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On Thursday, the Environmental Protection Agency revealed its intention to include microplastics and pharmaceuticals in a new draft list of contaminants affecting drinking water.
During a press conference, Lee Zeldin, the head of the agency, emphasized that this move directly addresses the concerns of countless Americans who have been eager for clarity on the substances present in their daily water supply.
Simultaneously, the Department of Health and Human Services announced its investment of $144 million into STOMP, the Systematic Targeting of Microplastics initiative. This program is set to pioneer research on microplastics, with the ultimate goal of eliminating these pollutants from the country’s water systems.
Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. described the collaborative effort as a “turning point,” highlighting the unified approach of the EPA and HHS in tackling the health risks posed by microplastics.
“Our focus is on three key questions: What are these substances doing in our bodies? What harm are they causing? And how can we effectively eliminate them?” he remarked.
Dozens of studies already show the potentially damaging effects of microplastics — shed by food packaging, water bottles and a litany of household items, among other things — on human health, ranging from liver injury and glucose intolerance to serious microbial imbalances in the gut.
Pharmaceuticals have also been detected at high rates in drinking water, both from human waste and people dumping pills down the toilet.
The draft list in question is one of the requirements of the Safe Drinking Water Act, which mandates that the EPA update its roster of “Contaminant Candidates” every five years.
Microplastics and pharmaceutical byproducts — plus per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, or PFAS, and several other chemicals — made it onto this most recent iteration, handing regulators at a local level better tools for tracking what’s in their water, according to the EPA.
What they do with those tools, however, remains to be seen. And some environmental advocates, like Earthjustice attorney Katherine O’Brien, worry these proposals are still too fluid.
She told NPR this week that she thinks “it’s fair to call this theater,” noting that the announcement might placate the MAHA base without requiring any real regulatory action.
“It’s a distraction from the real harm that these very same agencies are doing to public health by undermining actual legal protections against toxic chemical exposure in our drinking water, and in our food,” she added.
Her skepticism may have something to do with an EPA announcement from last fall, when the agency asked a federal court to undo its own rules for PFAS regulation in drinking water. It also declared last month that it wouldn’t take any regulatory action to curb the production or spread of nine chemicals listed on the last version of the contaminant list.
It’s true that simply adding the toxins to a list doesn’t flush away the problem, as several other “well-known, highly toxic drinking water contaminants,” as O’Brien put it, have sat on this very same list for years without meaningful change.
For now, however, some are feeling reason to be optimistic.
Sherri Mason, a researcher at Gannon University who has published studies on plastic pollution in freshwater, told NPR: “This is an important first step, and I think we should recognize that.”