Today is the last day of PFAS Awareness Week. After spending a significant part of my time at Clean Water Action focused on PFAS, I have a lot to reflect on what I’ve learned from working on these chemicals.
When I first started working on PFAS, I knew the basics: they are “forever chemicals,” they are incredibly persistent, and exposure to certain PFAS has been linked to serious health concerns. But the more I worked on the issue, the more I realized that PFAS are not just a scientific or environmental problem. They are a policy problem, an infrastructure problem, a public health problem, and ultimately a question of who we expect to bear the cost of pollution.
For years, the science around PFAS was moving faster than the regulations designed to protect people from them. That creates a difficult situation for communities and water systems. They may know that PFAS are a serious concern, but knowing there’s a problem and having the resources, authority, and tools to address it are two very different things.
Passing a policy is only the beginning. A regulatory standard on paper does not automatically mean cleaner water. We have to make sure that agencies have the authority and resources to implement it, that communities can actually meet the requirements, and that polluters are not allowed to shift the cost of contamination cleanup onto taxpayers.
Behind every contaminated well and drinking water system is a community that must figure out what comes next. There are families who want to know whether their water is safe. There are local governments trying to pay for testing and treatment. There are workers and communities living near industrial facilities. And there are taxpayers who can end up paying millions of dollars to address contamination they had no role in creating.
There is only so much we can accomplish by trying to clean up contamination after it happens. Treatment is expensive. Monitoring is expensive. Replacing contaminated water supplies is expensive. And even after we spend all that money, the chemicals themselves are still out there.
We should be asking a much simpler question: why are we continuing to allow these chemicals into our environment when we already know how difficult they are to remove?
PFAS should be a wake-up call. We have an opportunity to learn from what happened with these toxic chemicals and build a chemical policy system that is more precautionary, more transparent, and focused on prevention. We should not have to wait decades for contamination to spread and communities to bear the costs before we decide that a chemical deserves stronger oversight.
That is one of the reasons I have been proud to do this work at Clean Water Action. We don’t just respond to contamination after the fact. We work to change the policies and systems that allow pollution to happen in the first place.
We know enough about PFAS to know that we need to act. We need strong protections for drinking water and the environment, meaningful monitoring and transparency, resources for communities dealing with existing contamination, and policies that reduce PFAS pollution at the source.
PFAS Awareness Week is a chance to talk about what these chemicals are and why they matter. But for me, it is also a reminder of why the policy work matters so much.
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