The U.S. Is About to Uncover a Crisis in Drinking Water

Cordelia Saunders remembers 2021, the year she and her husband, Nathan, found out that they’d likely been drinking tainted water for more than 30 years. A neighbor’s 20 peach trees had finally matured that summer, and perfect-looking peaches hung from their branches. Cordelia watched the fruit drop to the ground and rot: Her neighbor didn’t dare eat it.

The Saunderses’ home, in Fairfield, Maine, is in a quiet, secluded spot, 50 minutes from the drama of the rocky coast and an hour and 15 minutes from the best skiing around. It’s also sitting atop a plume of poison.

For decades, sewage sludge was spread on the corn fields surrounding their house, and on hundreds of other fields across the state. That sludge is suspected to have been tainted with PFAS, a group of man-made compounds that cause a litany of ailments, including kidney and prostate cancers, fertility loss, and developmental disorders. The Saunderses’ property is on one of the most contaminated roads in a state just waking up to the extent of an invisible crisis.

Onur Apul, an environmental engineer at the University of Maine and the head of its initiative to study PFAS solutions, told me that in his opinion, the United States has seen “nothing as overwhelming, and nothing as universal” as the PFAS crisis. Even the DDT crisis of the 1960s doesn’t compare, he said: DDT was used only as an insecticide and could be banned by banning that single use. PFAS are used in hundreds of products across industries and consumer sectors. Their nearly 15,000 variations can help make pans nonstick, hiking clothes and plumber’s tape waterproof, and dental floss slippery. They’re in performance fabrics on couches, waterproof mascara, tennis rackets, ski wax. Destroying them demands massive inputs of energy: Their fluorine-carbon bond is the single most stable bond in organic chemistry.

“It’s a reality for everyone; it’s just a matter of whether they know about it,” Apul said. As soon as any place in the U.S. does look squarely at PFAS, it will find the chemicals lurking in the blood of its constituents—in one report, 97 percent of Americans registered some level—and perhaps also in their water supply or farm soils. And more will have to look: Yesterday the Biden administration issued the first national PFAS drinking-water standards and gave public drinking-water systems three years to start monitoring them. The EPA expects thousands of those systems to have PFAS levels above the new standards, and to take actions to address the contamination. Maine is one step ahead in facing PFAS head-on—but also one step ahead in understanding just how hard that is.

Cordelia and Nathan both remember the dump trucks rumbling up the road. They’d stop right across the street every year and disgorge a black slurry—fertilizer, the Saunderses assumed at the time, that posed no particular bother. Now they know that the state approved spreading 32,900 cubic yards of sewage sludge—or more than 2,000 dump-truck loads—within a quarter mile of their house, and that the sludge came in large part from a local paper company. Now they wonder about that slurry.

Maine has a long, proud history as a papermaking state and a long, tortured history with the industry’s toxic legacy, most notably from dioxin. In the 1960s, another group of compounds—per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, or PFAS—began to be used in the papermaking process. The chemicals were miracle workers: A small amount of PFAS could make paper plates and food containers both grease-proof and water-resistant.

Then, in the ’80s, the state encouraged spreading sewage sludge on fields as fertilizer, a seemingly smart use of an otherwise cumbersome by-product of living, hard to manage in a landfill. In principle, human manure can sub in for animal manure without much compromise. But in reality, sludge often contains a cocktail of chemical residues. “We concentrate them in sludge and then spread them over where we grow food. The initial idea is not great,” Apul told me. The Saunderses first found out that the sludge-spreading had contaminated their water after the state found high PFAS levels in milk from a dairy farm two miles away. Maine’s limit for six kinds of PFAS was 20 parts per trillion; state toxicologists found so much in the Saunderses’ well water that when Nathan worked out the average of all the tests taken in 2021, it came to 14,800 parts per trillion, he told me.

Nathan used to work as an engineer for Maine’s drinking-water-safety program, and he quickly pieced together the story of their street’s contamination and just how bad it was. After state researchers tested their blood, Nathan remembers, a doctor told him that his levels of one PFAS were so high, they had hit the maximum the test could reliably report—2,000 micrograms per liter. So far, he’s healthy, but he feels like he’s living on borrowed time. Diseases related to environmental exposures can take decades to emerge, and although studies show that PFAS may degrade health at a population level, why some individuals fall ill and others don’t isn’t always clear. Cordelia told me that the neighbor who wouldn’t eat the peaches is now on three medications for high cholesterol (which has been linked to PFAS), and that other neighbors have bladder or brain cancer.

Cordelia’s PFAS blood levels were lower than Nathan’s—but still high enough to make the Saunderses rethink the past decade of their life. In 2010, when she was an otherwise healthy and active 50-year-old, Cordelia went into kidney failure; Nathan donated the kidney that now keeps her body going. Back then, her doctor told her that her body’s failure to suppress an infection had likely caused her kidney crisis. And PFAS exposure is linked with lowered immune response.

Since PFAS were first detected on a dairy farm in 2016, Maine has been trying to uncover the extent of the contamination. The state’s environmental department kept records of the sludge-spreading, and those records show that, over more than two and a half decades, paper-product companies were directly responsible for spreading more than 500,000 cubic yards of waste, the Portland Press Herald has reported. More was routed through water-treatment facilities; the sludge spread near the Saunderses’ house came from the Kennebec Sanitary Treatment District, which got a sizable portion of its waste from the nearby paper-products manufacturer, now owned by Huhtamaki, a Finland-based company. Because we all ingest some amount of PFAS in our daily life, human wastewater can also have high levels of contamination.

Maine has been trying to stem the impacts of the contamination too. The Saunderses and their neighbors all got whole-house filters installed, and the PFAS levels in their water immediately became undetectable. The state has initiated relief funds for farmers whose land has been poisoned by compounds that have infiltrated the milk and grain they’ve sold to their customers and eaten themselves for years. No one really knows the extent of the health problems linked to PFAS in the state.

The state did ban products containing PFAS—it was the first to do so—but the ban won’t go into effect until 2030, which to Cordelia seems like a long time to wait. She feels in her body the price of contamination: The medication that protects her transplanted kidney is causing her to lose her hearing in one ear, and her bone density. At 64, she has real trouble walking a mile. “When things are out of your control, what are you going to do?” she told me. “We’re all going to die. I’m probably going to die sooner than I would have.” But she still has to clean the house and make dinner. She’s still alive to spend time with her sons and her seven grandchildren. She likes to focus on that.

Nathan is less equanimous about it. He’s suing the paper companies; the charges against some of the original defendants have been dismissed, but the case against Huhtamaki remains open. (The company did not respond to a request for comment on Nathan’s lawsuit, but in a statement to The Atlantic, it said it no longer intentionally adds PFAS to its manufacturing process, and noted that “several” paper mills in Maine have used PFAS in their products. “In Waterville, as in all locations, we comply with all applicable environmental and product safety laws and regulations. We will continue to be engaged to help with the state’s inquiry as needed,” the company wrote.)

Nathan’s is just one of hundreds of similar cases that legal experts expect to erupt from the new findings. Such cases might someday get people like him recompense, but they won’t make the PFAS go away.

So far, other states have taken a different approach to PFAS. Virginia, for instance, kept permitting sludge-spreading even after environmentalists had loudly raised concerns about the chemicals’ impacts, though the state did begin requiring industries to test for PFAS in their waste stream last year. Alabama has reportedly rejected pleas by environmental groups to begin testing for the compounds. Because Maine is the first state to try to mitigate PFAS this thoroughly, it is also the first to confront PFAS’ particular bind: What do you do with a pollutant you can’t destroy? After Maine banned sludge-spreading in 2022, slurry began to pile up precariously at the state landfill. Casella Waste Systems, the landfill operator, first tried exporting it to Canadian provinces where no law addressed PFAS in land-spread fertilizers. The trucks went to Quebec, then New Brunswick, until pushback in both places stopped the toxic exports; now Casella Waste Systems says it is temporarily stabilizing its landfill by mixing sludge with dry waste. Overall, the sludge-management situation, per a state report, remains “very challenging and uncertain.”

In the state’s northern reaches, PFAS contamination came from a different source— Aqueous Film Forming Foam, which the U.S. Air Force once used to extinguish jet-fuel fires at Loring Air Force base and which relies on PFAS for its fire-suppressing power. Long after the base closed, the Mi’kmaq Nation acquired part of the land; the water was undrinkable, and the soil was so full of PFAS that state officials advised the tribe not to eat the deer that grazed there. It is effectively unusable land.

In 2019, the Mi’kmaq Nation partnered with the nonprofit Upland Grassroots to try to clean up the land using hemp. Hemp plants have thick stems that can grow more than 10 feet in a single season, theoretically the perfect plant body type for hoovering up and squirreling away lots of poisonous chemicals. The results of the first test run last year were disappointing: A maximum of 2 percent of the PFAS was removed from soil in the most successful area. Still, no better technology exists to do more than this, Sara Nason, an environmental chemist who provided scientific guidance for the project, told me. The plan is to continue planting hemp; it’s better than doing nothing, though the hemp will take decades to clean the soil, and no one knows exactly what to do with the chemical-loaded plants once they’re harvested.

Several labs across the country are trying to find a way to unmake these chemicals, using foam fractionation, soil washing, mineralization, electron-beam radiation. David Hanigan, an environmental engineer at the University of Nevada at Reno, is studying whether burning PFAS at ultrahigh temperatures can break the carbon-fluorine bond completely. He once thought that PFAS researchers were out of their minds to be testing such wildly expensive solutions, he told me. But he’s realized that PFAS are just that tough, and as a scientist, he thinks the original manufacturers of PFAS must have understood that. “It’s upsetting from an organic-chemistry standpoint,” he told me. Any chemist would have known that these compounds would persist in the environment, he said. Indeed, an investigation by The Intercept found that DuPont, among the original manufacturers of the compounds, did know, and for decades tried to obscure the harms the chemicals posed, something the UN Human Rights Council also contends. DuPont has consistently denied wrongdoing, and recently settled a lawsuit for $1.18 billion, helping create a fund for public water districts to address PFAS contamination. (In a statement to The Atlantic, a spokesperson for DuPont described the current company’s history of corporate reorganization, and wrote that “to implicate DuPont de Nemours in these past issues ignores this corporate evolution.”)

Hanigan does think this engineering problem of PFAS will be solved, eventually. “We can do it,” he said. But he wonders what else we might have been able to do with that amount of human effort. And until chemists and engineers can undo PFAS, more places will start to see that they’re caught in a cycle in which these compounds move from water to soil to bodies to water. A few states, such as Connecticut, have regulations against land-spreading sewage sludge; instead, they incinerate it, likely at temperatures below what’s needed to destroy PFAS’ strong bond. Most states have no such prohibition. Michigan, another state with a history of spreading sludge on farmland, has found PFAS in its beef. In Texas, farmers recently sued a waste-treatment giant alleging that it knew or should have known that its sludge had PFAS in it.

The federal government’s new rules, though, will force the country as a whole to measure, then confront, the scale of our PFAS problem. Like the Saunderses, people across the country are likely to soon discover that they’ve been drinking PFAS-contaminated water for years and begin wondering what it has cost them.