Today’s webinar will focus on what consultants, municipalities, property owners and businesses should know to navigate the shifting PFAS regulatory and litigation landscape.

With that, I’d like to introduce our presenter for today. We are pleased to have with us Ned Witte, partner at Witte Davis Law LLP. Ned Witte is a nationally recognized environmental attorney with extensive experience advising clients on PFAS-related matters across the US, including sites impacted by AFFF use, manufacturing, and disposal. He has represented clients in Wisconsin and several other states and was selected in 2020 by the Biden-Harris EPA agency review team to consult on PFAS issues. He serves on the Wisconsin DNR PFAS Policy Advisory Group and previously co-chaired the Citizens and Public Interest Committee for the Wisconsin PFAS Action Council. He frequently presents on PFAS at national and legal forums and contributes to ASTM efforts on PFAS due diligence in real estate.

All right, that concludes our introduction, so now I will hand things over to Ned Witte to get us started.

Thank you, everyone, for coming today. It’s always good to come back to school in the middle of the summer. So welcome to this session today that Regenesis is putting on, and I’m proud to be the speaker of.

This is your PFAS summer school, your new ABCs of CERCLA, Safe Drinking Water Act, or SDWA, and the US EPA.

I want to thank Regenesis again for putting this together. It’s always a pleasure to be here and to speak with this team. And I want to thank all of you for coming here today as well.

I’m assuming that we have a broad collection of attendees from different backgrounds, likely consulting services, private industry, perhaps law and government, and that you’ve already dealt with PFAS in some capacity.

We’re dealing with an issue that used to be so new to us, but now is getting to be a little more mature. So a lot of these presentations that used to focus on what is PFAS and where is it found, now we’re sort of jumping right into the meat of it, and that’s what we will do today.

Really, two objectives today.

I want to provide an update for you so that you can understand the legal landscape presently, focusing primarily on federal regulation, but also because of the somewhat scattered and staggered rollout and implementation of the federal rules.

We’ll also look at some state laws and use those as proxies and sort of placeholders for where we think that the federal and overall regulatory program is going.

But I want to also help you see where there are opportunities for you to get involved so that you can continue to serve your clients and work together toward helpful input and practical outcomes.

Please, if you have any questions, as Dane indicated, you can ask those and we will try to get to those. If we can’t get to all the questions, I will also have an opportunity to communicate with you afterwards and provide answers to those questions.

But I want you to feel free to ask those questions because they’re really valuable and that way we know that we’re Quick background about myself.

I am with a law firm which has the familiar name Witte Davis Law. We’ve been operating since April of this year. But I have 37 years of environmental law practice. I’ve worked with law firms primarily based in Wisconsin. I’m licensed in Wisconsin and Oregon. And our law firm, Witty Davis Law, together I work with Heather Davis. In addition to Wisconsin, Oregon, we’re also practicing and licensed in North Carolina, Kentucky, and Texas. And we’ve worked on a large number of issues across the country with a particular focus on PFAS.

Really, in the last 10 years, this has been a topic and a subject that has really taken off. So, our work spans a number of different areas, including CERCLA at the federal level, the Safe Drinking Water Act, state regulatory programs.

We are also deeply involved in brownfield redevelopment projects, both for municipalities and for developers, working through complex remediation of PFAS matters and also a big part of our practice is working on water regulation, development near water, and some of the conservation conflicts that can come up as a result of those.

But we advise manufacturers, water utilities, municipalities, property owners, dealing with PFAS liability. There’s still a lot of questions and a lot of uncertainty in these areas.

Some of the practice areas that we’re working in though is helping businesses prepare for sale of businesses and dealing with PFAS risk, trying to minimize those. We’ve also assisted businesses and opportunities of relating to acquisition of properties and dealing with PFAS and due diligence.

Helping businesses deal with growing and developing regulations, some of which we’ll be talking about today. PFAS is popping up at circular sites, obviously, and coming up on five-year reviews. That’s been a very important part of what we’ve helped on.

We’ve also worked on proactive internal investigations and for businesses that produce products with PFAS in them. And so some of those product ban legislation actions are very important and we’ll be talking those really at the state level.

So an overview of what we’re going to be talking about today, really four chapters. The first chapter is looking at the Safe Drinking Water Act and the status of the rollback of that law at the federal level.

It’s important to understand where that currently lays so that you can have an opportunity to work with clients of yours who are dealing with that. We’ll also talk about the next chapter, CIRCLA’s designation of PFOA and PFOS as hazardous substances, where that stands from the standpoint of current enforcement and what the status of the litigation is challenging those rules.

One thing that’s really important with regard to both of these federal rules is that they are effective. They are being challenged, they are being tweaked or tinkered with, but for now both the Safe Drinking Water Act and CERCLA have regulatory authority over PFAS. And so that’s an important thing to keep in mind.

We’ll then look at three representative state approaches in Wisconsin, New Jersey, and New Mexico, each of which is a little bit different. And I think it’s important to think of those as being models for the ways that different states would handle different subject areas from different perspectives.

And I think that we can learn from those, but it’s also important to keep an eye on what’s happening across the states because it is a bit of a patchwork still, but it represents a second tier of regulation that I think all of us have to watch and pay attention to.

And then the last chapter we’ll talk about the product band frontier, which are really looking sort of up the pipe, if you will, to regulate PFAS at the source and to try to disrupt is the term that’s used quite frequently, disrupt PFAS exposure.

So, we’ll talk about how some of those are operating and, you know, different ways that that’s coming into effect.

So, I think the through line for all of this, though, is really thinking about federal regulation of PFAS as being in somewhat of a retreat or recalibration at this point in time, states following through and regulating PFAS notwithstanding.

And I think those are really the important themes to keep an eye on and think about today.

But please do ask your questions. We’ll try to get to those at the end of the presentation today.

Okay, as regard to chapter one, if you will, talking about the federal regulation, really this came about through the prior presidential administration and the development and rollout of what it characterized as its 2021 PFAS strategic roadmap.

And it really was a holistic, broad approach to regulating PFAS in all media across the full spectrum of regulatory programs. Again, we’re focusing today on two of those which have been in somewhat of a fluctuating status, CERCLA and Safe Drinking Water Act.

But just to keep an eye on it and bear it in mind, there were also and are also regulations rolling out and in effect under the Toxic Substances Control Act TASCA, the Toxic Release Inventory, a reporting function, or TRI.

RCRA is also an area that we’re seeing attention with the development of hazardous constituent rulemaking, and we’ll talk about New Mexico as being a state that has kind of rushed to fill in that gap.

Going further than that, looking at regulating PFAS as a hazardous waste under their state law. Clean Water Act effluent development is also kind of following on some of the other actions. That’s going to have an impact on discharge permits and the presence of PFAS in those, as well as stormwater. So we’ll see those coming along.

And then we’ve got the Clean Air Act also as another regulatory medium, which really has not been moving forward as fast as others. But I think one thing that you’ll see, we’ll talk about here as we go through this that’s interesting is that I think a lot of us anticipated when the new administration, the new EPA came in that there was going to be an action that was a little bit more pronounced and sort of a stepping back altogether from regulating PFAS.

But instead, I think that what we’ve seen is that there’s a bit of a, again, I’ll use the term recalibration, focusing on the better understood, better known PFAS compounds, PFOS and PFOA, but really not withdrawing entirely from those, which I think is important to note.

I think the regulation of these two substances is here to stay.

It’s a matter of sort of battling through the challenges to the overall regulatory program.

The Safe Drinking Water Act really hit the ground in 2024 under the prior administration with promulgation of maximum contaminant levels in drinking water for PFOA and PFOS at 4 parts per trillion.

Again, you know, we’ll talk about 4 parts per trillion and what it means, but that’s a very, very small, difficult to measure number.

In addition to those two substances, the Safe Drinking Water Act also came out with regulations for an additional group of substances, other Gen X or shorter chain PFAS compounds, utilizing a newer approach, newer technique of the Hazard Index.

Following that, when the new administration came in, there were some immediate challenges to the regulation of PFAS. And those took the form of rolling back or sort of curtailing some of the regulation of those. There’s also been a proposal to defer some of the compliance deadlines for the MCL implementation, extending it out a bit further.

These come with tremendous opportunities for those of you in the consulting industry, because you can work to address some of these with some of the clients that you may have.

So again, just to rephrase that, we’ve got the first ever federal drinking water limits for PFAS that were promulgated with enforceable maximum contaminant levels, a very unique hybrid structure of looking at MCLs together with the maximum contaminant level goals, which really are looking at trying to achieve zero exposure.

But the MCLs, while it may seem like it’s more lenient at four parts per trillion, really is a very small model to come around. But it’s been a tough issue for wastewater utilities because with some of the litigation going on, it’s been a very difficult ground playing field to really feel confidence about.

So where we stand right now is that as of May of this year, we have the US EPA proposing to rescind the maximum contaminant levels for four of the six PFAS compounds, primarily looking at rolling back those Gen X or shorter chain compounds.

The way that USEPA has approached that is to identify that the Loper-Bright decision, which was the decision that reversed Chevron, which was kind of the baseline foundation for reviewing agency actions and granting deference to the decisions of agencies.

But Loberbright, which came down several years ago, basically eliminates that deference.

And so what this current EPA is asserting is that the rulemaking that was utilized didn’t follow appropriately the Safe Drinking Water Act procedures.

I think also a big part of this is that there’s been a greater recognition that some of the proposed regulation of these additional PFAS compounds may in fact not be as necessary based on some of the monitoring that’s going on across the country.

They’re finding that some of these compounds other than the PFOA and PFOS really are not prevalent in drinking water supplies and therefore the concentration has been on trying to just focus on PFOA and PFOS.

Therefore we’re going to see those particular limits staying in place as part of this current stepping back, if you will. So it’s framed as a narrowing and not a full repeal of the regulation of PFAS compounds. The difficulty, I’ll say it again, is how do businesses that are the wastewater treatment plant utilities, how can they plan for these? They move very slowly.

They forecast out their budgets and plan well, well in advance. And so for them to anticipate potential capital expenditures to deal with managing these compounds. They need to know what they’re going to be, what the standards are, and what the dates are by which they need to have these regulations in place.

So that makes it extremely challenging for them to anticipate and to model for that. The compliance deadlines have been extended. Systems are already underway. Businesses and these wastewater treatment plants have been planning.

For those that hadn’t started yet, you know, they may have some additional time but there also may be some state implementation measures taking place. So it’s a very tough changing playing field for these businesses that have to account for these and the vacillation really just adds to uncertainty and can add to potential costs.

Presently, we are waiting on the digestion, if you will, of the comments that US EPA solicited through a public comment period that ended recently. EPA wanted public comment on the proposed withdrawal of certain regulation of those four additional PFAS compounds, the compliance deadline, and also the desire to keep PFAS in the contaminant candidate list, the sixth contaminant candidate list, which basically is a process by which US EPA, under the standards of the Safe Drinking Water Act, requires continued monitoring of certain unregulated compounds.

And therefore PFAS is staying in that CCL, which would indicate that EPA’s intent is to continue to regulate PFAS under the Safe Drinking Water Act.

So, a lot of different interested stakeholders have weighed in on this, and they’ve provided comments which, you know, I think this is usually an indication that there’s a pretty strong interest in this, and it’s going to be something that could lead to disputes going forward as far as where parties stand.

And you know, I think that we’re probably going to see continued litigation in regard to this, but I think we’ll – we ought to keep an eye on who’s making comments and what those comments are.

So wrapping up with regard to this first pillar, the Safe Drinking Water Act, the federal timeline is important to monitor as well as independent state rollout of standards and regulations. The federal stepping back doesn’t necessarily mean that states won’t want to regulate certain PFAS compounds.

more aggressively remember that the state law simply needs to be as stringent as but can be more stringent than federal standards. It’s important for the businesses that are affected by this. When I say businesses, again, I’m really referring to the wastewater utilities that they plan around dealing with the strictest applicable standard that may be out there.

But I’ll say it one more time because I think that for me throughout the process of of staying on top of PFAS and PFAS regulation. Uncertainty has always been the term that really causes ripples of anxiety among those regulated parties.

And uncertainty continues to prevail here because we just don’t quite understand yet what the specific timing standards and regulated substances are going to be. So it’s been an extremely challenging framework and process for those who are affected by these standards.

Okay, let’s move on to the next chapter, which is CERCLA. CERCLA, as everyone knows, hopefully is the federal law which was initially passed in 1980 and it establishes liability for hazardous substances that have been released already.

It influences ongoing behavior because of the desire to avoid incurring responsibility, but it is a law that creates a very onerous liability standard that is strict, meaning fault does not have to be established.

It is joint and several, meaning only one party out of many who could be responsible could be responsible for all of that potential cost, and it’s also retroactive, so even something that might have been legal or unregulated before CERCLA has regulatory authority over a given obligation, that can trigger responsibility after the fact.

It creates opportunities for both the government and for private parties to utilize the authority. And as I said, it also influences forward-looking behavior because the phase one environmental site assessment process is really that exercise in the acquisition of property that parties use to understand risk.

And so the all appropriate inquiry level, which is a term that comes directly out of CERCLA, if PFAS is included, PFOA and PFOS are included as CERCLA hazardous substances, then it becomes part of the phase one environmental site assessment process as well.

So it’s really a very significant impact when the federal government created the hazardous substance identification for these two substances. When it did so, year before when it made the initial announcement that these substances were going to be regulated, EPA also indicated that it really wanted to focus on significant contributors and circular responsible parties, creating some discretion for the term that we’ve that had no hand in generating the PFAS that they find on their property or in their substances.

And so publicly owned treatment works, public landfills, airports that are required to use PFAS containing aqueous foam forming foam or AFFF and farmers receiving biosol has been kind of the classic parties that have been recognized as being suitable for that passive receiver status.

Where EPA stands now is really to focus on manufacturers and industrial users of PFAS, again, with that stated protection for passive recipients.

We’re seeing, I’d say, kind of a greater attention for now being paid to the litigation, which we’ll talk about here, and also to kind of the fragmented rollout of this particular rule.

So we haven’t really seen necessarily that there’s been a clear action or clear indication of action by the government that would lead us to conclude that yes, the focus is on manufacturers and causers and less on the passive recipients.

It may shift as time goes through and it may shift also of course, depending upon the outcome of the litigation. But that’s kind of where we stand at this point right now. In regard to the litigation, And the initial challenge came out quickly to the identification of PFOA and PFOS as hazardous substances in an action led by the U.S.

Chamber of Commerce with other parties joining in as supporting plaintiffs taking on the challenge against the identification. And really, the core issues that these parties have attacked are, did EPA follow proper rulemaking procedure.

Remember, this was the first time that a particular provision of CERCLA had ever been utilized to identify or nominate substances for identification or regulation as hazardous substances. Most of the time, that has come about through regulation of those substances as other hazardous constituents or media under other laws like RCRA, Clean Water Act, Clean Air Act. Once they’re under those, then they also get swept into CERCLA.

But this is the first time that there’s been sort of that initiative to take on given substances and regulate those as hazardous substances. There was also a question of whether the cost-benefit analysis was really on target.

And in the proposed rule, they didn’t really go into cost in detail. That was attacked by a lot of the commenters and by these plaintiffs. And then with the final rule, they came out with a broader cost-benefit analysis. But now the claim was, well, you didn’t really give us a chance to review that in depth, and therefore, is that a valid process?

And then in order to promulgate this, they have to meet a standard which is somewhat ambiguous that a given substance or product may present a substantial danger. And so that sort of subjective characteristic provides an opening for parties to attack it.

So where we stand on procedure right now is that following briefing And January oral argument this year, the matter is pending and we’re awaiting a decision from the DC Circuit Court probably later this year. I think that should be a reasonable time, but we’ll see something coming through. But this could be an up or down fork in the road.

Likely it will be appealed by either party, but we’ll have to just wait and see. But following the appeal and the resolution, the significance is that if the designation is upheld, then Then the circle hazardous substance status for those substances remains intact and all of the conditions that I identified previously will continue to apply.

Must be, you know, still going to be part of the cleanup regimen and still going to be part of the all appropriate inquiry.

But I think it’s also important because it’s a signal that future activities of the EPA may also include other PFAS compounds. If they prevail on this one and the process is upheld, then they may go after more going forward.

But if it’s vacated, then it would remove the substances from CERCLA. It would eliminate all those conditions that we were previously discussing. But my own position is also that I think that that creates greater uncertainty. I mean, we’ve all been there.

That’s where we came from before the April 24 indication that they were gonna regulate PFAS. And so I think that as much as it’s difficult to swallow, I think that having some degree of certainty is going to be better than the absence of that because then it leads to difficult decision making.

As far as who’s actually using it now, I think that most of the action we’re seeing is water utilities pursuing other parties. We’re also seeing that it’s popping up at CERCLA sites that are already out there in five-year reviews.

It’s leading to some confusion, and just as a representative marker, I’ve got this case here identified where parties that had brought actions under both Clean Water Act and under CERCLA, CERCLA has a certain priority over other laws, and that was what was at issue here, a very complex discussion and decision, but I think that it highlights the difficulty of dealing with this new landscape of taking PFAS and CERCLA. Limited action, I’d say, so far.

I think that it’s not the flood of action that everybody anticipated, so we’re likely to see that increasing to grow as time goes forward.

One very interesting area, though, that I think we ought to keep an eye on is how old defenses under CERCLA that, you know, passed in 1980 are now being used for PFAS. And one I think in particular is the useful product defense.

The basic idea here is that if a product is sold in commerce, it shouldn’t be something that is regulated as a waste. And so for biosolids that are turned into fertilizer, parties have already raised this argument that their substances are not circular hazardous substances.

They are a useful product. And early decisions indicate that that is an argument that courts are willing to accept and approve. So I think it’s one approach that just we ought to keep an eye on, because I think that we could see some of the jurisprudence that previously existed for CERCLA moving forward and being applied here in ways that we hadn’t necessarily anticipated.

So, the takeaways for you and for your businesses and your practices is, you know, keeping an eye on this, thinking about how to document how PFAS have been used on-site, it could be key to moving forward and exercising available defenses, and you don’t want to wait until you’re sued to have an understanding of how PFAS has been present there on your property.

Okay, next we’re going to talk about some state laws, which again, I think are important because I think they represent sort of gap fillers, if you will, and I think that they are proxies for the way that we would see regulation happening in government.

So we’re gonna look at three states. We’re gonna look at Wisconsin, New Jersey, and New Mexico. These are not the only states that are regulating PFAS, but I think that they are interesting because they represent three different models.

Wisconsin, where I’ve practiced most of my time, is very interesting because it’s been a long, hard slog to get legislation passed, but part of the incentive was that there was a substantial amount of money, over $100 million, that was set aside to deal with PFAS, but they needed to have this legislation in place in order to do so.

So in April of 2026, it was signed into law by the governor, and we think it may could be a model for the way that some other states might want to study on how to deal with PFAS.

The general theme requires some understanding of the way that Wisconsin regulates hazardous substances.

And that is, it’s kind of like a superfund model, a circle model, but the terms that are used in Wisconsin are that the responsible parties are two categories, somebody who either caused the contamination, caused the discharge, or a party that possesses and controls the a substance that has been discharged, basically an owner or an operator.

But what we see in the rollout of this law, which we called Act 201, is that there’s really an effort to try to protect the parties that received PFAS-containing material without generating or causing it.

Those are like the passive receivers. And generally, those would be landfills, water utilities, farmers, and other such parties. But those ones who simply are responsible because the PFAS happens to be president on a property and they therefore possess it and control it, what this law is trying to do is to sort of carve out and create some exemption from responsibility for those types of parties.

Again, there’s a massive chunk of money that was in state funding to be available. And that money is also part of the grant programs that are part of the program here in Wisconsin.

So right now, the interest is beginning to trickle in, and, you know, some of the initial efforts that the department has is to try to direct that money toward sources and needs that are sort of priorities, if you will. Looking at daycare schools, areas, there’s also been a focus on biosolids and trying to create funding opportunities for testing all of those areas.

But what remains in this law that I think is important is a focus on holding parties that cause contamination or that arguably introduce the product into introduce the PFAS into the environment. Those ought to be the parties that continue to have responsibility. We think it would probably, again, could be a model.

I think that the cause or pays has some greater appeal, and it could be interesting to see how that rolls out. New Jersey is the second state that we wanted to look at. Here, New Jersey has really been a little bit more, I think, just from an organic process.

New Jersey had an opportunity to bring actions after some of the major manufacturers, and earlier this year came up to a point where it had settlements in draft or proposed form with major manufacturers with a very substantial amount of money coming back.

There was pushback internally, interestingly, from municipalities in the state who were concerned that they were giving up rights against the manufacturers.

They wanted to retain those. They didn’t want to waive them all and basically sign off. But the state also made adjustments to the settlement agreements that they would set a certain amount of funds for the municipalities.

But I think that this is a little bit of a contrast to Wisconsin, which was trying to come up with regulation to manage behavior and sort of focus on anticipated regulation versus an enforcement and settlement mode of going after these parties.

And I’m coming in with significant settlement agreements. So again, the state needed to work with the local POTWs to come up with a model to try to protect them. And I think it also creates a different style and system that could be a different control mechanism.

New Jersey also has a product-based statute, which we’ll talk about more for other states in a minute. But this is, again, looking upstream at the generators, the manufacturers.

And so this Protecting Against Forever Chemicals Act is going to prohibit intentionally added PFAS in certain commercial products starting in January 2028. This is, again, trying to cut off the PFAS at the source to prevent it from getting into the stream of commerce in any fashion.

So compare these again. Wisconsin is talking more about regulating conduct, but it doesn’t have any product control regulation yet. And New Jersey is kind of sending out the signal that they’re going to go after parties that have caused contamination and settle with them on very large numbers, but also apply a product-based restriction.

And I think that those are two interesting markers of how different states can handle this.

New Mexico has an entirely different approach for right now, where they are the first state, really the first in nation, regulation of PFAS-containing waste as a state hazardous waste.

And that’s akin to the RCRA, Resource Conservation and Recovery Act, regulation of products as hazardous waste, not the same thing as circle of hazardous substances.

These are the substances, these are the wastes that have been generated that are solid wastes that also have hazardous characteristics, and basically New Mexico is getting to a point where they say, that’s how we’re going to regulate these substances going forward.

New Mexico has some history here.

They’ve been battling with the federal government for years related to airports, DoD installations where PFAS has been present, pushing for greater federal regulation and I think their frustration ultimately have led them to move forward to take this matter into their own hands and regulate PFAS waste as hazardous waste.

So the hazardous waste designation is affecting waste management. It’s not manufacturing, but it’s the waste product that is the culmination of activities. It’s a different tool, really, than a product ban or some sort of cause-or-pay approach that Wisconsin is using. Wisconsin, sorry, New Mexico is pursuing product-based restrictions, including labeling of products also.

So they’re a little bit like New Jersey in that regard that they’re looking at this from two ends of the degree of responsibility. I think that New Mexico is a very fascinating model that’s out there that could represent a pattern that other states might want to take a look at.

I think it’s going to affect conduct and behavior because of the waste that’s being generated. And I think that part of the objective is to try to think about changing conduct in the way that PFAS is utilized in manufacturing activities.

So the last chapter I just want to talk about here with you today is the expanding prohibitions on PFAS that is in products and requiring producers, businesses that are utilizing product to address the presence of PFAS in those substances.

And what it really does is it sort of shifts by impacting financial decisions. It impacts the manufacturers and the producers of these products and ultimately creates incentives to try to avoid use of PFAS and, you know, in some certain circumstances, it prohibits the use of PFAS in certain substances.

It’s a difficult issue, a difficult pill to swallow because essentially there are going to be times where you have customers approaching suppliers and, you know, asking about products So you have suppliers that now are saying, well, we need to put this label on this product that we’ve sold to you that says that it contains PFAS.

And that’s not an easy transition in a arms length exchange to try to deal with it. But the idea is to curtail use of PFAS and to limit its exposure in circumstances.

So the different ways that really this is being handled is by immediate and direct bands on intentionally added PFAS, phased-in or tiered-in bans, limited or qualified exemptions that, you know, are kind of phased-in, disclosure reporting and labeling, and then reporting accountability.

And we’ll talk a little bit about how different states are handling these. These are not the only states that are managing these issues in these ways, but I’m just using these as examples.

So in the state of Maine, Beginning January 1st of this year, there’s a ban on sale of products containing intentionally added PFAS in different products that you see identified here. I spent quite a bit of time in Maine and I’m already seeing some of these things popping up. You buy a bottle of water or milk sometimes and it will say, you know, no PFAS present or things like that.

So it’s interesting to see that actually beginning to happen in different states. The phased or tiered bans, Minnesota has been a leader in regard to regulation of PFAS in products and what Minnesota is doing is banning categories of products beginning last year with broader prohibitions expanding into five years from now with manufacturer reporting requirements as well and that again is for intentionally added PFAS.

Another example is Vermont, which instead of putting those out there just as blanket prohibitions, Vermont is looking at, how can they regulate PFAS at different concentrations?

So for products containing greater than 100 parts per million total organic chlorine, and for intentionally added PFAS, they would phase in with a lowering of threshold and certain uses also potentially exempted.

Another New England state, Connecticut, requires labeling and notification.

And in this case, it’s not intentionally added as for any product that can be characterized as PFAS containing beginning in July of 2026, with potentially using that as a first step toward increasing regulation of these activities.

And then, you know, as far as reporting and accountability, This is an interesting one that is rolling out right now. Manufacturer reporting to the MPCA for products with intentionally added PFAS is required starting next month in September of 2026.

There is an opportunity for an exemption request which would defer the deadline and that deadline is coming up very fast on August 16th of this month. So these are really, and again, we talked about New Jersey is going to have its own regulatory standard for intentionally added PFAS in certain products.

Other states are looking at these as well. But the different mechanisms that are really being utilized are prohibitions, timelines, reporting, and then disclosure requirements, as kind of the intradote, sort of the roll-in to how we’re gonna manage some of these regulatory standards.

But I think that these are important because the federal government has not taken this step of requiring labeling, disclosure, reporting, and other prohibitions on products.

We’re seeing these states stepping up to deal with these. It creates tremendous challenges. I’ve mentioned that we represent a manufacturer of a product that is sold into multiple states that has PFAS in it.

And they are having to aggressively monitor what those different states require to be able to anticipate these different timelines and different limitations on the ability to have a product that a lot of their customers still want. But they have to begin to figure out how are they going to phase out and address PFAS in all of these compounds.

OK, so we’ve been through those four chapters. And just as a wrap up, let’s just review what we talked about today.

The Safe Drinking Water Act, I think we see that narrowing, but we may see state standards stepping up. And I think that PFOA and PFOS regulation is here to stay.

It’s a question of when some of those standards become effective and when the wastewater treatment plants are going to have to meet these standards, having already monitored for the presence of PFAS in their, sorry, not wastewater treatment plants, drinking water utilities are going to have to monitor for those compounds.

CERCLA, again, that is effective. PFOA and PFOS are CERCLA hazardous substances, but I think that right now we’re seeing that the overall basis for that is being challenged.

We’ll see the other federal laws following behind RICRA, Clean Water Act, others, but that’s kind of not as rapid as the regulation that we’re seeing under Safe Drinking Water Act and CERCLA. We looked at a couple of different states, Wisconsin using kind of a cause or pays model to really hold the party that generated and was responsible for the PFAS being released into the environment.

New Jersey really has targeted the larger scale manufacturers, holding them responsible with very substantial settlement amounts. New Mexico leading the charge on regulating PFAS as a hazardous waste. And then the product bands are showing up in multiple states across the country.

Not every state, but I think it’s gonna be fascinating to see how that continues to evolve and roll out. So I think in general, you know, kind of the through line again that we’ve talked about today is that there’s kind of a federal retrenchment recalibration but very aggressive state activism.

I think that pattern is going to be here to stay and I think that for businesses that are operating in multiple states it’s going to take vigilance and attention to understand what the regulation is state by state.

I don’t think that we can wait for the federal government to reach clarification because that’s going to in the meantime we have to pay attention to what’s happening at the state levels and that’s going to be tough because there not on similar tracks.

And I think that we’re in an age of political discord within the federal level and between the different states.

So I think that’s gonna be fascinating to watch how this all evolves, but it’s gonna take a great deal of attention and I’m glad that we’re paying attention to this today. So thank you very much. I think we probably have time for some questions now and I’d be happy to answer those. And again, you should feel free to reach out to me After today’s session, if you have any questions, I’m always happy to receive those, and you’ve got my contact information here.