The Environmental Protection Agency proposed Thursday to include microplastics and pharmaceuticals on a list of contaminants in drinking water for the first time, a step that could lead to new limits on those substances for water utilities.
EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin said they are responding to Americans who have worried about plastics and pharmaceuticals in their drinking water. The gesture also aims to hand a win to Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s MAHA movement, which for months has pressured Zeldin to further crack down on environmental contaminants.
The EPA’s Contaminant Candidate List identifies contaminants in drinking water not regulated under the Safe Drinking Water Act. The agency is publishing the draft of the sixth version of the list, which opens a 60-day public comment period. It expects to finalize the list by mid-November.
“I can’t think of an issue that hits closer to home for American families than the safety of their drinking water,” Zeldin said at EPA Headquarters.
Studies have looked at the prevalence of microplastics in drinking water and in people’s hearts, brains and testicles. Doctors and scientists are still assessing what it means in terms of human health threats, but say there’s cause for concern. There is also growing worry about pharmaceutical drugs that get into the water supply because humans excrete them and conventional wastewater treatment plants fail to remove them.
The EPA uses the list to prioritize research, funding and regulatory decision making, but rarely moves pollutants off the list to set limits for how much is allowed in public drinking water. The EPA said in March that it will not develop regulations for any of the nine pollutants from the list it most recently examined.
“It’s the beginning of a very long process that routinely ends in nothing,” said Erik Olson, a senior attorney at the Natural Resources Defense Council who works on drinking water protection.
Still, some who are urging the government to do more to stop plastic pollution say the announcement is a good start.
“Including it in the list would be the first step toward eventually regulating microplastics in public water supplies and hopefully this is not the last step,” said Judith Enck, a former EPA regional administrator who now heads up Beyond Plastics.
Dr. Philip Landrigan, director of the Global Observatory on Planetary Health at Boston College, said that while the EPA is moving in the right direction, if the United States does not rein in the accelerating growth in plastic production, which leads to plastic pollution, it will make little difference. The U.S. is participating in talks on a treaty to address the global crisis of plastic pollution, but strongly opposes limits on plastic production.
Food & Water Watch says the listing is important but it ultimately falls short of their call for monitoring. EPA uses the Unregulated Contaminant Monitoring Rule to collect data for contaminants that are suspected to be present in drinking water.
The American Chemistry Council, an industry group, said it supports monitoring of microplastics in drinking water and research to better understand potential impacts, as long as the monitoring is standardized and consistent nationwide.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.