How New Jersey tamped down PFAS in drinking water

In 2018, New Jersey began limiting PFAS “forever chemicals” in drinking water. Levels of the regulated chemicals have dropped as much as 55%.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 0:31Ira Flatow?

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• 0:51Ira Flatow?

  Hi, this is Ira Flatow, and you're listening to Science Friday. Nearly every one of us has some type of PFAS, commonly known as forever chemicals in their blood. These chemicals are found in nonstick pan coatings, waterproof materials, and firefighting foam. Roughly two years ago, the EPA adopted federal regulations for PFAS levels in drinking water, though last year the Trump administration rolled back some of those regulations. But back in 2018, New Jersey was the first state to adopt its own drinking water standards for PFAS. And now, 10 years later, researchers at Rutgers University have crunched the data to see how well it worked.

• 1:36Ira Flatow?

  Joining me now to tell us more is the lead author of the study, Dr. Hari Iyer, Assistant Professor of Cancer Epidemiology and Health Outcomes at the Rutgers Cancer Institute of New Jersey, based in New Brunswick, New Jersey. Welcome to Science Friday. Thanks so much, Ira. It's so great to be here. Nice to have you. Okay, let's jump right in. What did you find in this study?

• 2:00Speaker 02

  We're so excited to present these results of a evaluation of state policies to reduce PFAS levels in drinking water, and we found a 55% reduction in average concentrations after the policy was implemented.

• 2:14Ira Flatow?

  Wow, is that a surprising study? I mean, that's a pretty big drop.

• 2:18Speaker 02

  So it's interesting you ask that. Our government colleagues were not surprised. They said, you know, Hari, we know when we put these policies in place, we expect to see a drop. That's why we do them. But I think we were excited to see this because in public health, often our message is, you know, this thing is bad for you. This disease is becoming more prevalent. But here, we were actually able to demonstrate a positive impact of a regulation.

• 2:50Ira Flatow?

  So would you describe the PFAS in the water now at a safe level in New Jersey?

• 2:56Speaker 02

  So we definitely have observed levels that are below the maximum contaminant levels, they're called, these regulatory limits. But I think that there's another part of this story, which is the ongoing evolution of our understanding of the health impacts of long-term exposure. And so something that a lot of folks will ask is, you know, that's great that the water levels have dropped today, but have I been drinking water for the last 20 years that has had higher levels? And if so, how does this help me? And I think that that's a very fair question to ask. And so I think when you ask a question about

• 3:37Speaker 02

  safe levels, I think we're still kind of understanding these long-term health risks.

• 3:42Ira Flatow?

  Yeah, so we don't know what those long-term health risks are. Do we know what portion of our daily ingestion of PFAS comes from drinking water?

• 3:53Speaker 02

  So that that's a complicated question. It's a good one. But what I will say is, based on a lot of this accumulating evidence from animal studies and from toxicology studies and cells, what has been shown is that once water is ingested into the body, the concentration in the water can be magnified by orders of magnitude. And so while I don't know if I have a precise answer of what contribution water is, it is certainly a very important one. And because of this biological magnification effect, it's still a major area that we want to control.

• 4:34Ira Flatow?

  Yeah, I want to dig into that more. So what happens when you drink the PFAS in it? How does your body, as you say, magnify what's going on?

• 4:44Speaker 02

  That's a great question. I can speak a bit more to the health side than the sort of consumption side. So on the health side, I think what has started to become more evident is that the water passes through your body and usually gets filtered in the kidney and liver. And so those are the organs where some of the sort of best established emerging evidence on a health impact seems to be. So kidney function and risk of certain kidney cancers have been linked to these PFAS exposures. And a lot of liver enzyme levels that sometimes, you know, you get monitored at the doctor's office, those seem to be elevated in people who have high consumption of these chemicals. And so some of what we're doing at the Cancer

• 5:26Speaker 02

  Institute and in other places is now trying to understand those elevated levels, are they being linked now to these downstream cancer outcomes and other chronic disease outcomes?

• 5:37Ira Flatow?

  How did New Jersey limit the PFAS? Did they have special treatment plants or filters?

• 5:42Speaker 02

  I'm glad you asked that question because it turns out that there were a lot of actions that we observed when we were reviewing these data, actions taken by water systems in anticipation of the policies coming into place. Some examples of some of those actions are Identifying wells that have really excess levels and then just pulling them offline. So they're no longer going to be serving people at their home. Another example is like what you had just asked about, which are granulated activated carbon. It allows us to kind of identify these PFAS chemicals, catch them and remove them from the water. So post treatment, those levels are no longer as high.

• 6:23Ira Flatow?

  When you said well water, were you talking about people's individual well water? They were able to eliminate the PFAS from that?

• 6:30Speaker 02

  So, no, no, in this context, what I was referring to is that often water that is provided from different systems, they will have their own wells that are sources of water that then gets kind of transferred. Unfortunately, one of the limitations of our study is that it was really only looking at public water systems. And so unfortunately, we're not able to demonstrate that this 55% reduction holds in people's home well systems because those don't tend to be tested as often. And that's about 1 in 10 New Jersey residents, I believe, is served by their home well.

• 7:06Ira Flatow?

  So is New Jersey's water more contaminated than other states?

• 7:10Speaker 02

  So unfortunately, there's been nationwide studies that have looked at levels over the last 15 years or so. And yes, unfortunately, New Jersey has in the past had higher levels on average than other states. However, given sort of the findings from this study, one would hope that in subsequent years, when those national comparisons are done, that may not, that may not be the case.

• 7:36Ira Flatow?

  Yeah. Are other states looking at your success and implementing their own standards for PFAS?

• 7:43Speaker 02

  That's a great question, and that's something that we hope that other states can look to some of these successes. But I think the power of doing something like this and being able to publish these findings is that it can lead to exactly what you're describing. Best practices can be shared from states. These experiments that are done at a local level, you can test some of the, you know, the kinks in the policy. Maybe it works well in certain contexts, but not others. Maybe it's addressing certain populations and not others. And those best practices can be shared to ultimately make, you know, our water, our drinking water safer for everybody.

• 8:19Ira Flatow?

  Dr. Iyer, I know you're a cancer researcher and I'm wondering how you got interested in studying PFAS in drinking water?

• 8:26Speaker 02

  So I've been studying prostate cancer since my doctoral training. And one of the biological pathways that drives prostate cancer is sex hormone disruption. And so endocrine disrupting chemicals have long been thought of as a potential risk factor, but there's been very few human epidemiologic studies that have robustly demonstrated this, have replicated in different populations. So when I moved to New Jersey to start my job as an assistant professor here, one of the first things I did was talked to environmental health scientists at our university who have been studying not just forever chemicals, but lead levels.

• 9:08Speaker 02

  And I think it was really through conversations with them, learning more about the state, learning more about some of the health challenges, that I became aware of it. And it seemed like it was a very important question, not just from a scientific side, but one that the residents of New Jersey are very concerned about.

• 9:25Ira Flatow?

  So what's next for your research here? I imagine, since we don't know a lot about the long-term effects, that you're interested in that?

• 9:33Speaker 02

  Yeah, so I think that the evidence right now has demonstrated a lot of these biomarkers, like we talked about liver enzymes and kidney function and lipid levels and cholesterol levels are another area. But demonstrating these cancer pathways is incredibly difficult from a design perspective because you have to follow people for many, many years. And you have to get a really strong understanding of what their exposure was, not when you're talking to them today, but 10 years in the past. And so our lab is conducting a few studies right now, trying to reconstruct those historical PFAS levels by using some of the data that we presented in this study and developing

• 10:17Speaker 02

  predictive models, predicting the PFAS levels 20, 15, 20 years ago in different parts of New Jersey. What we can do then is we can link those predictions to people's homes and where they may have moved over the course of their lives to be able to get a better, a better measure of what that exposure may have been at a time when that cancer may have been developing.

• 10:40Ira Flatow?

  You know, whenever I think about PFAS or other carcinogens or potential carcinogens that we don't know about that take years to develop, I think about asbestos that we all sucked in for half a century.

• 10:55Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 10:56Ira Flatow?

  Right, from our car brakes and had no idea of how toxic it was. Could we be facing the same kind of thing with PFAS?

• 11:04Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, it's a really, it's a really important point. And with PFAS, I think it's also important when you, when you think about this and put this in the historical context, when these chemicals were first used, they had a lot of really desirable properties. It's great to be able to fight fires. These plastic linings on the food that sort of kept them preserved were important things at the time. I think what the story of PFAS and asbestos and some of these chemicals has shown is that there's likely a balance that can be found in doing some evaluation of chemicals when they first come on the market where we don't fully understand what those long-term health outcomes are.

• 11:47Speaker 02

  But finding that balance, I think, is something that the PFAS story shows that we may have, we may have skewed too far on the side of technological progress. We'll worry about the problems later.

• 11:59Ira Flatow?

  Dr. Iyer, I want to thank you for taking time to be with us today.

• 12:02Speaker 02

  Thank you so much, Ira. It was great to speak with you.

• 12:05Ira Flatow?

  Good luck with your research. Dr. Hari Iyer, Assistant Professor of Cancer Epidemiology and Health Outcomes at the Rutgers Cancer Institute of New Jersey, based in New Brunswick. If you're listening and worried about PFAS in your drinking water, we have a list of resources on how to effectively filter out forever chemicals from your tap. Head to sciencefriday.com/pfas. That's sciencefriday.com/pfas. This episode was produced by Shoshana Buxbaum. Do you have a question you want us to look into? Please, our listener line is always open. Give us a call at 1-877-4-P-F-F-A-S.

• 12:49Ira Flatow?

  1-877-the-number-4-P-F-F-A-S. I'm Ira Flatow. Thank you for listening.