House passes sweeping bill to target spread of toxic ‘forever chemicals’

By Rebecca Beitsch | The Hill | January 10, 2020

Read the full article by Rebecca Beitsch (The Hill)

“The House on Friday passed legislation to broadly regulate a cancer-linked chemical over objections from the White House that Congress is sidestepping agencies.

The bill, which passed 247 to 159, targets a class of chemicals abbreviated as PFAS that have been leaching into the water supply across the country, causing health problems in communities where water has been contaminated…

‘The Environmental Protection Agency has known about these risks for decades and has allowed this contamination to spread. Last year, EPA announced its PFAS Action Plan. It was woefully inadequate, and since that time, we’ve learned that EPA is not even keeping the weak commitments it made in that plan,’ House Energy and Commerce Committee Chairman Frank Pallone Jr. (D-N.J.) said on the floor during debate late Thursday, referencing the EPA missing a self-imposed deadline for announcing how it would regulate the substance…

Under the bill the EPA would be required to set a mandatory drinking water standard for PFAS.

The EPA currently recommends water contain no more than 70 parts per trillion of PFAS, but Democrats and public health groups say the agency needs an actual requirement — one that will likely need to be below that level to protect public health.

Republicans lamented that negotiations to require that drinking water standard fell apart in December.

But now that the legislation incorporates measures from 11 previous PFAS bills, Republicans, including those in the White House, say the bill is too broad, making little distinction between the more than 6,000 forms of PFAS while opening up too many parties to liability…

In a policy statement released earlier this week, the White House threatened to veto the bill, further diminishing the prospects of legislation already facing resistance in the GOP-led Senate.

‘The regulatory process works best when EPA and other agencies are free to devise regulations based on the best available science and careful consideration of all the relevant facts. By truncating the rulemaking process, this legislation risks undermining public confidence in the EPA’s decisions, and also risks the imposition of unnecessary costs on States, public water systems, and others responsible for complying with its prescriptive mandates,’ the White House wrote in its statement of administrative policy…

The bill includes a number of other measures that would further regulate PFAS, including requiring PFAS to be covered under the hazardous waste cleanup law, and imposes a five-year moratorium on the development of new PFAS chemicals.

The bill also spells out new regulations for production and cleanup of such toxic chemicals, requiring the EPA to regulate PFAS air pollution under the Clean Air Act, as well as another portion outlining proper disposal for PFAS chemicals.”

This content provided by the PFAS Project.