The Trump administrations EPA has decided to “rollback” a rule which was to take effect by 2029 to curb or limit the amount of five PFAS(Per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances) chemicals, noted as “Forever Chemicals” due to their nature, found in drinking water. The administration has kept two of the five at current EPA limits and rolled back the other three. The PFAS chemicals in question are as follows:

• Perfluorooctanoic acid (PFOA)
• Perfluorooctanesulfonic acid (PFOS)
• Perfluorononanoic acid (PFNA)
• Perfluorohexanesulfonic acid (PFHxS)
• Hexafluoropropylene oxide dimer acid (HFPO-DA)

The EPA stated that water utilities needed more time to roll out the requirements and more studies will needed to be performed on two, PFOA and PFOS and extend the compliance date for those two PFAS chemicals to 2031.

The Biden administration’s EPA had rolled out the rule, which was to give water utilities three years to obtain the correct filtering equipment and to publish the results starting by 2029.

PFAS are a group of synthetic organofluorine chemical compounds that have multiple fluorine atoms attached to an alkyl chain; there are 7 million such chemicals according to PubChem.¹

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Per-_and_polyfluoroalkyl_substances ↩︎