A new study is re-emphasizing just how many waterways now contain "forever chemicals" known as PFAS.
The report, published in-part by the MassPIRG Education Fund, collected water testing data of all kinds from across the country and catalogued just how many waterways contain the chemicals.
Pioneer Valley Bureau Chief James Paleologopoulos joined Sam Dingman on Northeast Notebook to discuss more.
Paleologopoulos: The big report entitled “PFAS found in America’s lakes and streams” went live on MassPIRG’s website today.
It was put out in part by MassPIRG, along with the Environment Massachusetts Research and Policy Center and the Frontier Group. To make a very long report short – the authors assembled data from between 2022 and 2024, collected by the federal government, states and non-profits. They then painted a picture that made it clear – PFAS is almost everywhere
Dingman: So PFAS are, as I understand it, a class of man-made chemicals, and PFAS contamination has been linked to forms of cancer. But what does the report say about the chemicals in lakes and streams?
Paleologopoulos: Well, for starters, of just over 1,600 locations across the nation discussed, 83% of the locations featured the detection of PFAS. So, just to reiterate, a lot of this data is kind of available, but this is a compilement that you're not going to find everywhere, anywhere. So, that included up to 114 different PFAS compounds detected at "one or more" water testing locations. The locales are far and wide. We're talking tons of positive results in the Mississippi River, parts of Cascadia and the Pacific Northwest, and of course large swaths of the Northeast. I spoke with Deirdre Cummings, the consumer program director for the Massberg Education fund. She told me in Massachusetts alone, 87% of the 108 tests done in the Commonwealth were positive for PFAS, and that there's more ground to cover. You know, tip of the iceberg is how she characterized this. A lot of these areas, some of these areas are only tested once, mind you, but once is enough.
Often they find the range of of compounds I was referring to earlier. As it turns out, there was actually only one spot in western Massachusetts, so to speak, Sheomet Lake in the Warwick State Forest. But yes, the Connecticut River, the Oxbow in Hampshire County, Pelham Lake in Rowe – all had PFAS compounds detected.
There was not a ton of data on Vermont and New Hampshire. Still, of the New York locations, researchers tackled 93.3% of 180 or 182 locales tested positive for PFAS. That includes Catskill Creek, which feeds the Hudson River, the rivers that feed Lake Champlain, so on and so forth. All tested positive.
Dingman: So what does MassPIRG and the other groups ultimately say about this?
Paleologopoulos: Well, there were a bunch of interesting observations. For example, one of the highest PFAS concentrations found in the data came out of Brunswick, Maine – that appeared to be tied to a 2024 incident in which a local airport accidentally released a town of aqueous film-forming foam – 1,450 gallons of the stuff mixing with 50,000 gallons of water that ended up in stormwater ponds.
But in terms of solutions – this is all part of a greater call for getting PFAS – forever chemicals - out of every day products and doing more to address the PFAS that ends up in the treated, repurposed sewage that ends up being used for farms – sewage sludge of course.
As Cummings told me – some of the first best steps we could take to addressing this starts with every day things like ditching grease-proof food wrapping or, really, any consumer goods that use PFAS chemicals when a PFAS-free solution is available.
Cummings: Because PFAS are so ingrained in our economy, we really have to get to a point where we're starting to phase it out and get rid of the using of PFAS everywhere we can, right? So that's got to be the first thing you want to go back to the source. So the source is consumer products, as I mentioned. And I will tell you, I did an event maybe about a year ago at the State House, and we had a show and tell where we would have a child's car seat that had PFAS in it, and right next to it is a car seat without PFAS in it. And there are alternatives now for so many of these products that are out.
Paleologopoulos: We should probably mention the way I phrased it. It makes it sound like refusing straws at a fast food restaurant. This does come back to the manufacturers as well. State legislatures have a pretty prominent role in this. Federal support for PFAS cleanup and avoidance — it hasn't dried up completely, but deregulation isn't helping. As Cummings and company reiterated in the report, "decreased fertility, developmental delays in children, compromised immunity, and some types of cancer" have been linked to PFAS. It’s to a point where, even in Massachusetts, you can’t eat fish from a number of waterways – not just the usual suspects like the Hoosic River. More info on the Department of Public Health Website.
