Less than ten days after setting drinking water standards for six of the hundreds of chemicals known collectively as PFAS, EPA has now identified two of those PFAS that have been widely used for decades, PFOA and PFOS, as hazardous substances under CERCLA.
The media will report this as breaking news, and it is monumental but it is most certainly not a surprise. As EPA’s reminds us, EPA promised to do exactly this in its PFAS road map issued in the fall of 2021. It is nothing short of extraordinary that EPA is only about six months later than it hoped in doing these things.
On April 10, EPA reported its conclusion that zero is the concentration of these PFAS in drinking water that does not present a risk to human health, so we can now expect an avalanche of CERCLA litigation over the most minute concentrations of these PFAS in water that might be a drinking water source (the enforceable drinking water limit for each of these PFAS is 4 parts per trillion).
Mintz – Jeffrey R. Porter
April 19, 2024