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4/28/2025
WT Staff
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Monday, April 28 2025 301 pm EDT
Part II Interview with the Authors of "Poisoning the Well - How Forever Chemicals Contaminated America"
A conversation with Rachel Frazin, Author and Energy and Environment Policy Reporter
WT: Hi Rachel, thanks for being here. You have just launched your first book, congratulations! How does it feel?
Frazin: Thank you! Good, scary, exciting, you know, all the feelings.
Link here to Island Press for Poisoning the Well.
WT: Tell us about your first encounter with "forever chemicals"? How did you learn about the water contamination issue?
Frazin: I cover Energy and Environment Policy for The Hill since January of 2020. One of the first bills passed when I was on the beat was the PFAS Action Act. I thought, "What is this bill? What are these chemicals?" The more research I did, the more interesting and alarming I found PFAS (per-and polyfluoroalkyl substances), many of which have been linked to cancers. These are not only polluting specific communities, they are inside of pretty much every one of us.
WT: How widespread is the contamination? Is this largely impacting the drinking water directly downstream of PFAS manufacturing sites, or does it extend further?
Frazin: A lot of us are exposed to PFAS in our drinking water. A study from the US Geological Survey found PFAS in 45% of Americans' tapwater. When EPA set drinking water regulation for PFAS, they were operating under the assumption that the average person's exposure comes from consumer products, the air or just other uses broadly, with the drinking water being only part of the exposure.
See USGS PFAS in US tapwater interactive dashboard, here.
People who live in places like Courtland, Alabama are disproportionately exposed. If your drinking water source is downstream near one of these (manufacturing) facilities or near a military base that used the chemicals, you are probably going to have it in your drinking water at a much higher rate, unless you have some sort of filtration. I certainly would feel more comfortable drinking tapwater in a home that's not near one of these locations.
I would also point out that every person is different, different people may react differently to chemical exposure. I was speaking with a toxicologist, and the way she put it to me was, "There might be a lab rat out there that gets cancer pretty much no matter what you expose it to. There might be a lab rat out there that doesn't get cancer no matter what you expose it to. Most lab rats, like most of us, are probably somewhere in the middle. So, minimizing your exposure is probably good to minimize your risk."
WT: Is it up to all of us to demand products made without PFAS? Do the consumers need to press industry to find another way to produce grease-proof, heat-resistant, smudge-proof products?
Frazin: Maybe. When we see a product in a store that we want, we buy it and don't really give it a second thought. A lot of times, people don't really put much thought into the supply chain, to who made this? Who lives near this factory?
We hope with this book, that people do stop and think, making choices now as an informed consumer. I guess the one caveat is, I am a reporter, I am not an activist. I don't necessarily want to come here and prescribe what people can or should not buy, but I think my goal with this is to give people all of the information and help them see the whole picture.
WT: Give us the background on PFAS. When did these chemicals show up in consumer products in the market? When was it discovered that they were hazardous to health?
Frazin: The first PFAS, "PTFE" was invented in 1938. Some of its earlier uses were in the military, because it was a very stable chemical. It helped to prevent corrosion in things like the atom bomb. It became very popular in non-stick pans in the early 1960s. That's when this really took off. Everyone had a non-stick pan in their house when I was growing up. These products have become very popular. The (inventor/developer) company had some evidence dating back to the sixties, documents showing the chemical may be hazardous. Some internal DuPont memos from the sixties say, "Be careful when you're dealing with this, you may want to use extreme caution." Regular people didn't get that information. As we write in our book, the (US Food and Drug Administration) FDA also had some early evidence (of potential harm) in the fifties and sixties when the companies decided to make these products. Some people within the FDA had studies that raised concern.
One study embedded PTFE "Teflon" under rats' skin, and found it causes tumors. So there were some sort of objections lodged during that time, in the late fifties and sixties. The government had some evidence, but it is complicated, because the government is not one entity. Different branches may not be talking to each other. That may have been somebody in the FDA (aware of health risk), I can't say whether the entirety of the FDA was aware. The military had some of its own evidence emerging as early as the seventies that PFAS were bio-accumulative, or persistent in the environment, and that they could cause pollution problems. By the eighties, I believe in some handbooks, they were being referred to as hazardous.
The EPA maybe didn't have an indication quite yet that this was a problem (in the drinking water). I think when birth defects were discovered (in the 1980's), the EPA was alerted. They weren't too worried about it or there were some subsequent studies that maybe didn't find PFAS causing the birth defects. I don't think much came of it, and they weren't notified again until the late nineties about the persistence or the prevalence in human beings, and that this stuff is in everybody.
WT: As for policy, when was the first indication coming from a regulatory agency to put the brakes on PFAS manufacturing?
Frazin: The US EPA was established in 1970, so some PFAS pre-date the EPA's existence. In 1976, the EPA passed its first chemicals law, the "Toxic Substances Control Act" which governed which chemicals got approved, but everything that was already in existence was pretty much grandfathered in. So, it wasn't for decades that they started taking a hard look at existing PFAS. Once the EPA learned in the late nineties how prevalent PFAS was, they started to take an approach of working with the manufacturers to try to get them to reduce their use of PFAS, or at least to phase out the two most notorious PFOA and PFOS, the most studied of the forever chemicals. The (initial) approach of EPA was more collaborative with industry, as opposed to regulatory.
Now there have been some regulatory developments since that time. It's certainly been slow going, and it wasn't until 2024 that we got drinking water regulations, the limits on the water utilities as to how much PFAS they can have in drinking water. They are not required to (comply) quite yet.
WT: Can you talk to us about the legal challenge that's come against the EPA for passing PFAS limit in drinking water?
Frazin: Yes, the EPA set the MCL (Maximum Contaminant Level) in 2024, but it's not in effect yet. There have been some lawsuits from industry over that regulation. It's not clear how that's all going to shake out right now. When there's new administration, a lot of times they request pauses on a lot of these laws. Before you know it, there are court cases and all these lawyers and the government defends the rule. We need to figure out whether we actually even like this rule, whether we plan to support it and defend it, or whether we are going to revise it or get rid of it.
I think the (new Administration) has requested a few delays while they figure out whether they want to uphold the drinking water rule. It is not necessarily a binary choice to keep it or cut it, there are things they might do to limit or weaken it that they stop short of getting rid of it entirely. They might, for example, raise the MCL. That's just one example of something they could do, I'm not saying they will necessarily do that.
WT: Who is behind the push to relax the PFAS laws? Did you find evidence in support of allowing higher levels of PFAS in drinking water?
Frazin: Well, for one is the chemical industry. They have a vested interest in not having their members be on the hook to clean this up. Again, it's just the broader business interests, the business groups have sort of helped lead the push against this law. On the drinking water side, some of the water utilities (are against the regulation). I don't want to be sweeping because there are some water utilities who do support the PFAS rules. Some of them don't, and some of them say, "Hey, you know, we can't afford to clean this up. We didn't put this in the water. These technologies are expensive, we don't have the money." Generally, business has political allies and, some Republicans in particular have raised concerns and criticisms.
Republicans have been less opposed to the drinking water regulation than to the hazardous cleanup regulation, PFOA and PFOS being classified hazardous substances. The EPA put polluters on the hook to clean them up. I've heard more resistance there.
It's interesting, on the Republican side there is this "Make America Healthy Again" movement that does seem to reject chemicals and does want to put (industry) on the hook. The Republican party has historically been a big ally to industry, so there are these two warring factions. This administration has a lot to say about environmental contamination. President Trump himself, in his joint address to Congress, pointed to a little boy with cancer because of some sort of environmental contamination or chemical. Yet, his administration is rolling back environmental protections.
We will see what they do on PFAS, but more broadly they are rolling back regulations on mercury, air toxics and things that we do know are linked to harmful health outcomes. They they have a lot to say as far as environmental contamination, but at the same time they are rolling back significant rules aimed at protecting Americans from environmental contaminants.
WT: So does this reconcile?
Frazin: I think it's a good question. I would just go back to these warring factions. You've got a faction of the party that is "Make America Healthy Again", but then you've got this other faction of the party. At least as far as the EPA goes, they've got all kinds of chemical industry veterans who have been appointed to leading roles, so I think in practice it seems like that branch, at least at the EPA, the (chemical lobby) is winning out.
It can be really difficult to prove or even see a link between the cause and the effect of chemical contamination. An example that I keep giving is that if I get in the car and I drive and I hit somebody with the car and they get injured, the cause and effect there are very clear. If I'm drinking contaminated water, and in 15 years I develop cancer, it's a lot harder to say, "Oh, well, this is because of the water, or because I bought this product."
I think those links can be very difficult. The links between the water or the products and health are just not obvious. Making things more expensive is unpopular. Regulations, like it or not, do make things more expensive. With the last election, I think inflation was a big part of a lot of peoples' thought process and decision making. A lot of the time, people will buy the cheapest product on the shelf because they want it and it's affordable for them and they may not be doing this entire broader analysis in their minds.
WT: What's your take on the level of public awareness of the presence and risk around PFAS?
Frazin: I think most Americans have never heard of this. As I meet new people and I say, "Hey, I'm writing this book on PFAS", and people ask, "What's that?" So even though folks like you and I have been covering this for a long time, and a lot of the media writes about it all the time, yet a lot of people don't know.
That's on the consumer side, not to say people can't or shouldn't get more educated. Certainly we're trying to do an education here. That being said, the corporations, as we note in our book, have had evidence of the toxicity of these substances for a very long time. They have continued to make and sell these products despite that evidence. Now, I think that's kind of as far as I can comment, I can tell you what the facts are, I can tell you what these studies show and the evidence that they had, impacts in animals; rats, dogs or even monkeys. Also evidence that it was building up, not only in the employees, but also the general population. They have continued to make and sell and profit from these products. I can't tell you how they've thought about it or why, or if they've thought about it, but you know the evidence was there, there was certainly evidence that it was dangerous.
WT: Can you get specific about the evidence?
Frazin: So there are studies going back a very long time and more recent studies that have found health impacts when you exposed animals to various PFAS. Some had liver impacts, kidney impacts. One study from the seventies or eighties with monkeys, they had to abort the study because all the monkeys died. There was a study done after a massive PFAS lawsuit in West Virginia. Part of that settlement was predicated on study of the people in the (Parkersburg) area, testing their blood and following their health outcomes. This linked PFOA to kidney cancer. This science panel has in turn spurred additional litigation on the basis that PFOA has been proven to have these (adverse health effects).
See the C8 Science Panel findings, here.
WT: Is it fair to say the public relies on government to ensure products that come to market are safe? What's the role of government going forward here?
Frazin: I think there is an expectation among the general public that the government is out there protecting them. I do not want to be on the record endorsing any particular policies, saying they are good or bad, or that the trade-offs are worth it.
For many years, the government has not put any limits on these dangerous toxins. (EPA) has started putting drinking water MCLs forward as a step towards regulating these forever chemicals and our exposure to them in our drinking water. These chemicals are mobile, they move through the water. There is no formal limit government-wide across how much can be dumped, no limits on discharges. The Biden administration issued an "Advanced Notice of Proposed Rule Making" in 2021 saying, "Hey, we are considering a rule". It never went forward. Then the Trump administration came in and withdrew that Advanced Notice, so now it's not even on the books that the government wants to do anything to limit the discharges and the releases of these chemicals.
I think it's good to recognize that there are trade offs. Regulation makes things more expensive, makes it harder to afford things, and might hurt the economy. On the other hand, you could say it also hurts the economy to have people with extremely high medical bills. So this is what we're wrestling with every day. It's a complicated, messy picture but what we do know is that these chemicals have caused harm to people's health. Medical bills are expensive too, and that's another piece of the economic picture that I think doesn't always get considered.
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