New York’s PFAS Report: Ten Years of Progress?

At a Glance

New York State is marking ten years of responding to PFAS with a progress report and public events
The report lists many actions the state is taking and reflects an attempt at collaborative, comprehensive approach
The milestone is a moment to ask: How did we get here in the first place?
The answer is US chemical regulation—or the lack of it. NYS Department of Environmental Conservation’s (DEC) PFAS report does not answer that root cause
We need to examine the assumption that we can fix this problem, or protect ourselves in the future, using the status quo environmental protection system
Attend the upcoming upcoming virtual presentation for the upcoming New York State’s leachate management rulemaking (regulations) on Wednesday, February 11 from 2 – 3:00pm (EST)

In January, New York River Watch celebrated when DEC announced that it would hold two public information sessions on its Onsite Treatment and Disposal of Leachate at Landfills rulemaking. These sessions—hard won by advocates—marked the first publicly advertised opportunity for broad public participation since DEC began communicating and seeking input on the regulation in 2023. Earlier outreach focused primarily on industry stakeholders, while many directly affected parties—including downstream sewage and drinking water treatment plant operators, frontline communities living with landfill pollution, and organizations like ours—were not meaningfully included. As this rulemaking moves forward, it is essential that public participation be treated as a core component of the pre-rule process, with impacted communities and public agencies engaged as early and substantively as industry.

DEC framed these information sessions within the broader context of New York’s statewide PFAS pollution response. As the state marks ten years since PFAS pollution first came to light, DEC has released a PFAS progress report and scheduled additional public information sessions.

The report—“A Decade of Progress on PFAS: Summarizing DEC’s Continued Response,”—catalogs actions across multiple state agencies, including site investigation, methods development, data analysis, litigation, product bans, and new regulation. It indicates an attempt by New York State to approach the problem of PFAS contamination comprehensively.

The Question We Need To Ask

Yet, a fundamental question lies beneath the details: If PFAS are toxic, indestructible, and mobile, why are companies still allowed to produce them and incorporate them into so many consumer goods? If we truly want to make progress on PFAS pollution, that is the question we need to ask.

DEC’s report explains that PFAS have been “widely used in various consumer, commercial, and industrial products since the 1940s.” The report leaves out the earlier history of these chemicals, as most PFAS explainers do.¹

The first PFAS chemical—tetrafluoroethylene, or Teflon—was created by DuPont in 1938. Initially, the company struggled to find a profitable application for it. That changed with the Manhattan Project. The “unique properties” that make PFAS so resistant made Teflon invaluable for developing nuclear weapons. DuPont used Teflon to unlock plutonium fuel manufacturing and become the lead US supplier.

After World War II, chemical companies including DuPont sought domestic markets to continue selling military-grade chemicals. Teflon was joined by other PFAS chemicals on this trajectory.

By the 1970s, the pollution consequences from this chemical boom had become impossible to ignore, prompting Congressional action. Rather than resist regulation outright, the chemical industry helped shape it. The resulting legislation—the Toxic Substances Control Act (TSCA)—was heavily influenced by industry lobbyists and insiders.²

As Mariah Blake writes in her book about PFAS contamination in Hoosick Falls, “It was a DuPont-funded scientist who first articulated the principle that now forms the bedrock of our system for regulating potentially toxic substances—namely, that they should be presumed safe until proven otherwise.”³ TSCA is part of the industry’s playbook: It is ineffective at regulating chemicals by design.⁴

Chemical companies designed TSCA “to make the oversight of industry difficult,” creating significant obstacles for EPA to require chemical testing data, and broad opportunities for companies to avoid public disclosure through claims of confidential business information.⁵ (These claims extend to such basic facts as the identity of the chemical.⁶ In fact, claims involving chemical identity make up about half of all confidential business information claims.) Chemicals already on the market—including Teflon, PFOA, and PFOS—were grandfathered in without scrutiny. Although TSCA was amended in 2016, it still doesn’t allow EPA to require companies to routinely submit basic safety testing as part of chemical use applications.⁷

The Status Quo Can’t Fix This

We absolutely need to respond to the immediate threat of PFAS and mitigate ongoing harm. But the deeper history of PFAS shows that clean-ups and litigation to make polluters pay will not address the root of the problem. That problem lies in our chemical regulatory system that allows chemicals to enter widespread use without requiring prior safety testing. PFAS also reminds us that substances developed for military and industrial purposes were later repurposed into everyday consumer products, without adequate scrutiny of their long-term impacts on human health and the environment.

When the public began to understand PFAS hazards in the early 2000s, PFAS manufacturers voluntarily phased out the two most infamous PFAS chemicals, PFOA and PFOS. This didn’t stop the release of PFAS into the environment. Instead, production shifted to less-studied forms of PFAS, chemicals lacking documentation of health impacts and environmental interactions that regulators require to develop restrictions. Noncompliance with the phase-out is also a problem.

PFAS are a poster child for just how badly our chemical regulations need to change, and the problem goes beyond them. EPA receives about 280 chemical use applications each year. That’s one for every business day. It receives about the same number of applications for exemption from full chemical review, and about ten times as many confidential business information claims.

In this light, an effective PFAS response must confront a hard truth: our existing regulatory framework will not protect us going forward. The answer is a resounding “no.”

DEC’s PFAS Report equates “progress” with “continued response.” That reflects the values embedded in U.S. environmental regulations, which prioritize industrial activity over human health. Our laws focus on managing pollution rather than prohibiting it. If industrial activity causes harm, the burden is on those who experience it to prove causality before regulation can occur.

As a result, despite more than 15,000 unique chemicals in the PFAS family, New York State has set surface and drinking water limits for only two.

If we want to change the trajectory of PFAS pollution, we need to shift from a reactive to a precautionary approach. Chemicals should not be presumed “safe until proven otherwise.” They should only be approved if there is reasonable assurance of safety. Chemical companies should be responsible for providing safety screening data as a part of a request for chemical use approval.

The systems that allowed PFAS to permeate industrial processes and consumer goods have done the same for countless other hazardous chemicals. Like PFAS, many of these substances ultimately end up in landfills.

DEC’s forthcoming leachate treatment regulations were prompted by the PFAS pollution crisis, but they hold broader promise: ensuring that many types of toxic chemicals collected at landfills are not released back into the environment, and at the same time, that the concentrate from any sort of treatment not be sent back to the landfill, only to compound the harm.

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