The US Environmental Protection Agency is abandoning binding drinking water limits for “forever chemicals” and betting instead on destruction technologies that do not exist at industrial scale, a gambit critics liken to the fossil fuel industry’s use of carbon capture to justify continued pollution.
EPA administrator Lee Zeldin last week announced plans to rescind nationwide limits on four Pfas compounds — GenX, PFNA, PFBS and PFHxS — and to extend compliance deadlines for two others, PFOA and PFOS, from 2029 to 2031. The move reverses what Zeldin called a Biden-era rule in which the agency “cut corners” and did not follow the law, leaving it vulnerable to legal challenges. He promised a new approach “grounded in gold-standard science and the Safe Drinking Water Act”.
Yet the room in which Zeldin made the announcement was billed as a “Pfas destruction event”. He and health secretary Robert F Kennedy Jr spent most of their time touting what they called an “explosion in destruction technology” and nearly $1bn in new EPA funding to states for Pfas in drinking water — part of a larger $5bn programme over five years. Kennedy said the destruction plan was built on “honest science”.
The problem, according to public health advocates and engineers who study the chemicals, is that no technology currently exists that can fully destroy Pfas on a wide scale. The administration is effectively suggesting it can solve a contamination crisis without regulating the source, an approach Kyla Bennett, a former EPA scientist now with the non-profit Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (Peer), called “nonsensical”.
Why destruction technologies fail
Pfas — per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances — are a class of at least 16,000 compounds designed to be indestructible. They are used to make products water-, stain- and grease-resistant, and their carbon-fluorine bonds are among the strongest in chemistry. That stability gives them their nickname “forever chemicals” and makes them extraordinarily difficult to break down.
Current destruction methods, including incineration and thermal oxidation, do not achieve their goal. Instead of eliminating the molecules, these processes tend to fracture them into smaller fragments. Those fragments, or byproducts, may be just as toxic as the parent chemicals, and most standard regulatory tests cannot detect their presence. “Just because you can’t measure it doesn’t mean it isn’t there,” advocates warn.
This was illustrated dramatically in 2023, when independent experts working with the Guardian took air samples around a Chemours Pfas plant in North Carolina. The company and regulators had claimed a thermal oxidiser was destroying “99.999%-plus” of Pfas. But testing using a method designed to detect all Pfas — not just the ones regulators routinely check for — found evidence of chemicals that had escaped the destruction process. The chemicals were not fully destroyed.
That same problem applies to more than 200 garbage, hazardous waste and sewage sludge incinerators across the United States, which release Pfas into the atmosphere at levels that alarms scientists. If the Trump administration gets its way, those facilities are likely to proliferate rather than face tighter drinking water standards.
The fundamental difficulty is that Pfas were engineered to resist breakdown. “No one has said they can destroy Pfas on a large scale,” Bennett said. “From what we know about Pfas, this is not going to work, and to say ‘We’re going to destroy it so we don’t need to regulate it’ is bullshit.”
Wastewater treatment plants compound the problem. They do not break Pfas down; instead they concentrate the chemicals into sewage sludge, or biosolids. That sludge is then either sent to hazardous waste landfills or spread on farmland as fertiliser, contaminating soil, crops and livestock. The practice is not regulated at the federal level, though some states have begun to introduce limits. Peer has filed a lawsuit alleging the EPA has failed to perform its non-discretionary duty to regulate Pfas in sewage sludge.
The health consequences of this contamination are severe and mounting. Pfas exposure has been linked to cancer, birth defects, decreased immunity, high cholesterol, kidney disease, liver damage, impacts to the heart, and developmental damage to infants and children. Scientists say there is no safe level of exposure. The chemicals are now found in 98% of tested US waterways across 19 states, and an estimated 73 million Americans are exposed to Pfas in their tap water above levels the EPA itself considers unsafe. Studies have detected Pfas in at least 97% of Americans’ body fluids. They have been found in virtually every rainwater sample, in every soil sample taken across New Hampshire in 2023, and even in polar bears’ blood. As advocates put it, the planet is filling up like a bathtub, and the only real solution is to “turn off the tap”.
Industry profit and the ‘fox guarding the hen house’
Instead of turning off the tap, the Trump administration is keeping it open and promoting destruction technology as a fix. The parallel to carbon capture is deliberate: in both cases, an industry continues to produce a dangerous substance while arguing that a future, unproven technology will clean up the mess.
Laura Orlando, a waste management systems engineer at Boston University, said one can explain the administration’s approach by “following the money”. Because Pfas contaminate sewage sludge at high levels, there is a growing market for technologies that claim to destroy the sludge and the chemicals within it. The processes are extremely expensive. One study found Pfas can be purchased for $50 to $1,000 per pound, but removing them from water costs between $2.7m and $18m per pound — and that price does not include destruction. A separate study estimated that removing Pfas from wastewater alone in Minnesota would cost between $14bn and $28bn over 20 years. Globally, the annual cost to remove Pfas from the environment could exceed the world’s total economic output.
Taxpayers shoulder most of that burden, while the powerful waste management and chemical industries collect the payments. “Ultimately Pfas destruction has all the same problems as carbon capture — it is inefficient, expensive, unreliable, prone to technical failures and clearly not an alternative to regulations,” Orlando said. “We need to continue to research Pfas ‘destruction’ by funding entities without a profit motive, who work in a transparent environment, with the public’s health front and center. Right now the fox is guarding the hen house, and it’s not looking good for the hens.”
