Today’s webinar will focus on navigating the PFAS regulatory scientific interface for 2027 and beyond. With that, I’d like to introduce our presenter for today.

We are pleased to have with Taryn McKnight, Vice President and PFAS Practice Leader for Eurofins Environment Testing USA.

Taryn McKnight has 25 years of experience in the environmental testing industry. As one of Eurofins subject matter experts on PFAS, she contributes to multiple organization and agency workgroups to address PFAS challenges, including her effort as co-chair of the NGWA subcommittee to develop PFAS sampling guidance and a PFAS forensics white paper.

With her expertise, she provides technical guidance to clients in setting up programs to achieve their site-specific objectives and to agencies with understanding their analytical options and data usability considerations.

All right. That concludes our introduction, so now I will hand things over to Taryn McKnight to get us started.

Great. Thank you, Dane, and thank you everyone for joining us today.

So what I want to give you today is an accurate and up-to-date picture of where federal PFAS regulation stands as of September of this year because the last nine months have produced a lot of headlines.

Not all of them mean what they appear to mean, so we’ll hash that all out and we’ll walk through what was adopted, what was proposed or withdrawn, what the courts have now settled, and what’s still on the docket between now and about the end of next year.

My focus is going to be federal and environmental, as we just don’t have enough time to cover all the state-level activity or what’s happening in the consumer product space.

OK, so let’s start with a big-picture view of how the regulatory landscape is shaping up.

Before we get into any specific rule, we should be clear that we’re not operating with a single definition of what constitutes a PFAS.

There are several, and they’ve been expanding for the last 15 years or so. And this is happening while our target reporting limits are dropping. But it’s important to note that the top access here is theoretical.

So EPA’s CompTox database may have cataloged over 20 ,000 structures that would qualify as a PFAS according to the definitions that they’ve specified in that database, but that doesn’t mean that those structures were ever produced or introduced into commerce.

That number is far less, on the order of hundreds according to the EPA, but we’re still navigating unclear waters when it comes to knowing which PFAS those are.

So the target is moving in two directions at once. We’re being asked to find more compounds at lower concentrations, and the definition of what counts as a PFAS compound depends entirely on which statute you’re working under.

As you can see in the U.S., within the EPA’s purview, we are taking a varied approach to which PFAS to address or how many, depending upon the program.

There’s at least nine, and each program office picked the scope that fits its own authority or structure or available methods. We have everything from regulating just PFOA and PFAS under CERCLA to addressing dozens of PFAS under the Clean Water Act, to addressing PFAS as a class under TOSCA.

Now the operational consequence, of course, is that scope drives cost and liability, right?

And these can be different across programs. So a facility could be fully compliant with a 40 analyte NPDES permit but still be at risk due to TRI emissions.

So before you scope any program, you just want to make sure that you really understand which list or chemicals you’re being measured against, not just for regulation but also in terms of you know risk and liability.

So a lot of our approach to addressing PFAS at the federal level stems from the previous administration’s PFAS strategic roadmap which had a litany of action items that were organized by those program offices.

This was published in October of 2021, and it was largely complete by the end of 2024. The document’s a very easy read, so I’m not gonna regurgitate it for you, but I will highlight a few of the key actions that were undertaken, and then provide a status update on those as well.

These are the major rulings, the really big ticket items that were adopted and are in effect now. This includes drinking water maximum contaminant levels, or MCLs, and hazardous substance designation under CERCLA.

I’m sure it would come as no surprise that the drinking water rule and the CERCLA rule were immediately contested in the courts, and we’ll talk about the status of those a bit later. We also have some TOSCA reporting obligations that are in effect.

So these are key regulations that either didn’t quite make it over the finish line or are still somewhere in the process, and so this includes efforts under the Clean Water Act, under RCRA, and the Clean Air Act.

So that’s what was initiated under the previous administration, but what are we doing under the current administration?

Have we carried any of the unresolved items forward or initiated any new items?

And one of the more telling actions that reveals what the current administration will pursue as it relates to PFAS regulation is contained in the unified agenda, which is basically a checklist of rulemaking items and anticipated dates of completion or initiation for those.

We’ll talk about each of these in more detail when we cover the individual rules that they pertain to, but you can see several items listed here associated with those big ticket I just introduced, so TOSCA, Clean Water Act, State Drinking Water Act, and RCRA.

And you can also see where target dates are sliding, which is not necessarily uncommon. Okay, so now let’s dig into the specifics around these individual regulations. Okay, so first we’ve got TOSCA. So this is the Toxic Substances Control Act.

And I’m sure there’s many of you out there who may not be involved with managing Tosca reporting obligations for your clients. So you might be wondering why should you care about this? And I think it really comes down to the information that will ultimately be accessible to all of us.

If or when these reporting obligations are fulfilled, we will hopefully take a significant step forward as an industry in understanding which PFAS were introduced into commerce in large enough quantities to pose an environmental or human health risk.

So EPA adopted this one-time reporting rule for PFAS under TOSCA. So this is a look-back rule, and it requires those who have manufactured or imported PFAS in any year between January 2011 and 2022 to report information regarding quite a bit, uses, production volumes, byproducts, environmental and health effects, worker exposure and disposal. And there are currently no de minimis exemptions.

This is an adopted rule, but the reporting deadline continues to be delayed with the most recent pushback to January of 2027. But sitting on the unified agenda is a line item for considering proposed exemptions. That was slated for June of 2026, but we didn’t see it then. So I’m guessing we could continue to see a few more delays with this.

That proposed rule change could include de minimis exemptions or exemptions for importers of finished articles, just things to make this a little bit easier to comply with and less duplicative of efforts.

However, when this reporting obligation comes due, this is a pretty significant amount of information that would be publicly available.

So it could be used when navigating property transactions, possible source identification or apportionment, source control efforts by municipalities, and the list goes on.

In a similar vein, but not a one-time reporting rule, we have an annual reporting obligation under the Toxics Release Inventory, or TRI, which regulates industry’s emissions to the air, land or water.

So companies have to report annually on emissions of any chemicals that are specifically listed on the TRI. And right now we’re up to 206 PFAS on the TRI list.

This list grows each year due to triggers that mandate certain PFAS be added to the list.

And EPA classified PFAS on the TRI list as chemicals of special concern, which removed any de minimis exemptions that had previously applied.

In 2024, EPA attempted to add many more PFAS to the TRI through proposed rulemaking, but they didn’t quite get that one over the finish line in time.

So it is possible this rule could still move forward under the current administration because they did consider new public comments and they do have this listed on the unified agenda for July of this year.

So we’ll have to see what happens with that one.

After EPA classified PFAS as chemicals of special concern, removing that de minimis exemption, they expected reporting volumes to go up pretty significantly, but they didn’t.

So the other threshold that’s still in place is the 100 pounds emitted per year.

And the agency had concluded at the time that a revision of the threshold wasn’t warranted because they didn’t have enough data.

However, they also stated that continued limited reporting of these PFAS may indicate that threshold should be lowered. And they also stated that they anticipated revisiting that threshold after five years of data on PFAS as chemicals of special concern. So reporting year 2024 was year one of that five-year clock, which puts any possible reconsideration of that threshold somewhere around the end of this decade.

Looking at the 2025 reporting year, those data were just published in July of this year, so there’s unfortunately a bit of a lag with these reporting data, but this was the first cycle to include nine PFAS that were added in January of 2025.

And six of them are of the 6-2 fluorotelomor sulfonate group, two more are PFDA salts, and then there was one other one I can’t remember, but 6-2-FTS I think is the interesting one because it’s an indicator compound associated with modern fluorotelemer AFFFs, misdepressant replacement chemistry, and some surface coating applications.

So for the first time, we would be building a national release inventory database on more modern PFAS that we might be chasing at site work rather than only legacy PFAAs or novel PFAS that seem to be under any reporting threshold.

All right, now onto the Safe Drinking Water Act, which is where most of the public attention has been this year, a flurry of headlines. Okay, so as of June of 2024, we had finalized drinking water MCLs for five PFAS. And that ranged from a four to 10 per per trillion limit and a health hazard index of one that addresses mixtures of PFAS.

There is a longer timeline for public water systems to come into full compliance with these standards, so five years after the rule is adopted, which makes the deadline for this one 2029.

I mentioned that this rule had been challenged in the courts, so when the new administration took over, they had to decide whether or not to defend this rulemaking, which ultimately they did decide. And EPA decided that they support an MCL of four PBT for PFOA and PFOS, but they wish to rescind the rest of it.

And they are proposing a separate rulemaking to extend that compliance deadline even further, given the uncertainty about the fate of this rulemaking.

The trouble with this is there is a no backsliding provision in the Safe Drinking Water Act which prevents the EPA from making an adopted MCL any less restrictive.

So the courts will have to decide on this one.

Now in December of last year, the EPA did request a partial vacatur essentially requesting that the judges split the MCLs under consideration.

So decide on PFO and PFOS separate from the rest, but they declined to do so.

So that means that the courts will be making a decision on the whole thing, either all the MCLs stand or they all fall, of course, subject to any subsequent appeals.

So right now we are anticipating a decision from the courts, perhaps early next year. That’s what the anticipation is right now.

Now, the unregulated contaminants monitoring rule or UCMR is where we collect data on the presence of emerging contaminants that are not yet regulated in public water systems around the country to assess whether a drinking water standard is necessary or beneficial.

So what’s really uncharted territory here is that we were monitoring for already regulated PFAS under UCMR-5. So this was happening after that rule was already in effect.

And this is a summary of the finalized reported results for UCMR 5, and you can see here why EPA is proposing to rescind everything except the MCLs for PFO and PFOS, because the UCMR data just don’t support that final regulatory determination to regulate the rest.

And right now, we are gearing up for UCMR 6. The target list for monitoring was just released on July 1st of this year, and it tells you where EPA thinks the concern lies moving forward.

So there’ll be 30 contaminants total that’ll be monitored for between 2028 and 2030. The seven listed on this slide are from the organofloring group and they are all considered ultra short chain compounds, but not all are considered PFAS.

So according to EPA’s working definition, only four of these seven, PFMOAA, PFPRA, PFPRS, and PFETS are considered PFAS, leaving out TFA, TFMS, and TFSI. Now, the technical point is that these are ultra-short-chain compounds, so 1 to 3 carbons.

They are not part of methods 537.1 or 533. They will require a new method that is currently in EPA-563. Most of them are expected to pass right through popular treatment systems that are currently being designed and installed to address MCLs for PFOA and PFOS.

So if EPA eventually decides to regulate any of these compounds in drinking water, how to treat for them all the way down to TFA is to become a future problem. All right, so this one is hot off the presses.

EPA announced on September 9th that it is launching a study that will apply non-target analysis to drinking water sources. The scope includes PFAS, pharmaceuticals, and more than a thousand potential contaminants.

The agency’s framing of this is that Americans are concerned about unknown pollutants and it tends to find out what is actually there. Every method applied in a regulatory context to PFAS so far is a targeted analysis. This is where we have analytical reference standards and we report fully quantitative data.

But you get an answer only for what you looked for, which means the target analyte list is a decision made years earlier during the writing of the method.

Now non-target analysis turns that on its head. You can collect high resolution mass spectrometry data across the full sample, and then you interrogate that data against spectral libraries and suspect screening lists after the fact.

So you’re not limited to what you thought to ask or look for. So that’s got two implications.

First, non-target data is re-interrogatable when a compound becomes interesting three years from now, you can go back to the archive data file and ask whether it was there without recollecting the sample. There’s no targeted method that lets you do that.

Second, the results are semi-quantitative at best, and identification is tiered by confidence levels. So you can think of this more as generating leads rather than compliance numbers.

So, how does this line up with the future rulemaking efforts under the Safe Drinking Water Act? The CCL-6, the contaminant candidate list that is used to, or typically used to select contaminants from for UCMR monitoring, this spring included microplastics and pharmaceuticals as priority contaminant groups for the first time, and PFAS as a class was already sitting on the CCL, but EPA was constrained in selecting any of them for monitoring due to the lack of standard methods.

EPA says that the non-target work is going to fill the gaps that the CCL and UCMR processes don’t reach because those mechanisms can only prioritize and monitor things that somebody already suspected and built a method for.

Okay, so now we’re moving on to the Clean The activities that I’ll discuss here could affect clients in any number of sectors, including municipalities who process wastewater, landfills who discharge to the wastewater treatment plants, manufacturers or airports who discharge those POTWs and the like.

So addressing PFAS and wastewater discharges really occurs in tandem with a supporting role from the EPA and an enforcement role from the states.

Every other year, EPA publishes an affluent guidelines program plan, which establishes technology-based standards for industrial wastewater discharges.

And in the year 2023, EPA had first released their program plan 15, where it stated it would not pursue further actions for various categories, but it would continue to monitor them.

However, the 2023 NDAA, National Defense Authorization Act, was being published at the same time, and it included a stipulation about affluent limitation guidelines directed the EPA to publish them for all the different categories it had mentioned in its plan and on their specific timelines.

So this, what’s listed in green is the congressional mandate. You can see most of those headlines have passed. We do have a few updates on those timelines from that unified agenda, and those are for the sectors listed here in orange.

But really the take-home message here is regardless of timelines, which continue to slip. EPA does seem to be focused on addressing PFAS at the source.

But what we don’t know yet is what approach they will take. So the first set of guidelines we were expecting to see released in January of this year was for the chemicals and plastics manufacturing category.

So once we finally get our eyes on those, we’re gonna see what approach they take for the sector, and that could be illuminating for what’s to come for the rest of the sectors.

Now, although EPA’s efforts to establish ELGs may be taking longer than planned, the agency has reminded the states back in 2022 and again in 2025 that most states can address PFAS discharges themselves through state-issued NFDS permits.

For those who are not familiar with this aspect of the Clean Water Act, it prohibits discharging pollutants from a point source into waters of the United States unless that discharge is authorized by a National Pollute Discharge Elimination System or NPDES permit.

I can tell you that we definitely saw an increase in NPDES permitting for PFAS in 2025 and that continued in 2026. We would expect to see this trend continue. However, there is this one little gotcha about that.

So in order for the states to add PFAS to NPDES permits, they usually depend upon the EPA to establish promulgated methods for monitoring first. Although EPA has long since released draft methods that they encourage the use of, it wasn’t until recently that they attempted to finish the rulemaking effort to promulgate these methods, but that’s been delayed indefinitely at this point because the methods update rule was removed entirely from the last unified agenda, and so we don’t have any indication as what the timeline is for that.

Some states are waiting for this to happen so that they can require testing under either of these methods. And I do think once these are promulgated, you’re gonna see a greater increase in those states that are wanting to be proactive about this starting to require testing under those methods. After EPA had released a draft risk assessment of PFOA and PFAS and biosolids.

The U.S. Department of Ag had commissioned the National Academies of Science Engineering and Medicine or NASEM to provide guidance on the management of PFAS contamination in agricultural systems, which of course includes the land application of biosolids, but would also include irrigation and atmospheric deposition, and I think maybe one other.

But they basically identified a lot of the critical limitations and knowledge gaps that exist and made recommendations for more testing and to avoid the risks when known.

So needless to say, there’s a lot more work that has to be done on this front, but this was certainly a good starting point. And then this was EPA’s follow-on to the draft biosolids risk assessment. And this is actually a draft guidance document.

So it was published in June of this year And the public comment period is still open until October 5th, so this one’s still live if you want to weigh in on it. And so just want to clarify what this document is and it’s not. It is risk-based guidance with recommendations.

It does not establish a numeric limit for PFOA or PFOS in biosolids, and it does not create any kind of enforceable obligation. That said, it does put EPA’s name on a set of endorsed practices, which means it may get cited in permits, in nuisance claims, or contract negotiations, regardless of whether it’s binding or not.

The recommendations sort into these three audiences. So, bulk land suppliers are told to avoid application near drinking water sources and fishable waters and to favor lower exposure risk crops.

Similarly, home and garden users are told to know their supplier and avoid leafy greens and root vegetables, and then wastewater treatment plants are directed to look at source identification and industrial pretreatment.

So that’s the real zinger. We all intuitively may know that, but now it’s in writing as an official recommendation the EPA. All right, now we are on to the next really big ticket item. This, in fact, even has something to do with the last topic about biosolids.

So CERCLA. This is the Comprehensive Environmental Response Compensation and Liability Act, also sometimes referred to as the Superfund law. And as of July of 2024, PFOA and PFOS were designated as circular hazardous substances.

And of course, the most critical part of this acronym is the compensation and liability part. So the most significant implications of this listing are related to the cleanup actions. EPA has the authority to order the investigation and remediation of these chemicals, including cost recovery. They can reopen closed sites, which they have done.

Private parties would have cause of action for cost recovery, and PFOA and PFOS also have to be included in the scope of a Phase 1 in order to satisfy the all-appropriate inquiries rule. Although EPA does have enforcement discretion here, which they clarified for us in a memo how they intend to use that authority.

It does not have the authority under CERCLA to exempt entities from liability, which could come in the form of third-party claims. So EPA clarified they are interested in going after what they consider to be the responsible parties.

But there is a group of people that have been labeled as passive receivers. So these would be the entities that did not generate the contamination. They may have unknowingly been a pass-through for it, like landfills or wastewater treatment plants that would like relief from this liability.

So this is something only Congress can address. They’ve been debating it for years now. They seem to be any closer to making a decision on whether to provide waivers for passive receivers or to whom, but so we’ll have to stay tuned to see what happens with that.

So as I mentioned at the beginning, this is an adopted rule that was also challenged in the courts, but as of August 18th, the DC Circuit denied every petition challenging the designation of PFOA and PFAS as of course, barring any further appeals.

But really practically speaking, that closes the judicial question on relief, which means anyone who may have been waiting to see whether this designation would survive or not before addressing their liability planning now has their answer. The second question regarding relief for passive receivers does remain undecided.

So the best update I can give you is that Senator Ricketts has now filed this twice, the first attempt was Senate Amendment 3363 back in 2025 to amend the 2026 National Defense Authorization Act.

The current one is Senate Amendment 6429, which was filed in June of this year to amend the 2027 National Defense Authorization Act. And the current version would exempt five categories from liability for passive releases. So agricultural producers, that would be right the farms that accepted those potentially PFAS impacted biosolids and land applied them for fire protection entities, water and wastewater entities, resource management entities, and aviation entities.

Now this proposed amendment was ordered to lie on the table is the wording which according my understanding means that it’s basically been parked rather than rejected. So we just have to wait and see whether it makes it into next year’s NDAA.

All right, so that covers the liability part, but now let’s talk about where the material physically goes and also keeping in mind that every treatment system that concentrates PFAS rather than destroying it is generating a residual that has to be managed somewhere. So on the heels of the CERCLA designation, EPA made a move to list these nine PFAS as RCRA Hazardous Constituents.

This is only a proposed rule. It was never adopted, and it was only to list these as hazardous constituents, making them subject to RCRA’s corrective action requirements, but not to list them as hazardous waste.

It does appear that this administration is continuing to at least consider the current rulemaking because they indicated in the unified agenda and opened up a request for public comment in April of this year, but they did withdraw the proposed rule that would have affected the hazardous waste definition and extending authority there.

So the pending rule would affect those facilities or companies that participate in the handling, transportation, or disposal of PFAS-containing waste, right? That corrective action requirement means EPA can come knocking and say, we think you’re responsible for the contamination of these nine chemicals due to your handling of this waste.

But this is not an adopted rule, so for now, CERCLA is really the only rule that would most likely affect these parties, and this is at a federal level, barring any local state rules and jurisdiction.

So this is some of the history behind PFAS destruction and disposal guidance. The 2020 National Defense Authorization Act required that any incineration of AFFF be conducted at a temperature range adequate to break down PFAS and in accordance with Clean Air Act. That was pretty short-lived.

Two years later, the 2022 NDAA imposed a temporary moratorium on incineration of PFAS materials pending guidance from the Department of War or a final rule from EPA, which was Congress kind of responding to community opposition around incinerator sites.

Department of War then issued its own guidance identifying permitted hazardous waste incinerators, meaning specific temperature requirements is acceptable, which effectively lifted the moratorium.

EPA’s 2024 interim guidance generally agreed, but did push for additional testing to demonstrate that thermal treatment was fully mineralizing all PFAS rather than creating transformation products.

And as of this year, EPA and Department for both updated their guidance and are aligned and do allow for hazardous waste incineration at permitted facilities with proper testing. Beyond the destruction side of things, the document keeps the same options it’s had for a while, deep well injection or landfilling.

There was a not so popular interim storage recommendation that seems to have been dropped. Also, this document will now be updated on an annual basis instead of every three years because things are just evolving so rapidly in this space.

Okay, and we are getting to the end here. I just wanted to leave you with a tool, not just a regulatory citation. So EPA has created this PFAS analytics tool that’s housed in their ECHO database. And it basically allows you to search on all publicly available data related to PFAS. And so you can search by programs, whether it’s UCMR data or TRI data or Superfund data, you can search by geographic region or by industry sectors and see what those databases have to offer you in terms of PFAS occurrence data.

So that’s the end. Thank you so much for your time and your attention and happy to answer any questions.