WEST JORDAN — Your drinking water could become even cleaner under the Environmental Protection Agency’s latest attempt to limit ‘forever chemicals.’
“It’s in our water, it’s in mothers’ breast milk, it’s in polar bears in the arctic. It’s everywhere,” said Dr. Andy Hong, a professor in the civil environmental engineering department at the University of Utah.
Dr. Hong and his students research ways to degrade PFAS compounds. The harmful chemicals can be found in food packaging, dental floss, and non-stick cooking pans.
These contaminants are linked to kidney cancer, fertility issues, and child development delays. The federal government plans to limit the compounds to four parts per trillion, the lowest level that tests can detect.
“You can’t chemically destroy it, you can’t biologically degrade it, you can only burn it but only at a very high temperature,” said Dr. Hong.
Just last month Park City banned fluorinated ski wax or “fluoro-wax” after they found chemicals in the water supply.
“These levels are so low that they’re in the parts per trillion ranges,” said Michelle de Haan, Park City's water quality and treatment manager. “So recognize we’re at seven parts per trillion, which is barely measurable by instrumentation today.”
To put parts per trillion into context, it's equivalent to one cent out of $10 billion or one drop in an Olympic-sized swimming pool.
“Or another way to think of it is about 30 seconds in a million years,” said Shazelle Terry with the Jordan Valley Water Conservancy District.
Terry said the West Jordan treatment plant serves over 800,000 people in the Salt Lake valley.
“So far all of our samplings have shown we have had non-detect: so no detections in our system,” she explained. “I understand that that’s true for most of the state.”
Terry said the West Jordan location hast the treatment capabilities if they breach the agency’s proposed limit, but the extensive tech could be very expensive for other water systems.
In a statement sent to FOX 13 News, the Utah Department of Environmental Quality said the Utah Division of Drinking Water (DDW) “has done voluntary testing since 2019 for over 100 communities across the state, representing about 70% of water systems. Our monitoring has indicated that most systems either had non-detectable levels or levels well below the previous EPA advisory limit of 70 parts per trillion.”
The statement said that if there is a breach in the enforced limit, funding is available “to assist systems in water infrastructure upgrades if necessary.”
“For a system like Logan to include additional steps in the removal process for PFAS, it’d be quite expensive,” said Dr. Ryan Dupont, a Utah State professor with the Utah Water Research Laboratory.
Dr. Dupont predicts the EPA’s proposal will pass, but says this is just one step out of many to protect public health.
“Problem with getting this rule: it will help with our exposure to drinking water, but it won’t eliminate the exposure from all these other routes,” he said.
