The monumental infrastructure bill that President Biden signed yesterday will send $10 billion to the States to pass on to drinking water suppliers to test for the "forever chemicals" known collectively as PFAS and then filter the parts per trillion of PFAS out of the water when they're found. That filtering will likely be required for the rest of the lives of anyone reading this blog and the costs of that filtering are considerable.
While there's no current Federal requirement to look for PFAS in drinking water, in many States, including Massachusetts, water suppliers have been required to look for PFAS for a year or so. Not surprisingly, most of the water supplies found to have been impacted by PFAS are in States where water suppliers have been required to look for them.
EPA's PFAS Road Map released last month calls for a Federal PFAS Drinking Water Standard in the Fall of 2023 but the dollars to address PFAS will start flowing now.
While $10 billion is nowhere near the amount that will be necessary to treat all of the PFAS that will be found in drinking water from coast to coast, it is certainly more than a drop in the bucket.
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