Forever Chemicals: What Science can Still Achieve

What has changed is that initially the major focus was drinking water, and the EPA stepped up. We don't know what happens with this administration, but progress has been made to regulate and treat drinking water. I think the next level item is to use the same knowledge that made us regulate drink water to apply and find out what can we advise and do to minimize the exposure to people from food. We can't really ban PFAS in food because they've escaped already. The intended use—they're out there. So now it's just a matter of, is there a way to nudge or prevent the worst exposure while not interfering with most people's lives? PFAS are already interfering with people's lives, but some people don't want to know. It's just a matter of how can you, with the least amount of effort, get the biggest benefit for public health? And that really relies on hopefully most states being very strategic about the need to do that for any contaminated sites that impact food supplies.

The most obvious one, and something that we're discussing within our institution and with friends in the region, is what do we do about the fact that fishing is part of a lot of traditions here? Traditional livelihoods and indigenous communities rely on fishing and hunting and gathering, but at the same time, we know that some of the freshwater fish carry much more PFAS than a lot of the other food items that that are out there.

I wish we could treat PFAS as a group because when we ban certain types of PFAS, there is an industry producing different compounds. We need to test them to understand their properties. I wish all PFAS were banned.

As federal agencies work on PFAS involving testing and analyzing food and other products, it can be challenging to understand some of the methods used, as well as some of the approaches taken. We do and have worked with states in regard to PFAS regarding not only toxicological values, but also methods and communications. Through the White House Council on Environmental Quality, we have or have had a workgroup, which included representatives from state agricultural and health departments. Certainly having communication with states as well as other stakeholders is very important in regard to PFAS.

Q: With PFAS regulations ongoing and updating often, we're still in this sort of compliance era.  After this, what is next?

What will be next is likely monitoring even more compounds. The level of some PFAS will be lower. It will be looked at in different matrices, especially in food, for example. There is only regulation in Europe only for a limited number of food, but that is likely to extend. The scope of the number of PFAS compounds is going to increase with different levels, and probably other contaminants will be discovered in the near future and monitored well.

As we learn more about PFAS, then we can learn more about the tox data and regulators can enact an expanded list of PFAS compounds in various matrices. Another thing is that we need to enforce and monitor the PFAS in food and food products and food contact materials to make sure that the food we eat is safe.

Q: Is it too late for us to completely mitigate the effects of PFAS? If so, what can your research and findings do? 

The genie is out of the bottle. You can't put PFAS back. The problem with chemicals that don't degrade is once they’re out, then they keep being somewhere. So we'll have to live with that problem. I think the main challenge is to identify what are the most common exposure pathways and what can you do about them. Can you mitigate them, ban them, remediate them? Drinking water remediation is in place. In food contact materials, bans are in place that hopefully will be taken across many more states. What we do in Rhode Island, for example, is to make sure we know if there are particular fish or regions that are more contaminated to the point where the state might step in and say, do not fish here. It's not the perfect solution, but it would at least send a message out to the public that if they have a choice, go somewhere else. I think that's one of the tasks for basically all states—make sure you understand where you have major exposure routes.

It's for sure not too late. We are developing technologies for remediation of PFAS from water, drinking water and surface water. I think that researchers, like myself, we have lots of work to do, but we can still get rid of all PFAS.