American Chemistry Council Uses Disinformation to Target PFAS Safeguards

By Genna Reed | The Equation | August 8, 2022

Read the full article by Genna Reed (The Equation)

"Last week, the American Chemistry Council (ACC), the chemical industry’s trade association, submitted a highly deceptive petition challenging the EPA’s June decision to set significantly stricter health advisories for four PFAS chemicals. In its statement about the petition, the group claimed to support the development of drinking water standards for the PFAS chemicals PFOA PFOS, PFBS, and GenX. But it speciously charged that EPA was failing to ensure “the scientific integrity of its process.”

When I saw ACC’s allegations, coming just as the EPA has finally began the long-overdue process of using the best available science to set enforceable drinking water standards, I was appalled by the irony and the injustice. At federal agencies, scientific integrity policies are meant to protect federal scientists from political interference and other forms of censorship and suppression and to ensure that agencies are properly incorporating science into their decisionmaking processes. The ACC and its alumni (including former head of EPA’s chemicals office, Nancy Beck) have notoriously been involved in numerous incidents of political interference, manipulation or suppression of EPA scientific processes and documents at the EPA and beyond.

These breaches of scientific integrity didn’t happen in a vacuum. As ACC and PFAS manufacturers denied, silenced, and lied, thousands of chemicals in the class have made their way into our waterways, air, soil, homes, and our children’s bodies. Now as the body of evidence of the harms associated with this class of chemicals grows larger, ACC is ramping up its attempts to delay the important work finally underway at EPA to protect the public."