Petitioners want PFAS chemicals identified

An indigenous tribal leader from Savoonga is among the signers of a petition filed on Jan. 15 with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to identify hundreds of PFAS chemicals, making federal funds available to clean up their toxic impact in drinking water.

“We live in one of the most remote and seemingly pristine places on the planet, yet our community-based research shows that our environment and people are contaminated with PFAS (per-and Polyfluorinated chemicals),” said Vi Waghiyi, of Savoonga, the environmental health and justice program director for Alaska Community Action on Toxics. “Why are our children born with birth defects and why are our people dying of cancer? We need to prevent these health disparities by stopped the contamination problems at their source, so they don’t continue to contaminate our northern communities.”

Waghiyi joined with an eclectic group of community leaders from other states and scientists from the Green Science Policy Institute in Berekely, CA, to urge the EPA to list these chemicals under the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act. Identifying these hundreds of toxic chemicals which have leaked for over four decades leaked from manufacturing sites, airports and military bases into drinking water around the country, will make these communities eligible for government clean-up funds.,.

The University of California Berkeley Environmental Law Clinic is representing the petitioners.

Chemicals listed under the RCRA are subject to strict storage, transfer and disposal requirements. Their listing would also result in automatic designation of these chemicals as hazardous substances under the federal Superfund law, making more federal dollars available to address contamination.

“PFAS-contaminated communities have been test subjects in an unintended and dangerous experiment,” said Tom Bruton, senior scientist at the Green Science Policy Institute. “We have more than enough data to know these chemicals are ending up in drinking water and posing a serious threat to public health and the environment. The EPA needs to clean up existing sites and work to prevent more communities from falling victim to contamination.”

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