EPA Reaffirms Rule Designating Forever Chemicals PFOA and PFOS as Hazardous Substances

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) announced today that it will continue to defend its 2024 decision to list two toxic “forever chemicals”—PFOA and PFOS—as hazardous under the federal Superfund law. This designation is a key step towards cleaning up contaminated sites and waterways and ensuring the companies responsible for the pollution, not impacted communities, pay the costs of cleaning it up. 

 PFOA and PFOS are man-made “forever chemicals” from the larger PFAS class. Once used in products like nonstick cookware, stain-resistant fabrics, and firefighting foam, PFOA and PFOS persist in the environment, build up in people’s bodies, and are linked to serious health harms, including cancers and permanent hormone disruption. 

 “It is not too much to ask the corporations that dump forever chemicals into the environment to pay for the cost of cleaning them up. These hazardous substance designations promote the remediation of contaminated sites across the country, and we look forward to defending them alongside EPA,” said Jonathan Kalmuss-Katz, Earthjustice Attorney. “But even with these designations, it will take decades to clean up known PFAS contamination, and EPA’s efforts to delay and roll back PFAS drinking water standards will harm millions of people before that remediation can occur. This isn’t multiple choice; Administrator Zeldin needs to use all of EPA’s authority to reduce exposures to forever chemicals and protect children and families.” 

 In a filing this week, the EPA asked the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia to restart a case over its hazardous substance designations for PFOA and PFOS, after the case had been on hold for seven months. Several industry trade groups are challenging the designations. Alongside EPA, five community and environmental organizations, represented by Earthjustice, are also defending the designations. This move comes less than a week after the Trump Administration stopped defending separate standards for several PFAS in drinking water and asked the same court to throw out those protections. 

 “We are the faces of this crisis. My family’s cancer diagnoses aren’t statistics, they’re our lives. The EPA’s decision to defend its PFOA and PFOS hazardous substance designations gives us hope. It tells polluters they can’t poison our communities and hide behind legal loopholes. This is a powerful step toward a future where our children can live without the fear we’ve had to endure,” said Stel Bailey, founder of Fight for Zero, a community organization in Brevard County, Florida that has intervened in defense of the hazardous substance designations.