Cities across the nation are ramping up to spend billions of dollars to remove lead water service lines from municipal infrastructures.
Bloomington alone will spend about $101 million over the next decade. Another potential huge cost looms for drinking water producers — so-called forever chemicals or PFAS — and maybe down the road, nanoplastics.
PFAS stands for perfluoroalkyl or polyfluoroalkyl substances. They are collectively a group of chemicals that can repel water, dirt, and oil. They are in a lot of products, from electronics to the construction industry to your kitchen. They don't break down easily in the environment or the human body and can accumulate over time.
The Environmental Protection Agency is moving toward regulating them. So far, the EPA has required a couple stages of what's called unregulated contaminant monitoring regulation, or UCMR — one in 2013 for six chemicals, and a more comprehensive test for 29 chemicals that started in 2021.
"We know we have it. It is in some of our wells. Depending on the combination of wells that we use that controls the level of PFAS that is in the water then," said Town of Normal Water Department Director John Burkhart.
Burkhart said the chemicals are in the in-town wells, not the ones outside of town. The in-town wells are shallower than the others. He said the EPA measures PFAS through a complicated formula based on the levels of the various monitored chemicals.
"The EPA has come out with a calculation for what they call their hazard index. They want to see that below 1. Ours, using data collected from April 2021, is calculated to be .23. So, we are at 23% of what the maximum level is," said Burkhart.
The City of Bloomington also had a positive test result in 2021. Water Director Ed Andrews is a little cagey about how much PFAS are in the city water source before treatment, lakes Bloomington and Evergreen.
"I have to be a little careful how I answer that because we are in a class action lawsuit," said Andrews.
A group of water utilities like Bloomington is suing major manufacturers of PFAS. Though it could be years away from resolution, that lawsuit could result in the same kind of batch settlements that tobacco manufacturers and opioid makers agreed to — billions to governmental bodies for health costs or, in this case, perhaps costs associated with getting PFAS out of the water.
Andrews said data from older testing shows point .04 parts per billion. The limits in the regulations from the U.S. EPA and just adopted by the Illinois EPA are 4 parts per billion.
The data collected so far doesn't matter a whole lot anyway. It's all preliminary. Burkhart said what will matter is the next round of data coming in October.
"Every water utility across the United States will have to participate in this UCMR 5 testing. Everyone will know if they do have it or don't have it. And using those results they can start working towards removal below that level, elimination if they choose," said Burkhart.
Ah, removal. How to get rid of it.
"That's going to be a real struggle," said Burkhart.
There are a couple of ways to suck out PFAS from your drinking water. One of them is an old, old technology the City of Bloomington still uses.
"We're kind of lucky. I don't think it was the intent in 1929 to have designed the filter bed removal process, but our filter beds have a layer of granulated activated carbon, essentially like charcoal pellets," said Andrews.
And activated carbon does fine at removing PFAS. Another way to remove PFAS, and a host of other contaminants, is called reverse osmosis. That's an expensive add-on to any water treatment plant. And Burkhart said it has drawbacks.
"The problem with that system is you backwash it like a swimming pool, your pressure filters. That's going to go to everyone's reclamation district. Now they're dealing with PFAS that they generally haven't dealt with. So, they may have to change their treatment process," said Burkhart.
The Bloomington-Normal Water Reclamation District confirms it does not test for PFAS right now because it's not required for licensing.
Burkhart said the knock-on effects from reverse osmosis could be significant.
"If we remove PFAS by reverse osmosis, we're going to end up putting it in the Mississippi River and someone downstream, say the city of St. Louis who doesn't have a PFAS problem today, if every community upstream of them does that they may have a problem in the future," he said.
There's even a downside to the charcoal filters. Ed Andrews said periodically the city has to rehab its charcoal beds and replace the activated carbon.
"There's a waste stream and depending on the level of concentration, that may need to be directed to a special landfill," said Andrews.
Hazardous waste landfills are expensive to use. And PFAS have proven to be so mobile and so long-lasting in the environment they might not stay in such landfills. Depending on the geology of the facility, they could eventually get back into someone's water supply.
It is possible to destroy PFAS by burning them, but it requires really hot temperatures to do the job.
"Well, I'd have to find an incinerator," said Andrews.
And hazardous waste incinerators are even less common than hazardous waste landfills. It's tough to get permits and licenses to operate them and nobody but nobody wants one in their backyard.
Nevertheless, Andrews said there are signs businesses sense an opportunity created by potential regulation and such an industry may grow.
"I have heard that the suppliers are looking at offering that as a service where they could incinerate off and potentially rehab some of the product," he said.
Though it's unclear whether incineration is scalable enough to handle PFAS waste from thousands of water utilities around the nation.
Both Bloomington and Normal expect the government to require PFAS removal from drinking water relatively soon, perhaps a couple years.
Burkhart in Normal said he hopes the government will give cities and towns a little grace.
"It would be a disservice to go ahead and put regulations in place today. Water utilities are dealing with lead right now. And to throw PFAS and other things on top of them, there is just not enough money to deal with all these at once," he said.
Lead and PFAS are not the only challenges water utilities face.
So-called micro and nanoplastics are tiny bits of plastic shed by things like disposable water bottles. There's growing evidence those can stay in human bodies for a long time too. Some of them release chemicals similar to or the same as PFAS. And the small particles may themselves prove to be hazardous to people's health the longer they stay in the body.
The regulatory arc on those materials has not even begun.
