Navigating PFAS Regulations and Preparing for Future Water Contaminants

Bob, do you want to start us off?

Yeah, let's start there.

So from a regulatory perspective, one of the most significant developments for the wastewater sector right now is EPA's draft guidance on reducing risk from PFOA and PFOS in biosolids, or PFAS in biosolids.

While it is useful to quickly define those terms, I think most of you know PFOA and PFOS.

Those are the two primary chemicals that are being regulated right now in drinking water.

And biosolids, of course, are the treated sewage sludge from wastewater systems and often are used for beneficial reuse and land application.

And that's kind of the entire reason why this guidance has been created in the first place.

In this most recent published memorandum, EPA laid out the management conversation, which centered on a couple of questions.

What practices are being used today? And which practices does EPA view as reasonable risk reduction steps? And then more importantly, the publishing of this memorandum kicks off an opportunity for dialogue with EPA as they are seeking public comment regarding what is workable, regarding what needs some clarification, and anything that could create unintended consequences.

So as a utility or an engineering professional in the wastewater space, you should take this public comment period to heart and share how this could impact your facility or the work that you do in the marketplace, because we know this issue can be quite complex.

So making sure that you communicate that to EPA will provide a lot of invaluable feedback, especially just knowing the complexity and the nuance, like I said, that's going on with this.

In any case, this draft guidance is EPA's attempt to add context after the agency's 2025 draft biosolids risk assessment.

In the memo that was published just this week, EPA said that the prior assessment had focused on hypothetical higher exposure scenarios and that those scenarios did not necessarily reflect the majority of land application practices in the United States.

It also pointed out that the assessment did not estimate how often those high-risk scenarios occurred nationwide.

which is a critical distinction for operators and policymakers who are trying to understand the actual risk of PFAS in biosolids.

Now, that framing does matter because EPA is not saying that biosolids land application should simply stop.

In fact, the guidance in this memo acknowledges that land application remains a major management pathway for biosolids and the solids that come at the end of every wastewater treatment process.

Based on its survey and study of 2,300 wastewater systems in 2022, EPA data does show that roughly 60% of sewage sludge is land applied in some form, whether that's for agricultural use, reclamation sites, public sale, and other land application uses.

And it also recognizes land application is often a cost-effective option for utilities, especially in places where landfill capacity or incineration capacity is limited.

Now, the obvious call-out for this type of thing is Maine, where land application has been banned by the state legislature.

That has strained landfills in the state.

In fact, I believe only one landfill in the state currently accepts biosolids right now and that it's running out of capacity.

And then that has had this knock-on effect where utilities have found themselves shipping their biosolids over the border into Canada for disposal in some cases.

So as for current management practices, some states are leaning into source control and pretreatment.

Michigan is the clearest example of that and is mentioned in this guidance for that particular approach.