s also unclear exactly how the EPA is weighing chemicals’ risks. The agency generally relies on industry science, and in other situations in which it has fast tracked approval of new chemicals, it uses standardized formulas to assess health and environmental risks that seem “designed to get them to ‘yes’,” said Tosh Sagar, an attorney with Earthjustice, which litigates on PFAS issues.If there is health and safety data on the new chemicals, it was developed by industry and largely is legally hidden from the public under confidential business information claims.“It’s innocent until proven guilty and that’s a fundamental problem,” said Lenny Siegel, with Chips Communities United, a group working with industry and the administration to improve environmental safeguards. “If there are safety reports, then show me – the chemicals are going to be in our environment and blood for a long, long time.”While the industry has tried to evade environmental oversight, it is looking for alternatives to PFAS, but development is slow and difficult. Producing semiconductors is a highly complex process and PFAS are essential ingredients used in as many as 1,000 steps at the nanometric level.Recent testing data showed 78,000 parts per trillion (ppt) of PFAS in wastewater from one facility – the EPA legal limit for several common PFAS compounds is 4 ppt.The process also demands the use of fluorinated gases, or PFAS gas, in a range of processes, and their toxicological risks remain largely unknown. But they often turn into TFA, a toxic greenhouse gas that can stay in the atmosphere for 1,000 years. TFA is often found at higher levels than any other PFAS compound in the air, water, and human blood, but independent researchers are only beginning to study it.Meanwhile, the EPA has altered the definition of PFAS in the rule to exclude many gases that are considered PFAS by most public health agencies worldwide, Sagar said. The exclusion has been a priority for the chemical industry and military.Chip makers and the Biden administration have argued that the benefits of onshoring the semiconductor industry outweighs the risks. That may be a point of debate, Siegel said, but he added: “That’s not what the EPA is saying – they’re saying they’re protecting us.“The EPA is not doing their job,” Siegel added.

Chemicals
Climate
Pollution

Scientists find 'forever chemicals' lurking in certain smartwatch wristbands

Certain pricier styles of smartwatch wristband may not just be helping Americans stay fit — they may be exposing unsuspecting wearers to a hefty dose of "forever chemicals," a new study has found. More expensive wristbands made from fluorinated synthetic rubber tend to contain high amounts of one such compound, called perfluorohexanoic acid (PFHxA), according...

Certain pricier styles of smartwatch wristband may not just be helping Americans stay fit — they may be exposing unsuspecting wearers to a hefty dose of "forever chemicals," a new study has found. More expensive wristbands made from fluorinated synthetic rubber tend to contain high amounts of one such compound, called perfluorohexanoic acid (PFHxA), according to research, published Wednesday in Environmental Science & Technology Letters. “This discovery stands out because of the very high concentrations of one type of forever chemical found in items that are in prolonged contact with our skin,” corresponding author Graham Peaslee, a University of Notre Dame PFAS expert and nuclear physicist, said in a statement. PFHxA is one of thousands of types of per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS), a group of manmade compounds known for their ability to persist in the human body and in nature. Found in various kinds of household products, certain firefighting foams and industrial waste, some types of PFAS have been linked to cancer and other serious illnesses. Because of the ability of PFAS to repel water, sweat and oil, manufacturers have long included these compounds in items like stain-resistant textiles, menstrual products and fitness wear, the authors noted. The wristbands in question contain what's known as "fluoroelastomers," synthetic rubbers made from chains of PFAS — which are highly durable during sweaty workouts and help avoid discoloration. But the researchers warned that because the bands are so durable, they might provide easy access for forever chemicals to enter the wearer's skin. Meanwhile, prior research has shown that more than a fifth of Americans wear a smartwatch or a fitness tracker — and they do so for extended periods of time, the authors noted. The scientists ended up screening 22 wristbands from a range of brands and price points, looking for both fluorine — which indicates the possible presence of PFAS — and 20 individual types of PFAS. They found that not only did all 13 bands advertised as being made from fluoroelastomers contain the element fluorine, so too did two of the nine bands that were not marketed as such.  Of all the wristbands sampled, the researchers observed that those that cost more than $30 contained more fluorine than those priced under $15. When they checked all the wristbands for 20 different types of PFAS, they found that PFHxA was the most prevalent — popping up in nine out of 22 wristbands tested. The median PFHxA concentration was nearly 800 parts per billion (ppb), with one sample surpassing 16,000 ppb, according to the study. As a basis of comparison, a 2023 cosmetics study conducted by team found a median concentration of around 200 ppb of PFAS. To date, there are no federal regulatory limits that dictate safety levels for PFAS exposure through the skin. Currently, the Environmental Protection Agency only has set exposure thresholds for drinking water — and for six types of PFAS alone. That said, Peaslee stressed that he and his colleagues "have never seen extractable concentrations in the part-per-million range (>1000 ppb) for any wearable consumer product applied to the skin." The scientists acknowledged that they do not currently understand how readily PFHxA can transfer into the skin or whether the compound poses a health risk upon entry. Nonetheless, the study's lead author, Notre Dame graduate student Alyssa Wicks, recommended opting for lower-cost wristbands made from silicone. “If the consumer wishes to purchase a higher-priced band, we suggest that they read the product descriptions and avoid any that are listed as containing fluoroelastomers," Wicks said.

Chemicals
Health
Science

Suggested Viewing

928 The Threat Continues...

Since the 1950s deadly nuclear fallout has threatened millions of Americans from nuclear fallout carried east in the atmosphere across the United States, from the Nevada Test Site. “928 The Threat Continues...” tells the story of massive contamination from concentrated nuclear fallout that rained down during heavy storms, on communities and major cities for 40 years. Hundreds of thousands of cancer cases and deaths were the result. The Atomic Energy Commission and the Department of Energy knew the truth, but covered it up. Multiple generations may still face the long-term affects. Through current interviews with scientific experts and surviving victims across the country, plus footage from historic interviews with victims, whistle-blower scientists and journalists, we tell the devastating story of those affected by the deadly radioactive fallout. In Act 3, obscure government videos from US government websites reveal that the threat of cancer death to Americans from Nevada Test Site contamination continues even today! NTS has been renamed, the Nevada National Security Site or NNSS. Presidential administrations from Harry Truman to the present day have kept the highly contaminated former Nevada Test Site operating. Donald Trump while in office ordered the Department of Defense and the Department of Energy to start testing newly designed battlefield nuclear weapons at the NNSS despite the existence of The Non-Proliferation Treaty – 1970. Not withstanding the treaty, the extremely reckless aboveground testing area at the NNSS called Big Explosives Experimental Facility or B.E.E.F. tests non-nuclear bombs that send tons of highly contaminated nuclear dirt 10,000 feet into the atmosphere where the winds carry it east. It needs to be stopped now! The film asks viewers to inform their congressman and vote.

Chemicals
Crisis
Government

Unacceptable Risk: Dr. Margaret Kripke on Cancer and the Environment

Unacceptable Risk tells the story of a prominent cancer researcher who rethinks her assumptions about the causes of cancer and the true burden of environmentally-induced cancers.

Chemicals
Science
Health

Sprayed

An exploration of what happens when whole communities get exposed to toxins: Naled sprayed on Miami residents to fight Zika virus, Agent Orange sprayed on the Vietcong, and release of GMO mosquitoes in Brazil with pyriproxyfen added to drinking water to fight dengue. What are the results for nature and humanity? We meet Agent Orange survivors at Vietnamese detoxification and rehabilitation centers, parents of babies born with microcephaly from Zika virus, and Florida residents dealing with efforts to kill mosquitoes carrying Zika virus. Perspectives of doctors, scientists, and politicians are balanced with voices of ordinary citizens and victims to explore concerns about the potential impact on current and future generations.

Chemicals
Health
Science

Toxic Business

A documentary on the profits international chemical companies are gaining in Africa at cost of the health of small-scaled-farmers and consumers.International chemical companies sell high toxic agro-chemicals in Kenya, which are banned since long in Europe. They are banned because their ingredients cause cancer and have a major negative impact on the nature and environment. Anyhow – in developing countries like Kenya those toxic chemicals are sold without any regulations through small agro-shops all over the country. The small scaled farmers do believe in the promises of better and safer harvest those companies give. Today, the use of pesticides even inside the villages is already a daily business. Furthermore many of them already depend on hybrid seeds, old and resistant seeds supplants. Most of the consumers do not have the knowledge, how dangerous those agro-chemicals are: the WHO announced that annually 346.000 people die, caused by accidentally poisoning with those chemicals, 2/3 of them within developing countries.In the face of world food, industry is trying to push its way into the markets. On the contrary, statistics and alternative farming methods in East Africa show that it no longer needs chemicals and hybrid seeds to feed the world, but a general rethinking.

Agriculture
Chemicals
Business

We Trees

Ever wonder what trees think of us now that we have created a climate disaster? This 2-minute film answers that question. As Bill McKibben recently tweeted about the film, “Who speaks for trees? In this short and elegant video, the trees themselves.” It has been screened at Green Fest (Serbia), The Colorado Environmental Film Festival, The Wildlife Conservation Film Festival and Winner of Merit at the Nature Without Borders Film Festival.

Forests
Chemicals
Climate

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