A proposed rule to establish monitoring and minimization requirements for PFAS dischargers in the state was crafted largely from input provided by a utility association.
A draft of the rule was discussed last week in a meeting of the North Carolina Environmental Management Commission’s Water Quality Committee. The role of the commission is to adopt rules to protect, preserve and enhance the state’s water and air resources.
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The draft will likely be presented to the committee this spring, short of any further suggestions from community and environmental groups. The draft then will go to the full commission if the committee decides to move forward.
North Carolina Department of Environmental Quality’s Division of Water Resources Director Richard Rogers told the committee during its meeting Wednesday that while the draft rule includes “some” of the input from those groups, the “full scope of their written feedback has not been integrated in the rule that you have before you today.”
“At the direction of the committee chair, staff used the PFAS monitoring and minimization framework submitted by the North Carolina Water Quality Association to develop the draft rule before the committee today,” he said. He was referring to committee chairman Steve Keen. The statewide association members are from public water, sewer, and stormwater utilities.
Rogers went on to say that he would like to consider a rule on per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances discharges into surface waters that incorporates feedback from the other groups, the full engagement of which would push the division past a May deadline.
The committee instructed division staff to complete and present a draft to the rule and a regulatory impact analysis, which assesses the impacts of a proposed regulation, at its May 7 meeting.
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“We need to get this thing through,” Commission Chair JD Solomon said. “We need to get it to public comment. That’s the most important thing right now.”
Community and environmental groups will then get the opportunity to submit their responses to the draft rule, he said.
The language included in the draft presented to the committee last week has already drawn the ire of environmental advocates who argue it does not require industries to reduce their PFAS discharges.
“They moved forward a rule that is worse than doing nothing and that is because it will give cover to polluters to do nothing even if DEQ tries to put protections in permits,” Cape Fear River Watch Executive Director Dana Sargent said in an interview Thursday. “DEQ should be drafting the rule, the EMC should be there for review and obviously it should not be drafted by industry.”
The Cape Fear region became ground zero for PFAS contamination in the state after news broke in 2017 that Chemours Co.’s Fayetteville Works facility, some 70 miles upstream of Wilmington, had for decades been discharging PFAS into the Cape Fear River and groundwater, contaminating the drinking water sources for tens of thousands of residents.
But Chemours is not the sole discharger of these chemical compounds, which are used to produce everyday goods like food containers, waterproof clothing and stain-resistant carpets, into the region’s drinking water sources.
According to DEQ, there are hundreds of industries in North Carolina that pay wastewater treatment plants to take their industrial waste, the Southern Environmental Law Center said in a March 10 release.
Those treatment plants do not remove PFAS, but “have the authority and obligation to stop their industrial customers from sending toxic pollution like PFAS to their wastewater plants in the first place,” the release states.
Jean Zhuang, a SELC senior attorney, stated in the release that the draft rule presented last week “is offensive to families throughout North Carolina who deserve clean, safe drinking water.”
“Under this rule, PFAS-polluting industries could do absolutely nothing to reduce their toxic waste for the next century and face no consequences,” she said. “This rule protects over 600 industry polluters above communities and abandons the 2.5 million North Carolinians drinking water contaminated with harmful forever chemicals. The Environmental Management Commission cannot move this rule forward.”
During last week’s meeting, committee members discussed various language in the proposed rule, including the frequency with which dischargers would have to collect samples to test for PFAS contamination.
If an industry exceeds a certain PFAS discharge threshold, it would be required to implement a minimization plan and submit that plan to the state or publicly owned treatment works, or POTWs, within a timeframe established in the rule. A minimization plan would be reviewed every two years until the PFAS reduction goals set in the plan are met.
The committee also instructed the Division of Water Resources to complete a draft rule pertaining to 1,4-dioxane and present it in May.
The commission is expected to decide at its May 8 meeting whether to approve a rule outlining health standards for three compounds, PFOA, PFOS, and GenX, in groundwater.
If the rule is approved it will be presented to the state Rules Review Commission this summer. If that commission approves the draft rule, it would become final in July.
