Hello and welcome everyone. My name is Dane Menke. I am the digital marketing manager here at Regenesis and LandScience. Before we get started, I have just a few administrative items to cover. Since we’re trying to keep this under an hour, today’s presentation will be conducted with the audience audio settings on mute. This will minimize unwanted background noise from the large number of participants joining us today.

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In order to continue to sponsor events that are of value and worthy of your time, we’ll be sending out a brief survey following the webinar to get your feedback. Today’s presentation will discuss PFAS regulatory updates and what’s to come. With that, I’d like to introduce our presenter for today. We are pleased to have with us Taryn McKnight, PFAS practice leader for Eurofins Environment Testing USA. Taryn McKnight has over 20 years of experience in the environmental testing industry.

As one of the company’s subject matter experts on PFAS, she contributes to multiple organization and agency work groups to address PFAS challenges. 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.

Okay, great. Thank you everyone for joining us today. Thank you to Regenesis for inviting me to speak to you all about this topic. There is a reason why we chose to do this now in October. There’s a few key things going on in the world. We’ve got the EPA’s PFAS strategic roadmap that is coming to the end of its life cycle here at the end of 2024. And of course, we have an election looming. So we wanted to provide you with kind of a recap and a update on where things are as of right now prior to the election and then it will take some time once we find out what Congress looks like and what the new administration looks like and to what their next agenda may look like so you know maybe we’ll do this again next spring but for now let’s start with kind of the big picture at the top with the White House agenda and where we stand with that.

So primarily driven by President Biden’s plan to secure environmental justice, he had committed to tackling water pollution. The focus here was for it to be handled in a science-based manner and focusing on improving water quality in a really comprehensive way. And of course this brought PFAS front and center. So Biden stated that his administration would tackle PFAS pollution and called out these few key initiatives, so designating PFAS as hazardous substances, which they did, setting enforceable limits for PFAS in drinking water, which has been accomplished, and then prioritizing substitutes through federal procurement. Now, this has been initiated, but we’re not quite there yet.

And then accelerating toxicity studies and research on PFAS. So the jury’s probably still out on how much we accelerated this process, but certainly progress has been made. And then a far more in-depth accounting of the administration’s goals is really outlined in that PFAS strategic roadmap, which we are gonna cover the status of in-depth today. Now, the question on everyone’s mind is, what will the agenda look like for the next administration? EPA has made some great progress on their roadmap initiatives, but there is still some more work to complete and to fully implement.

So the question is, will that work continue? We are officially at the end of the period that the strategic plan was written for. So will we get a new roadmap to carry us through the next four years? It’s my understanding that that is a question that the agency is actively considering right now. But of course, that change in administration is going to weigh heavily into that. And don’t forget, what happens with PFAS at the federal level is just as much about who’s in the White House as who is in Congress.

Many of the actions that EPA and other federal agencies like the DOD have taken on PFAS have actually been congressionally mandated. And there’s many seats up for re-election this year, including those on committees that are actively involved with passing PFAS-related legislation. So a lot is up in the air in that regard. And then once we do have the new administration, it’s going to take them time to articulate their agenda and specifically as it relates to PFAS, but I would expect by next spring we’re going to see something formalized.

In the meantime though, the White House has continued its work on the PFAS Federal Research and Development Strategic Plan. Now I know that sounds similar to the roadmap, but it’s actually something different. So like most things, this particular activity traces back to the National Defense Authorization Act of 2021, where Congress directed that an inter-agency working group needed to coordinate federal research on PFAS.

So in response to that mandate, the Office of Science and Technology Policy, or OSTP, and by the way, I apologize for all the acronyms. I will try to always spell them out for you, but that’s the world we live in, right? So they developed the PFAS Strategy Team. And that team essentially is that inter-agency group that coordinates those PFAS R &D activities. So that team consists of OSTP, the Department of Energy, and the Department of Defense.

So as of September of this year, they released their PFAS research strategy, and key goals of that plan include utilizing high-quality data to inform decision-making, communicating research more effectively to impacted communities, continuing to identify remediation technologies, and generating actionable information, such as those needed to make decisions about PFAS alternatives for federal procurement.

So for those who’ve been following this, the strategic plan that just was released in September is intended to be a companion document to the March 2023 PFAS report, which was essentially just providing all the background on PFAS and the context for the development of this strategic plan that was just released.

So diving a little bit further into the details on this, this figure is from that strategic plan. This provides you with a few more details regarding the actual strategies aimed at supporting those stated goals. So that high quality data they’re looking for specifically relates to exposure pathways. To support more effective communication with communities, They aim to develop standards, advanced sampling and analytical methodologies. I’m not really sure how that plays in directly to more effective communication, but that’s the specific objective there.

Secondly, they aim to better understand the toxicology and risk of PFAS exposure. I definitely see how that ties into more effective communication with the communities. And of course, the big one is to develop and evaluate and demonstrate the effective, either removal, destruction, or disposal technologies. And then lastly, identifying and assessing those PFAS alternatives. Someone asked me the other day why I thought the administration would push forward a new strategy right before the election. I honestly don’t know why. Maybe there was a congressional deadline I’m not aware of, but of course with politics, timing always seems to matter.

I’m just not sure why it would have mattered for this particular effort. So on the topic of political timing, Let’s address the question on many people’s minds, can the new administration undo the PFAS legislation that’s been recently enacted? So enacted in 1996 was the Congressional Review Act, which is a tool that Congress can use to overturn recently finalized regulations. Now the CRA has a feature that is sometimes referred to as the look-back mechanism. This mechanism provides Congress with time to use the CRA to review rules that were submitted toward the end of the previous session.

This feature is often more relevant at the end of a president’s administration because it offers the new Congress, the new president, a pretty brief window where they can overturn rules that were issued by the outgoing administration. Now everybody wants to know when that deadline for that look-back period was. It’s actually really difficult to because it’s kind of a moving target based on the active legislative days of the House and the Senate, but right now the Congressional Research Service estimates that Biden administration rules that were submitted to the House or Senate on or after August 1st of this year are likely to be subject to that CRA look-back provision.

So it’s my understanding that this would make the drinking water MCLs and the circular hazardous substance designation safe from that look-back period, but it doesn’t mean those rules cannot be undone. It just means they can’t easily or expeditiously be undone through that CRA look-back provision. It would then require a formal rulemaking process to amend those rules. And then anything proposed and not finaled, like the RCRA hazardous constituents designation, would certainly be vulnerable to this.

All right, so now let’s dive into the heart of many of these updates, which is from the EPA’s PFAS Strategic Roadmap. Now, I’ve organized these updates by the program office they fall under. We have the six program areas that had a multitude of initiatives that they were responsible for between that 2021 and 2024 period. Also, I was hoping to have EPA’s annual progress report by now, but it looks like it’s still working its way through some interagency reviews.

However, keep an eye out for this in the coming weeks, as it may close any gaps in status updates that I didn’t have information on to share with you today.

All right. So thanks to the 2016 TOSCA Reform Act, the EPA has actually made some real progress in terms of leveraging TOSCA authorities to address PFAS. And EPA has initiated everything it set out to on this list, but some of these items have a longer life cycle, so they’re not necessarily completed yet, or they are intended to be ongoing.

So let’s start with probably the most significant of EPA’s actions under the Office of Chemical Safety and Pollution Prevention. EPA announced the National PFAS Testing Strategy back in October of 2021. The EPA developed these categories of PFAS based on information that they had access to about similarities in their structure of physical chemical properties and existing test data on the toxicity of those PFAS. Essentially, this is how they intend to fill the data gaps with regards to toxicity and health effects without having to conduct a study on each individual chemical on its own.

And so they’ve broken PFAS into these categories, and then picked representative PFAS from those categories. So the agency is looking to obtain critical information on more than 2,000 similar PFAS that fall within those categories. This is a snapshot of the candidate list from that testing strategy, and only 25 PFAS had identifiable manufacturers to whom EPA could issue a test order to. So that was also a little bit of a limiting factor. Although the EPA launched this strategy in 2021, since then it has issued test orders for just five individual PPAS.

So the first was in June of 2022, EPA issued a test order for 6 ,2-fluorotelamersulfonamide betaine. In January of 2023, it issued the second order for HFPO and later for HFPO-DAF. Those are both chemicals associated with the Gen X process. And then in March of this year, EPA released its fourth test order for Mifosi, which the agency has stated has been used widely in products, including clothing and carpet treatments and furniture coatings. They also stated that it appears in the air and in biosolids. So they vowed more recently to put more weight on potential exposures when it’s selecting the candidates for this program.

Then, just as of this month, October of this year, EPA issued its fifth test order for 6-2 fluorotelomer acrylate, which EPA states has been used as a reactant for plastics and resin manufacturing, also in the manufacturing of textiles, apparel, and leather, and other organic chemical manufacturing. These have a really long life cycle, like I was mentioning before. They’ve got hundreds of days to generate and submit all of the data that’s being asked of them. Toxicity testing is not simple or quick, so it’s understandable that that’s going to take them a while to generate.

Okay, so then we have the TOSCA Section 887 rule, so this is a reporting requirement. Essentially, EPA is doing a look back, so they’re asking anyone who has manufactured, including importation of certain chemicals since January of 2011 to report information regarding those PFAS uses, production volumes, disposal, exposures, and hazards. Now this reporting obligation was set to begin in November of this year, but due to some budget constraints, EPA has had to delay the beginning of that reporting period, so there is a six-month delay.

Now that deadline is May 8th of next year. And then the small manufacturers, limited to article imports, have a little bit longer time to comply with this as well. Now EPA provided a definition for what constitutes a PFAS that’s subject to this rule. And so they’re saying that they expect to receive data on just over 1 ,400 PFAS chemicals from this. So, TRI is the Toxics Release Inventory Rule, which regulates industry’s emissions to the air, land, water. Companies have to report annually on those emissions of any chemicals that are listed on the TRI. And so, Congress mandated that PFAS be added to the TRI, and that list has continued to grow each year.

There’s certain things that trigger the addition of compounds to that list. But the most notable development was probably last year, when EPA designated PFAS as chemical of special concern, so what that does effectively is does away with the de minimis exemption which allowed many manufacturers to avoid reporting on PFAS emissions. So July of 2025 will be the first reports that include all facilities that had those previously de minimis levels.

Just this month in October of this year, EPA proposed to add 16 individual PFAS as well as 15 PFAS categories. So all in all, this represented over 100 individual PFAS that they’re looking to add to the TRI. So if added, they would also be designated as chemicals of special concern and subject to the same reporting threshold of 100 pounds for manufacturer processing and other uses as the existing PFAS chemicals already on the list. EPA stated that these PFAS are being proposed for addition to the TRI based on their toxicity to human healthy environment or both.

Now EPA is currently accepting public comments on that proposed rule through December 9th of this year so if you’ve got thoughts on that make sure to get your comments in. TRI reports are due in July of the following year so there is a bit of a lag between the time that these new updates are made to the TRI and when we get to see the results of them. So for The 2024 reporting year, those reports are due in July of 2025, and 196 PFAS are going to be reportable for that.

Now over the course of this year, we’ve already added five PFAS that will be reportable for the 2025 year, and of course that number could grow if EPA’s latest proposal to add another hundred gets adopted. Now the changes to supplier notification requirements goes into effect January 1st of the reporting year. So, that de minimis clause that was removed also applies to supplier notifications.

So, it means when you’re giving notifications to your client as their supplier, you can no longer hide the presence of PFAS under confidential business information or under de minimis levels. It has to be disclosed to your buyer. So, we should see some activity on that front starting very early next year with those 196 PFAS that are now chemicals of special concern. Now EPA began addressing PFAS through what they call significant new use rules dating back to the early 2000s with the voluntary phase out of the production of the longer chain PFAS like PFOA, PFOS.

This is often the realm people are talking about when they think that PFAS have been banned. They’re banned through these significant new use rules. So in more recent years, EPA has carried out the following actions. In 2020, they issued a final rule requiring notice and EPA review before any of the longer chain PFAS started being produced again or imported. As a follow-up action to that SNR, in 2022, EPA became aware of a fluorination process that’s commonly applied to industrial containers such as high polyethylene or other plastic containers that had the potential to form and migrate those restricted PFAS from these items.

So the agency informed the manufacturers, importers, processors, even distributors of those containers about this risk and then at the end of last year EPA issued an order to one of the manufacturers of those directing them to not produce those PFAS anymore in those H-D-P-E containers because they’re essentially saying it’s a violation of that SNR, that significant new use rule. So this is all being handled in the courts right now. And so the path forward for EPA to enforce that is a little up in the air, but keep an eye on that.

And then finally, EPA finalized its latest SNR, preventing anyone from resuming production or processing of PFAS that were on the inactive list. So that means they haven’t been used in a while and this would affect 329 PFAS that were on the inactive list. So it just means they were inactive but they want to make sure nobody starts producing them again or using them again without agency review and approval. So with all of those reporting requirements and requests abound, I thought I’d just mention this relatively new tool from the EPA that consolidates PFAS data from 11 different databases into this one searchable platform.

So I know a lot of folks have questions about more information on potential sources of PFAS. And so as these laws go into effect and those reporting obligations are fulfilled, you’re gonna be able to access a lot of that information through this easily searchable tool. Okay, so now we come to the Office of Water, where most of the burden lies in terms of the initiatives that the EPA was responsible for. Now, I’m not gonna have time to go through all of these in detail, but suffice it to say, EPA came pretty darn close to checking each one of these items off the list, at least in terms of starting the process.

So setting the affluent limitation guidelines for industrial wastewater is still in the early stages, and I’m gonna talk more about those efforts in detail. The effort to update drinking water methods is also underway but very much in the early stages. And lastly, we have the risk assessment for PFOA and PFOS and biosolage, which is underway, but not clear yet if they’re gonna meet their target deadline of the end of 2024 to publish this. Of course, we have the final drinking water MCLs, the maximum contaminant levels, which were finally adopted in April of this year and went into effect in June.

But there is an extended timeline for coming into compliance. So there’s some monitoring requirements over the next several years, and then final compliance occurs at the end of this five-year period from the time the rule went into effect. Now we have individual MCLs for five different PFAS that range from four to 10 parts per trillion. And then we also have a health hazard index for a few of the listed contaminants that may be present as mixtures. And for those wondering about that hazard index approach, this slide kind of outlines the basis for that calculation and how you would determine exceedances.

I’m sure it comes as no surprise to you all that this ruling has already been challenged. This hazard index approach being one of the things that was challenged. So we will have to wait and see how those court rulings play out probably over the next year. Now, the unregulated contaminants monitoring rule or UCMR 5 is well underway, which includes the monitoring of the same six PFAS that were monitored way back under UCMR 3 and an additional 23 PFAS this time around. So this is where the EPA looks for emerging contaminants of concern that are not yet regulated in public water systems around the country. So, this effort is underway and you can actually monitor the status of incoming results in near real time on their website.

So, the final results from this effort would be used to inform future regulations or decisions about regulating additional PFAS in drinking water. These results also give us a preview into the scale of systems that are going to require treatment solutions to come into compliance with the drinking water MCLs at the end of five-year period. And so that kind of brings me to the next update which is where that whole process begins for regulating chemicals in drinking water.

Now this update is not new, it came at the end of 2022, but it’s pretty valuable context I think for people to stay abreast of. So the US EPA publishes a contaminants candidate list that includes the candidates for future monitoring under the UCMR, and then, of course, future potential regulation in drinking water.

So the way this works is typically the scientific community submits proposals for consideration concerning chemicals they think might pose a risk and are worth looking at, and then in accordance with the Safe Drinking Water Act, the EPA has to publish this contaminant candidate list or the CCL, and they have to do that every five years.

So I think what’s most remarkable about the current contaminant candidate list is that it lists PFAS as a class of chemicals. This was really the first time we saw the agency lay that policy foundation for treating PFAS as a class or regulating it as a class. So the importance of the definition of what constitutes a PFAS presents itself here, and I have included the definition EPA used for this particular listing, which does differ from other definitions that they’ve used.

But anyways, this means the next time they select contaminants for monitoring under UCMR 6, It is possible they could select PFAS as a class rather than trying to play catch-up with adding whatever compounds they have expanded their drinking water methods to capture. Now, on January 20th of last year, the EPA released their final Affluent Guidelines Program Plan 15. EPA stated that it would not pursue further action for various categories, but it would continue to monitor those categories moving forward to see if establishing affluent guidelines would be appropriate or necessary for them.

However, at the same time that they were publishing that plan, Congress was publishing the 2023 National Defense Authorization Act, which included a stipulation about these ELGs directing the EPA to publish ELGs for all the different categories that as mentioned in the plan and on their specific timelines. So you see that reference here in parentheses where it says NDAA and a date. Now right now the limit or proposed limits for the chemicals, plastics, and synthetic fiber sector are with the Office of Management and Budget for review.

Last I heard they have not cleared OMB yet. EPA took public comments on a plan to establish ELGs for the textile industry. Now that ended back in January of this year, but it’s just reopened this public comment period for another 30 days. So you’ve got a short window to add some comments there if you’re concerned about the textile industry. The mandatory questionnaire that would be part of that effort would be sent to just over 2 ,000 textile mills in the US and then EPA thinks that approximately 20 of those textile manufacturing facilities would be asked to actually submit wastewater samples for that effort.

And any EPA says that all of this is essential to any future rulemaking for this sector to have that questionnaire information and some of that actual empirical data. In that Program Plan 15, EPA also announced its intent to initiate a publicly-owned treatment works or POTW-influent study of PFAS, and that effort is underway. So EPA generated an information collection request to gather data on the amounts and types of PFAS that might be entering wastewater treatment plants as part of its plan to determine which industrial sectors would benefit from those technology-based effluent limits.

So they published that for public comment, which closed on May 28th, but as of October 10th, they have reopened that comment period for an additional 30 days. EPA says in the new notice that the data collection would not only support the agency’s POTW study but also the National Sewage Sledge Survey because they would require data for wastewater, influent and effluent from the POTW as well as their biosolids. So EPA has identified 400 of the largest POTWs around the country so those are ones that represent greater than 10 million gallons per day and servicing greater than 50 ,000 people.

So they would be asked to complete one of those questionnaires and then from those 400 POTWs, approximately to maybe 300 would be selected to do the actual testing of their wastewater and sludge to participate in that study. Analysis is expected to include the 40 compounds from method 1633 and adsorbable organic flooring from method 1621. Now this effort is a bit delayed, So sampling would be expected to occur from 2025 to 2026. And right now there is some pushback on allowing utilities to submit existing data that they already have and a request for them to wait on submitting biosolids data until EPA has completed their risk assessment for PFOA and PFOS and biosolids.

So those negotiations are in play right now and we will have to see what comes. And then lastly, on this wastewater front, In addition to that Program Plan 15, the EPA issued guidance to the states in a memo way back in December of 2022, so 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 the discharge is authorized by a National Pollutant Discharge Elimination System or NPDES permit.

Although not binding, this guidance document provides recommendations to the state agencies that have that NPDES permitting authority on how to address PFAS in those permits. Specifically, the guidance recommends that the permits require quarterly monitoring for 40 PFAS compounds using EPA Method 1633, and it also does mention the availability of their Method 1621 for the analysis of the absorbable organic flooring. Now as of 2024, we’ve begun to see an increase in activity at the state level with actually adding PFAS to those permits.

Here’s a little fun fact for you. The list of pollutants in the NPDES application regulation hasn’t been updated since 1987, so it should come as no surprise that PFAS are not included on that list. So EPA has determined that currently less than 1% of facilities covered by a NPDES permit contain any PFAS-related requirements.

So that could be monitoring, best management practices, or affluent limits, which they state results in the need to require permit applications with PFAS and their discharges to notify the permitting authority prior to permit issuance. So that means that they needed to initiate some of rulemaking to move this forward. So they have posted this notice of proposed rulemaking, which seeks to update requirements for several of the existing NPDES permit applications to address PFAS. It’s currently listed with an estimated timeframe of February of next year, with a possible final rule date of the end of 2026.

But those are pretty fluid dates that will definitely get updated as we move forward. And then an area where there seems to be a little bit of disconnect between the state and federal priorities is on the biosolids front. So the roadmap has these listed for EPA to complete a risk assessment of just PFOA and PFOS in biosolids by the winter of 2024. And that would be just to determine if regulations were even needed. Then they’d have to begin the whole process of proposed rulemaking.

So the states are struggling right now with whether to restrict land applications of biosolids, if so what limits are appropriate to use, and just understanding whether biosolids are even impacting the food supply or human health. So the EPA’s Office of Water, the Environmental Council of the states, and the National Association of State Departments of Agriculture have all kind teamed up to tackle this issue.

And so at this time last year, the administrator had pledged to work with these groups to preserve the main management methods, which include land application, incineration, and landfilling, while maintaining that focus on protecting human health, which EPA estimated that in 2021, large facilities land applied 43% of their biosolids while land filling 42% and then incinerating 14%. So really critical management tools that need to be preserved while the science catches up. And then lastly within this group, the Office of Water EPA has released final drafts of two of their methods that it had set out to finalize in support of their various investigative or compliance efforts.

A method 1633 specifically for PFAS analysis in non-potable water, solids, biosolids, landfill leachate and tissues and this is a targeted analysis for 40 PFAS and EPA announced just this summer that it intends to promulgate this method as part of the next method update rule which is slated to occur in 2025. EPA also released a method for the absorbable organic fluorine, or AOF, and AOF is a proxy measurement for all PFAS because there’s no way to conduct a direct measurement of thousands or tens of thousands or millions of these chemicals. So this is method 1621, it applies to aqueous samples only, and it is also on the same timeline as 1633 for promulgation next year.

Okay, so under the Office of Land and Emergency Management, we find some of the really big ticket items here with the CERCLA and RICRA designations. Again, EPA has checked the box on each of these. The reason I have the RICRA proposed rule off to the side is because this was not actually part of EPA’s strategic roadmap. This came from an initiation from the governor of New Mexico, but nonetheless, this is an important action that is underway, so I wanted to highlight it here as well.

As of July 8th of this year, PFOA and PFOS are designated as CERCLA hazardous substances. So CERCLA is the Comprehensive Environmental Response Compensation and Liability Act. Of course, the most critical part of that acronym being the compensation and liability part. Really the most significant implications of this listing are the related cleanup actions. EPA now has the authority to order the investigation and remediation of these chemicals, including cost recovery. So you have to pay for it, reopen closed sites if they need to, and then private parties would have a cause of action for cost recovery as well.

And then these two compounds have to be included in the scope of a phase one for due diligence in order to satisfy the all-appropriate increase rule. Some of the criticisms of this proposed rule included the notion that EPA intends to focus its authority on going after the polluters or responsible parties for cost recovery as opposed to entities that are considered to be passive receivers like landfills or wastewater treatment plants. Now, although EPA does have enforcement discretion, which they clarified in a memo, it does not have the authority under CERCLA to exempt entities from this liability, which could come in the form of other third party claims.

So this is something that only Congress has the authority to do, and they have been debating for over a year now, and I do expect those debates to continue into next year. As of January of 2021, the EPA had identified 233 private and federal facilities that are on the national priorities list with confirmed PFAS groundwater detections.

So people often ask, do we think EPA is going to just perform some kind of wholesale reopening of closed sites? And so far they have said no, they don’t intend to do that. They intend to address this on a site-by-site basis like they always do under Superfund and that they already had data on the Superfund sites that have PFAS contamination that will need to be addressed.

Now, on the heels of that CERCLA designation, EPA also made a move to list these nine PFAS as RCRA hazardous constituents, making them subject to RCRA’s corrective action requirements. So RCRA is how we manage or regulate the management of hazardous waste in this country. Now the EPA has to undertake a two-step process in order to categorize PFAS contaminated waste as hazardous waste that are subject to the full extent of RCRA.

So first they’d have to list PFAS as hazardous constituents in Appendix 8, which it just did, and then publish a finding that PFAS-containing waste could pose a substantial, present, or potential hazard to human health or the environment when improperly treated, stored, transported, or disposed of. This they have yet to do. So once it completes that effort, But then the agency would have to publish separate findings to regulate PFAS-containing waste as hazardous waste under RCRA.

So the inevitable question here is really, what’s the distinction then between hazardous constituents and hazardous waste? So there’s two sides to RCRA. The regulation of hazardous waste is often referred to as the cradle-to-grave law. Basically, under Subtitle C of this law, EPA has the authority to control and regulate hazardous waste from cradle to grave, meaning the tracking of hazardous waste from its generation to its disposal.

The other aspect under RCRA is corrective action, where EPA can require facilities that treat, store, dispose of hazardous waste to investigate and clean up their contamination. Hazardous constituents listening only makes them subject to corrective action, not the cradle to grave. So when you’re wondering where do I dispose of my PFAS containing waste, does it have to go to a subtitle C or D landfill, that is not being addressed right now by EPA. That’s all between you and the facility that’s taking in your waste.

What is on the table is this proposed rule for EPA to be able to come knocking and say we think you’re responsible for this and you’ve got to clean it up. But again this is just proposed not yet adopted so this is one of those rules that didn’t quite make it through under that cutoff for the administration and so it would be vulnerable to either not moving forward or undoing in a new administration.

So EPA was up against a congressional deadline to update their interim PFAS destruction and disposal guidance that they first published back in 2020. Although not much progress has really been made on this topic, there are some additional recommendations regarding how to measure or demonstrate that these various destruction technologies that are being applied are really achieving complete mineralization of PFAS. And so that’s probably the most significant update to this guidance. All the other methods that were mentioned before are still the same.

Landfilling, underground injection, thermal treatment, and then the pretty unpopular interim storage approach. EPA has continued its work assessing human health and environmental risk from PFAS by releasing additional toxicity assessments under their iris program. In fact, they accomplished everything and more that they originally set out to under the roadmap.

Although method development for the 1600 series methods fell under the Office of Water, The Office of Research and Development, or ORD, has also continued to work on some of their own method updates. They expect to release an update to EPA Method 83-27 this year, and they’ve begun to tackle the effort of establishing a standard and improved method for the total oxidizable precursor assay. EPA is also working to validate leaching methods, like the LEAF methods, that can support PFAS specifically. They have evaluated technologies for reducing PFAS in the environment. EPA released the PFAS thermal treatment database back in 2022. This database provides just an online resource of records about the treatability of PFAS using different thermal processes.

And then I’m not sure where they stand on the consolidation and updated data on chemical physical properties, human health toxicity, toxokinetics, and ecotoxicity information. This is kind of area where EPA has been far less public about their activities, so my apologies but I don’t have an update for you on that front. Of course, those test orders that they issue to the various manufacturers are going to provide a lot of that information. Just not sure where EPA’s efforts stand on gathering that information themselves.

And most of the regulatory efforts to establish limits for PFAS include not only occurrence data like what we obtained from the UCMR but also toxicity data. EPA uses regional screening levels or RSLs to determine whether a removal action or further investigation is needed to protect either the environment or human health. So the creation of those RSLs for PFAS compounds was important to provide a clear path forward for the evaluation of certain PFAS compounds as part of those site cleanup actions.

So to that end, EPA continues to chip away at toxicity assessments for the individual PFAS. We have recently established health advisory limits for PFBS and HFPODA. These were replacement chemicals for their longer chain counterparts. And then the assessment of the other PFAS listed here are still in various stages, but we do have final reference doses and draft reference doses for several more.

Although 1633 will soon be the primary method used to support those non-drinking water applications, there are other methods out there such as EPA’s SW846 method 8327. This table provides you with kind of a comparison of those two primary EPA methods for testing in the non-drinking water matrices. You can see how varied the techniques are, but really the key difference between these two approaches is that the EPA 1633 method utilizes a solid phase extraction and isotope dilution quantitation, whereas 8327 does not.

It is a direct injection and external standard calibration method. In an update over the summer, EPA indicated it intends to revise 8327, so then we’ll have 8327A to include additional analytes and also isotope dilution quantitation. But it will remain a direct injection method. And they did have that slated for some time in 2024, but no recent updates yet on if we’re going to meet that deadline or not. As I mentioned, there is also an effort underway to improve upon the top assay, which is a pretreatment step that’s combined with a standard targeted analysis to provide an estimation of the unknown mass of precursor PFAS in a sample.

One of the primary concerns with this technique is with complex matrices. The oxidant that’s used to convert the precursors to their measurable endpoints may be consumed by the matrix itself, and so you don’t get complete oxidation of those precursors. Some recent efforts have been made to improve upon this method, which EPA is consolidating and expanding upon. So the bulk of this work is likely to continue in 2025 and beyond because promulgating a standard method is really a multi-year process, but this effort is well underway.

All right, I think we’re getting to the end of the EPA groups here. So the Clean Air Act requires EPA to regulate emissions of hazardous air pollutants or HAPs, which are pollutants that are known or suspected to cause cancer or other serious health effects. Right now, EPA actively works to reduce air emissions for 187 haps, but that does not include PFAS. So the EPA Office of Air and Radiation is really building the technical foundation right now on PFAS air emissions that would help to inform decisions about future regulations under the Clean Air Act.

So right now, EPA is conducting ongoing work to identify sources of PFAS air emissions, develop and finalize monitoring approaches for measuring those stack emissions as well as ambient air concentrations, and then really just increasing their understanding of the fate and transport of PFAS air emissions.

Their most significant accomplishment on this front is probably the development of methods OTM 45 and OTM 50 for monitoring source air emissions for PFAS. With the development of these methods, they were then able to further their mission to identify sources, develop monitoring approaches, and better understanding the fate and transport. So all of that is in progress.

What I’m not sure about here, though, is the development of cost-effective mitigation technologies for the source error. My guess would be those assessments are still very much in the nascent stages, but it’s those analytical tools that are gonna help them evaluate the effectiveness of those mitigation technologies.

So a little more detail here, EPA published OTM45 for the semi-volatile and particle-bound PFAS from source air emissions back in 2021, but in an effort to better understand if any products of incomplete destruction or combustion are being generated during those processes, they developed OTM method 50. This method is for capturing those ultra-short-chain or volatile PFAS that are the likely products of any incomplete destruction process. This method was just published earlier this year, but it only became commercially available late this summer.

All right, so that brings us to the end of the updates on EPA’s PFAS strategic roadmap. But before we wrap up, I just wanted to acknowledge there is a plethora of activity going on within the Department of Defense and Department of Energy, and as well as the Federal Aviation Administration. All of it’s really related to the progress on AFFF, the aqueous film-forming foam and transitions away from that.

So I just wanted to provide you with a few key updates on that here real quick. Now the DOD is required to report to Congress each year on the status of their PFAS investigative and cleanup efforts. I couldn’t find a published report for this year yet. I think they might be a little behind on the deadline there, or maybe I just couldn’t find it. But to the best of my knowledge, the last compiled publicly available report is from September of last year, and this is a snapshot from that report.

So it tells you how many installations they’ve conducted, preliminary assessments at, or site investigations, which ones are moving into remedial investigations, and the DOD is continuing to fund research on more than 100 projects through their Cert-up ESTCP program. There was also a memo published in July of last year where the facilities were directed to evaluate data gathered during those initial assessments and to prioritize implementation of interim actions under CERCLA as expeditiously as possible.

I think seeing the writing on the wall with the CERCLA hazardous substance designation was pending at the time. And now that EPA has finalized drinking water MCLs at four parts per trillion, this has also shifted focus for the DOD who had been using a threshold of 70 parts per trillion to compare those drinking water values too.

So they issued a memo in April of this year prioritizing cleanup actions to implement the federal drinking water standards. So a lot is also going on with the foam transition that I mentioned which I’ll dive into in just a moment. The DOE joined the field much later than the DOD, but they have moved quickly to catch up. They published their own PFAS strategic roadmap in August of 2022 and by October had already published an initial assessment of PFAS at their sites.

By December they had published their PFAS research plan, which was pretty neat because they can leverage the unique facilities and expertise of the department, national laboratories, and partner institutions and all of that so that they could really move forward on a number of research initiatives. They’ve also published a sampling guidance plan, and then they did have a disposal guidance plan on the docket for earlier this year, but I have not seen anything published on that yet.

All right, so lastly, let’s just take a look at what’s going on in the world of AFFF. So, the DOD was congressionally mandated to transition from the use of those fluorinated AFFF foams to the fluorine-free foams that are also referred to as F3s. The deadline for this was actually October of this year, so the Defense Secretary had to invoke an extension of one year, which has been granted. It is said they are expected to invoke that again for a second year, but we’ll have to see. And really this whole process is not a simple proposition.

First of all, the DOD had to establish a new military specification for the new products. Then they had to certify new products that met the mil-spec. Then they had to determine how to effectively decontaminate systems before switching out to the new phones. And remembering that none of these procedures were pre-existing. DOD was building all of this from scratch for what are incredibly complex chemicals matrices. So it’s really no surprise that an extension was needed.

In July of this year, the DOD issued a memo regarding guidance for the change out from AFFF to F3, and then the FAA has a role to play here as well. So usually they follow suit with the DOD. They follow the same mil spec and the same requirements, but we haven’t seen much movement on their front. As I suspect, they’re waiting for DOD to get a little further along in figuring this all out.

Now, they did issue an alert to the airports letting them know that the mil spec is available. There are qualified products on the list of those F3s that are available and can be used. And so they can begin this transition if they choose, but there was no mandate just yet, at least not that I’m aware of, although I have heard rumblings that that mandate could be coming. So that’s the status of the world of a triple F to fluorine free foam transition. And so I think you’re going to see a flurry of activity around this in the coming year.

And so with that, we are at the end of the updates I have for you as of October 2024, and hopefully we’ll get to talk again next year to see you all the new developments that we’re waiting with bated breath to hear about.