Just over a week ago, InsideEPA and Politico broke news that the White House and the EPA attempted to bury a proposal from the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry that suggested exposure to Teflon and Scotchgard chemicals may be harmful at levels 10 times lower than what the EPA has publicly called safe.
EWG calls on the EPA, testing laboratories and drinking water utilities across that country that have PFAS testing results to make the information public immediately.
Based on a reanalysis of the national dataset by Eurofins Eaton Analytical, a water testing lab that processed more than 30 percent of nationwide water samples, EWG estimated how many utilities would likely have contaminated water if the reporting values had been set lower.
At a reporting limit of 5 ppt, an estimated 1,046 utilities could have tested positive.
If all results down to 2.5 ppt were reported, we estimate that over 1,900 of the 4,920 water utilities tested in the U.S. would have reported contamination.
Using maps generated by Eurofins Eaton Analytical and the public UCMR results, we calculated the number of water utilities that the lab identified as having PFOA or PFOS in their water, without results being reported to the EPA.
The PFAS water contamination issue is not going away and the EPA needs to take immediate action to both understand the full extent of contamination and ensure Americans have safe drinking water.
Based on the sensitive results from Eurofins Eaton Analytical, we estimated the number of American water systems with PFAS levels at or above 2.5 and 5 ppt.
To calculate the number of utilities estimated to have detections at 5 ppt, we used the ratio of detections between Eurofins lab at UCMR levels and at 5 ppt compared with the overall detection ratio for all labs at UCMR levels.
We estimate that 21.3 percent of water utilities in the UCMR program would likely have PFAS detections at 5 ppt or higher, and the detection frequency approximately doubles when comparing levels of 5 ppt and 2.5 ppt.