CHICAGO — Water utilities will be required to routinely test for toxic forever chemicals, and spend billions upgrading treatment plants to filter them, under the first-ever national limits intended to protect Americans from widespread threats to human health and the environment.
In Illinois alone, the drinking water of more than 660,000 people is contaminated at levels exceeding the proposed standards for per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances or PFAS. The most widely detected versions of the chemicals build up in human blood, cause cancer and other diseases and take years to leave the body.
Last year the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency declared there is effectively no safe level of exposure to perfluorooctane sulfonic acid (PFOS), used by 3M for decades to make Scotchgard stain repellent, or perfluorooctanoic acid (PFOA), which 3M sold to DuPont to manufacture Teflon coatings for cookware, clothing and wiring.
