The New Regulatory Climate and Emerging Contaminants

Today, I’d like to take a look at what environmental regulations and emerging contaminants look like in the modern era.

As most of you know, our current configuration of environmental regulations and ‘green’ consciousness is a relatively new phenomenon. It was the Nixon administration that gave us things like the Clean Air Act and the Safe Drinking Water Act wasn’t implemented in its revised formulation until the early eighties. The Resource Conservation and Recovery Act (RCRA) was developed in a grass-roots reaction to the work Silent Spring by Rachel Carson in the late seventies as the public became aware of common industrial practices of dumping waste products into common resources, such as lakes, rivers, or unused land. It was making people sick. It lit rivers on fire. For a brief, shining moment, the United States at least was awake and conscious of the deep interconnections between humans and nature and the responsibility we had, not only to protect our own health, but the continued sustainability of natural resources that are too easy to take for granted.

But something else happened in the eighties. Trickle-down economic theory and the resurgence of corporate power and political power. Wealth bloomed from deregulation of credit, banking, and investment rules. Most of this was made up, anyway-illusions of money that existed mostly as generated credit from institutions that shouldn’t have the power to invent money from nothing-but that’s outside the scope of this small exploration. Wealth was the only measure of success politically and soon enough, within the community. Our society switched to a consumption-based economy. The environment was, at best, a support for manufacturing or ‘useful’ human activities, or worse, a constant cookie jar to rip out natural resources, dump waste, and shit on for companies as they expected state and local communities to bear the cost to create their products and deal with their waste streams.

In the nineties and two-thousands, there seemed to be a resurgence in environmental protection, but lately, the arena seems to be changing again.

As we know, the current administration has rolled back many of the regulations from its predecessors. Waters of the US are now free for dumping. Air regulations are removed. Litigation is stopped. Stormwater and non-point source pollution are again ignored. All because of the financial strain it puts on companies to not destroy our earth. How sad for them. To have to properly clean up the toxins they create. Well, a big chunk of those limits are gone.

And now, we have a new class of emerging contaminants called PFAS – per and polyfluoralalkyl substances that are literally in everything. These nasty little molecules are virtually indestructible. You can change the long form to a short form, but it doesn’t help you much since the long-forms are less soluble and bond to humic surfaces whereas the short forms don’t, but that’s about it. And why does that matter? Because treatment relies on manipulating the chemical structure to bond it, slow it down, in some way so you can pull it out the environment.

These things could cause kidney cancer, immunodeficiency diseases, autoimmune diseases, and probably more stuff that we just have tested for yet. And our current EPA keeps pushing back on developing regulations for these things. And for all the pharmaceuticals, pesticides, and hormones that end up in our water, our food, our air. Because it would be expensive for companies to take responsibility for their chemical compounds.

In some cases, we can use a form of adsorption to capture these emerging contaminants (the things the EPA won’t make a decision on for…reasons…). This method is commonly called ultra or nanofiltration that works with a reverse osmosis technique that requires a pressure differential, a filter surface of some kind, a little acid, and a whole lot of electricity. But PFAS compounds don’t respond well to it and remain stubbornly mobile through most of our water treatment go-to solutions.

So, how do we deal with them?

A thought: there is some evidence that using a lead-acid solution can force a precipitation reaction for the short chain versions. Since long-chain versions can be captured using our traditional techniques, but then degrade into short-chains that escape in our sludge and waste discharge on the backend, we might be able to take that sludge/discharge and pass it through a lead-acid battery as part of the ionic movement pole to pole to trigger a precipitation reaction with the lead. The result would be a form of gypsum. Nice, stable, usable gypsum. It might look something like this:

Raw gypsum surface by electron scanning microscope

Gypsum is useful for all kinds of other applications, especially in the industrial world, so there is a chance that we could even convince companies to do this waste treatment themselves to reuse it as part of the production process.

Currently, this kind of sustainable product line development is a requirement under RCRA and CERCLA regulations (long may they reign), so there would be some regulatory drivers to get companies to start taking responsibility in a way that made sense for their financials as well.

But if the EPA doesn’t get off its butt and make these kinds of choices more profitable than just paying fines or moaning about how emerging contaminants don’t have realistic ‘limits’ and how companies couldn’t possibly stop dumping waste until those definite limits are set, we won’t be able to make any progress. And if the continuing trend of deregulation occurs, we are just going to end up with these contaminants in our rivers, lakes, air, bones, and lungs, paying for our industrial sector’s laziness with our insurance, our paychecks, and our taxes, which seems completely nonsensical to this humble author.