Tap Water
Most Americans enjoy high quality drinking water, but contamination by agricultural pesticides and disinfection byproducts is a problem for others. Check out your water supply with EWG’s National Drinking Water Database.
Last month, after a year-long investigation, former Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder and eight other officials were charged for their roles in the Flint water crisis – the environmental disaster that shocked the nation seven years ago. All nine defendants pleaded not guilty to 42 charges, including willful neglect of duty, manslaughter, extortion, perjury and obstruction of justice.
Read MoreThe Environmental Protection Agency must take a series of steps to protect public health and the environment from the toxic fluorinated “forever chemicals” known as PFAS from being incinerated or dumped in landfills, wrote more than 30 environmental and public health organizations in comments submitted to the agency this week.
Read MoreIn 2019, in the absence of enforceable federal limits, New Hampshire became one of the first states to set its own drinking water standards for the toxic “forever chemicals” known as PFAS.
Read MoreThe Environmental Working Group submitted testimony to the Maine Committee on Health and Human Services on Legislative Document No.
Read MoreTo protect the health of people, communities and the environment, the toxic fluorinated “forever chemicals” known as PFAS should not be regulated one by one but as a class, more than a dozen scientists, including this author, argue in an article published today in the peer-reviewed journal Environmental Science & Technology Letters.
Read MoreThe Environmental Working Group submitted a letter to the Environmental Protection Agency requesting TSCA 8(e) enforcement for Solvay’s failure to submit key health and safety studies within a timely manner.
Read MoreSolvay Specialty Chemicals failed for up to eight years to report animal and human tests showing the health hazards of one or more of the fluorinated “forever chemicals” known as PFAS, the Environmental Working Group charged today in a petition to the Environmental Protection Agency. For multiple violations of the Toxic Substances Control Act, EWG asked the EPA to levy civil and criminal fines totaling $434 million,
Read MoreToday the Environmental Protection Agency took two long-overdue preliminary actions toward regulating the toxic “forever chemicals” known as PFAS in Americans’ tap water, committing to set legal limits for the two most notorious PFAS compounds and to test public water systems for more than two dozen others.
Read MoreIn one of the most reprehensible and dangerous decisions by the Trump Environmental Protection Agency, Administrator Andrew Wheeler will announce tomorrow that the agency will drop proposals to ban certain hazardous uses for three extremely toxic, even lethal chemicals.
Read MoreIn yet another 11th-hour rollback of public health protections, political leaders at the Environmental Protection Agency overruled career scientists and watered down a major health assessment for one of the most toxic “forever chemicals” estimated to contaminate the drinking water for nearly 1 million Americans.
Read MoreNewly released test data from the Ohio Environmental Protection Agency show that more than 100 public water systems in the state are contaminated with the toxic “forever chemicals” known as PFAS.
Read MoreIn his campaign’s environmental justice plan, President-elect Joe Biden made a historic commitment to tackle contamination from the toxic fluorinated “forever chemicals” known as PFAS. One critical promise in his plan is to designate the two most notorious PFAS chemicals – PFOA, formerly used to make DuPont’s Teflon, and PFOS, formerly an ingredient in 3M’s Scotchgard – as hazardous substances under the federal Superfund law.
Read MoreState legislation introduced today would set a legally enforceable limit on the amount of lead leaching from drinking water faucets and fixtures, reducing by five times the amount now allowed by a plumbing industry standard. Assembly Bill 100, by Assemblymember Chris Holden (D-Pasadena), would restrict the amount of lead leaching from faucets and fixtures to no more than 1 microgram.
Read MoreNitrate contamination of drinking water in Wisconsin may cause nearly 300 cases a year of colorectal and other cancers and increase the risk of very premature births, very low birth weight and birth defects, according to a peer-reviewed study by scientists from Clean Wisconsin and the Environmental Working Group.
Read MoreA House-Senate conference committee approved a final version of the Water Resources Development Act, or WRDA, for 2020, which both houses will vote on before it goes to the White House for President Trump’s signature or veto.
Read MoreA House-Senate conference committee today approved a final version of the National Defense Authorization Act for FY 2021, which both houses will vote on before it goes to the White House for President Trump’s signature or veto.
Read MoreThe Environmental Protection Agency today released an "interim strategy" for addressing industrial discharges of the toxic fluorinated “forever chemicals” called PFAS. The strategy document encourages EPA officials, when issuing permits to industrial dischargers, to “consider” whether PFAS discharges should be limited but lacks any enforceable standards for such discharges.
Read MoreNo candidate for president has ever pledged to make the toxic “forever chemicals” known as PFAS a priority – until now.
Read MoreThe Big Bang of the nationwide “forever chemicals” crisis was the revelation in 2001 that PFOA, a toxic compound used to make Teflon, had contaminated the drinking water for 70,000 people near a DuPont factory in West Virginia. Pressure from the Environmental Protection Agency forced DuPont and other companies to phase out PFOA, and they agreed not to use it after 2015.
Read MorePresident Donald Trump and his secretary of agriculture have a message for Europeans: We want you to drink polluted water too.
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