June 2021

Maine lawmakers have passed a sweeping set of bills aimed at addressing the growing problems posed by “forever chemicals” that have shut down several farms and contaminated dozens of private wells across the state.

Although several of the bills await funding decisions or Gov. Janet Mills’ signature, Democratic and Republican lawmakers sent a clear signal this legislative session that Maine should move aggressively on PFAS pollution rather than wait for federal action. Bills passed with broad, often-unanimous support and would set among the nation’s strictest limits on PFAS pollution in drinking water, prohibit the uncontrolled testing of PFAS-laced firefighting foam, and provide millions of dollars to detect and clean up contamination.

“We really need to get ahead of this and recognize that we don’t know the extent of the issue,” said Sen. Rick Bennett, an Oxford Republican who co-sponsored several of the bills. “But what the Legislature was doing was giving the administration all of the tools … to address this as quickly as possible.” Read more…

A bill aimed at providing grants to communities affected by “forever chemical” contamination would take away the ability for cities and towns to pursue legal action against the companies or other entities that created the pollution.

The bill, approved in an Assembly floor vote Tuesday, was authored by Elijah Behnke, R-Oconto, and would create a $10 million grant program for the 2021-23 biennium for communities struggling with PFAS, or per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances. It would be funded by American Rescue Plan Act money received by the state from the federal government. Read more…

For a community leader like Josh Johnson, the newly elected chairman of the Town of Campbell, “forever chemicals” are more than just a health risk — they’re an expensive problem, one that a municipality of fewer than 5,000 people would struggle to fix on its own.

The town, situated on French Island across the Mississippi River from La Crosse, didn’t have funds to conduct testing last year when water contamination stemming from the nearby La Crosse Regional Airport came to light and homeowners wanted to know if PFAS had reached their wells.

Of 551 private drinking wells sampled so far, only 13 have shown no trace of the long-lasting chemicals. More than 130 have levels above the state’s recommended limits for drinking water. Read more…

So what was the strange, deadened look on the wide-open farm fields of Addison County in May at a time when new spring growth was awakening and reviving our spirits? Ever so slowly, small shoots of corn are somehow making their way through yearly-compacted, chemically-drenched soils, while we are all looking for ways to put Covid-19 behind us and to seek some kind of “normalcy.”

But I believe that “normal” is not what we need. This is time to look deeply at the paradigms, the ways of thinking that bring us to this point.

Commodification of land, water and life has brought pollution, illness and economic inequity. Read more…

A company hired to help extinguish a fire that gutted a northern Illinois chemical plant this week used foam containing toxic compounds that have tainted surface waters and groundwater across the U.S., officials said Thursday.

The private contractor sprayed the foam for about three hours Tuesday at the Chemtool Inc. factory near Rockton, despite concerns raised by government regulators the previous day, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency told The Associated Press.

The chemicals later were cleaned up and stored in a container, Fire Chief Kirk Wilson said at a news conference Thursday. Earlier, outside experts told the AP it would be difficult to prevent at least some of the material from seeping into groundwater. Read more…

People who wear makeup such as lipstick or mascara may be absorbing or licking up potentially harmful ingredients that hang around for decades in the environment, according to a new study by researchers in the U.S., Canada and Switzerland.

Those ingredients, known as polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS), are rarely disclosed on labels, making them hard to avoid, said the study published Tuesday in the journal Environmental Science & Technology Letters.

PFAS are a group of more than 4,700 human-made chemicals that contain fluorine bonded to carbon, a strong chemical bond that makes them hard to break down. Read more…

Cosmetics distributed in the United States and Canada are rife with a class of chemicals that have been associated with a number of diseases, including cancer, and frequently aren’t labeled accurately, according to a new study.