This episode discusses the complex challenge of managing PFAS (per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances) chemicals amid evolving regulations. Phil Molé from Velocity EHS explains that companies struggle to identify PFAS in their inventories due to vague product names and changing chemical compositions.
PFAS are persistent, bioaccumulative toxins that resist biodegradation and contaminate the environment, driving regulatory action across federal, state and international jurisdictions. Companies must prioritize phase-outs based on their operating locations and applicable regulations, such as EPA's Form R reporting requirements (with a low 100-pound threshold for PFAS) and EU REACH regulations.
The "essential use" framework helps companies assess which PFAS applications are truly necessary versus substitutable. While some EPA drinking water standards have been postponed under the current administration, TRI reporting requirements continue expanding. Companies must balance regulatory compliance with finding suitable alternatives, conducting risk assessments, and meeting stakeholder expectations across global markets.
Transcript
Welcome to Chemical Processing's Distilled podcast, where we take a big topic and distill it down to its essential parts. This podcast and its transcript can be found at chemicalprocessing.com. You can also download it on your favorite player. I'm Traci Purdum, editor-in-chief of CP. In today's episode, we are going to discuss managing per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, also known as PFAS chemicals, in an increasingly complex regulatory environment. PFAS regulations are coming at the chemical industry from multiple directions, federal agencies, state governments and international bodies, each with their own timelines, requirements and enforcement mechanisms. Production schedules, quality specifications and customer demands continue, creating a challenging balancing act between regulatory adherence and operational reality.
To help me help you with the balancing act, I reached out to Phil Molé of Velocity EHS. Phil and I chatted last year about better ways to zero in on chemical ingredients. His LinkedIn profile says he's just a guy who's been in the environmental and occupational safety field for more than two decades, starting out doing the dirty work, analyzing chemicals in a sewage treatment plant and collecting samples in the field, and moving from there to regulatory consulting, and then to corporate EHS management. In the latter role, he managed ISO certifications for a global manufacturing company and oversaw all facets of environmental safety, performance and regulatory compliance.
Thanks for joining me again, Phil, and do you have anything to add to that wonderful LinkedIn profile?
Phil: I think you did a pretty good job, Traci, I think that about covers it.
Traci: Well, I stole it straight from you and I laughed when I was looking up your profile there, so good job with that, that's one of the stand-out LinkedIn profiles I've ever read.
Phil: I like to keep it real.
Navigating Regulations
Traci: Well, let's go ahead and jump right into this. I want to know how companies are navigating all of the patchwork of the federal, the state, the international PFAS regulations, while still maintaining operational efficiency.
Phil: Yeah. So the very brief answer to that is with great difficulty, and let me explain. Companies have, in general, big chemical inventories, and especially a company that's involved in chemical manufacturing that is producing a variety of products for the marketplace probably has lots of chemicals in their inventory. Probably that inventory is also changing over time. That makes it really hard to keep track of things like new safety data sheets coming in, updating the chemical inventory, which is literally the written inventory that in the U.S. you have to have as part of HazCom regulations, which is an addendum to your written HazCom plan that indicates all of the hazardous chemicals, as defined by OSHA, that are part of your inventory. Keeping that up to date is very tedious, very time-consuming and difficult the more chemicals you have and the more often that inventory is evolving.
Then you add to that the fact that chemical products have names that often don't really tell you what's in them. If you've got something called green coat number seven, you don't know from that name what is in that. It could have any number of hazardous chemicals in it at the ingredient level, and some of those might be these things that we're talking about today, poly- and perfluoroalkyl substances, or PFAS, aka forever chemicals, aka the things that we hear about in the news very often, and have been for about the past decade, because of the fact that they persist in the environment. They are persistent bio-accumulative toxins, PBTs, if we want to be fancy about the name, and that means they resist biodegradation when they become wastes, it means that they're actively leaching and contaminating the environment when they get out into different environmental media, and they are associated with different types of health effects, from neurological effects to, in some cases, potential suspected carcinogens.
So this is all the reason why these things are on people's agenda today, and to not only keep track of your inventory, but then, at the ingredient level, determine what ingredients in this changing large inventory happen to be chemicals that are classified as PFAS, that's the hard part. That's where a lot of people are putting in a lot of extra work that they can't afford to be doing. Literally, they can't afford it because of the cost involved in it and the extra resources they sometimes have to contract with to do that. And from a more figurative level, but also very impactful, they can't afford not to do these things because so much depends on getting it right, because as you mentioned, there are these evolving regulations that are coming out more and more, not only in the U.S., but globally, and then on top of that, stakeholder expectations, where customers, investors, financial institutions, are all looking at companies with the expectation that they need to be doing all of this better.
Phase Out PFAS
Traci: Now, there are thousands upon thousands of PFAS chemicals, and only a percentage of that are the ones that have been... I don't want to say targeted, because that sounds like a strange way to say it. But they're on the list of being phased out, these regulations are having them phased out. What frameworks are companies using to prioritize which PFAS chemicals to phase out first?
Phil: Yeah, that's a great question and I would say there's a couple of different levels to this. One of them depends on the location that your specific company operates in. If it operates in multiple geographical locations across potentially multiple countries, it's going to depend on the regulatory jurisdictions that you're operating on. So for example, in the US, at the federal level, there are a number of federal regulations involving PFAS, such as those that have already come out from the EPA. Some of these PFAS have been added, for example, to the list of Form R chemicals. For anybody out there who has any sizable chemical inventory or amount of usage in the US, you're probably familiar with the term Form R reporting. You've got to get that done by July 1st of every year for the previous calendar year's usage for any of those chemicals that are listed on the TRI reporting list.
More TRI chemicals are added to that list every year because there's a mechanism for doing that. There's a section of the National Defense Authorization Act that says that based on the prior year's ongoing risk evaluations of PFAS, PFASs that have established a benchmark level of awareness among regulators for their toxicity and their harm to human health in the environment, they get added to that TRI list. So on average, I'd say there's about five to 10 of them newly added to that list right after the beginning of every year. So for example, there's about a couple of hundred PFAS roughly that are on that list right now that would be reportable in the 2025 reporting year on reports that would be due by July 1st of 2026. So that's at the federal level.
In the U.S. at the state level, there's also things going on, like California has been fairly proactive among the states in looking at the impacts of PFAS and getting out ahead with different types of regulations, for example, some that restrict or ban the use of PFAS in some of the traditional areas that it had been used in, like food packaging is a big one. A lot of food packaging historically had PFAS. That, I know, is one of the areas in California that is being restricted now.
Then, aside from any of those things, in the EU, I should quickly mention too, there's the REACH Regulation. Part of that is a list called Substances of Very High Concern, SVHCs. Those are chemicals that the EU has targeted because of their toxicity and harm to humans and the environment that they impose additional restrictions on, including on the transportation. There's some notification requirements for those, so that even if a chemical stream has only 0.1% of an SVHC in it, that chemical company would need to do downstream reporting to all their distributors, which means that they'd have to be able to identify that first and they have to be able to document they've got a way of doing that.
Then I think globally, across all people in all jurisdictions, there are agencies, like in the EU, the Global PFAS Science Panel, and they come up with a number of advisory reports. They consist of a number of international experts, researchers, that are looking at the effects of PFAS and putting out advisory reports. They're non-binding, they are for advisory purposes only, but they are widely used. And then, there's the Madrid Statement, which goes back to 2015, and then to me, that's the beginning of the modern era in how we've been looking at PFAS, because that was one of the early international examples of an attempt by subject matter experts to come together and warn about the effects of PFAS and to prioritize that companies really need to start researching and finding safer alternatives to them sooner instead of later.
PFAS Alternatives
Traci: Now, you bring up, and I was just about to bring up, the finding suitable alternatives, that's difficult. How can facilities balance the pressure of these regulatory compliance timelines with finding suitable alternatives?
Phil: Yeah, so that's a great question. I think this comes down to the concept of what's called essential use. This is a concept that is addressed in the Madrid Statement, as well as in advisory documents put out by the Global PFAS Science Panel. The idea is that companies need to look at what they are considering to be essential uses of PFAS in the things that they're doing, the products that they're making. And the components of that would be that they need to do an assessment and determine whether the chemical that they're using is necessary for health, safety and the functioning of society, or, and this is the more common and where a lot of the rubber really meets the road, no technically and economically feasible alternatives currently exist within these applications other than the PFAS that they're doing.
So the step-wise way that a company would tackle this would be first to do classification of the PFASs... First, I would say a step before that is identification of PFAS. This gets back to that difficulty of knowing whether you even have PFAS in your inventory. Some people, even today, 2025, may have PFAS in their inventory that they don't know about because of that difficulty of knowing their inventory at the ingredient level. So identification's first. Then there's classification and prioritization based on what you know you have. You're going to conduct alternative assessments to determine which uses really are essential, based on that framework that I laid out, and which are substitutable or non-essential, and you could prioritize high-risk and high-impact applications that might use a lot more PFAS or they might use more of these ones that, as we've mentioned, they're specifically called out on regulatory lists, and they would target those for more evaluation.
In the meantime, they're going to do exposure minimization and process controls, make sure that they're protecting their employees, maybe minimizing the amount of PFAS, to the degree possible, that they are using. And then, alongside that, they're going to look at doing some targeted research and development, R&D, maybe in conjunction with partnerships with firms that specialize in these things to start exploring whether there might be alternatives that can be developed if they don't exist now. An example of that that's actually happened is in the medical equipment industry. A lot of those tubings that they use in stents, catheters, until not that long ago, many of those actually were PFAS-containing. The medical industry has collectively gotten together and looked at alternatives and looked at research and development to find and to create safer alternatives to the PFAS-containing coatings that they used to use in this tubing for stents and catheters, so that's been ongoing.
And then, the idea too, I think, that we want to consider all uses of this, even though we're classifying things initially as essential, we still have the framework in mind that we are going to consider them temporary in the long run because we're looking at replacing them down the road. And underpinning all of this is having policies that are in place to make sure that we can show our due diligence that we've evaluated what's essential and what's not, we can show that we have started a process of evaluating alternatives, we can show that we are protecting our employees and minimizing harm to the environment and complying with all applicable regulations in the interim. So all of that's a lot of work, but again, it starts with even knowing whether you've got PFAS in your inventory in the first place.
Enforcing PFAS Regulations
Traci: Now, you bring that up, even knowing that you have PFAS in your system in the first place, if companies are having a hard time finding that out, how is this being enforced, how are the regulations being enforced, is it pretty simple on that end?
Phil: I would say that it depends, and it's, again, going to depend on the state, whether something has state jurisdiction, like there's state EPA agencies that, in many cases, they are the ones that would have enforcement jurisdiction in that state. If there is no authorized state EPA agency, it would default to federal oversight. So there's a couple of different layers, which one has the most urgency to you will depend on where you are. At the federal level, it's going to depend on enforcement, and here, it's not really the case, as far as I could see yet, that at the federal level, there are things like national enforcement priorities, or NEPs, national enforcement programs that OSHA has, for example.
OSHA has one about amputations now, OSHA has other NEPs on warehouse safety, things like that, that indicate, these are the people that we're going to go and look at and these are the things we're going to look at when we get there. I'm not aware of federal EPA having anything like that yet. Although, there can be things that make inspections more likely, such as if EPA has information that suggests to them that they know that you have a TRI-reportable PFAS in your inventory and they're not getting a Form R report from you, then that could pique their curiosity about wanting to go out and do some evaluation about how much of these things that you have, how much of it that you use, and whether the uses would be at levels that trigger Form R reporting.
And here's where I should say, for most chemicals, TRI reporting is something that only becomes applicable at levels of usage of 25,000 pounds if it's manufactured or processed or 10,000 pounds if it's otherwise used. But for PFAS, all of the PFAS that have been added to the TRI list so far, that threshold is only 100 pounds, whether it's processed, manufactured or otherwise used. It takes way less of a TRI-reportable PFAS to be used during a reporting year to trigger the need to report, so it's that much more likely that if you have those TRI PFAS in your inventory, you may need to report. And if you're not, then it could potentially result in non-compliance and then the escalated chance of there being inspections, potential enforcement actions that are taken because of that.
There are other things that have been talked about, like, for example, there were a number of water quality drinking standards that were supposed to be coming out. Those have some delays at the current time. There were six specific PFAS that were going to be targeted with drinking water limitations. Two of them, I believe that enforcement has been postponed until 2031. The other four of them, they're going back and taking another look at them for right now. So some of the things that would've been happening are not going to be happening, at least in the current timeframe, because of changes in regulatory and enforcement priorities within at least the United States at this time.
From Bad to Worse?
Traci: Now, I want to ask a question and then I want to get a little bit more into the upcoming EPA regulations. But the question I want to ask is, what happens if we introduce alternatives that are just as nefarious, does that happen, what do we do then, how do we manage that?
Phil: Yeah, that is a really good question. In the U.S., there's, for example, a framework under the Toxic Substances Control Act, or TSCA, and that was expanded in the final couple of years of the Obama administration and given some additional teeth in terms of its ability to actually be used as a way to make sure that when companies are introducing new chemicals that have not previously put into the marketplace, that they are doing proper risk assessments and that they need to determine whether something is, for example, a significant new use, or SNUR, significant new use restrictions, that would apply based on the risk assessments that they've done of those chemicals. This, again, goes back to being able to understand what your chemical inventory is, what changes that you're doing, and what those changes might create in terms of impact for you and for downstream users.
So I would say broadly too, this dovetails with concepts that have been emerging about the circular economy and about green chemistry, the idea that you need better insights of your chemicals sooner in the process so that you can determine what all of these larger context impacts are going to be, because the chemicals that people put out there affect communities, which might include sensitive receptors, like preschools, elementary schools, other types of hospitals, for example. There are then going to be potential impacts to the environment that could potentially put you on the wrong side of environmental compliance in terms of water discharges, in terms of hazardous waste compliance.
So this is part of, I think, an emerging area. It has been around for a while, but I think because of these issues, people are starting to understand the importance of it, is having that type of broader context view of what it is that they're doing and understanding that there are regulations, like TSCA in the US, that might put the onus on them to understand the hazards of these chemicals and things that they're using as replacements for other hazardous chemicals before they actually put them into the marketplace.
What's in Store for PFAS Regulations?
Traci: Now, let's circle back, you brought up the upcoming EPA regulations and some of them are postponed and we're seeing a lot of deregulation within the EPA, what can we expect in the future, how can we prepare for potential restrictions or bans or reversals?
Phil: Yeah. So this is where it gets interesting, because we are about seven months or so into the current administration, it's the second Trump administration that we've had, so far, there seems to be a difference when it comes to at least the things we're talking about today from the first administration. A lot of work was actually done between 2017 and the end of 2020 by the first administration in identifying PFAS and doing research into the toxicological routes of exposure and the symptoms of exposure long-term and short-term. A lot of the initial regulatory frameworks that the EPA started to use, what they call whole agency approach, that started to get developed as soon as 2017, because in part of the concerns that were brought to Congress by stakeholders about the impacts of forever chemicals and a lot of sites that are contaminated with forever chemicals.
So far, in 2025, we're seeing things play out a little bit differently. Current EPA director, Lee Zeldin, has used language similar to what was used when we were talking about the whole agency approach, talking about following the science and those kinds of things, and not shrinking in terms of the things that he and his agency are saying about upholding safety standards for PFAS and further restrictions and regulations about PFAS. There have been some things that have changed, and as I mentioned, there were four types of PFAS that had been tagged with water drinking quality limits, that those are either being rescinded or they're being reevaluated to see if they actually need to exist or not.
There are two PFASs that had limitations that the process was started under Trump the first time, and then continued and turned into actual regulations and drinking water limits under the Biden-Harris administration, for those two, that has been postponed until 2031. But at the same time, we have statements from Lee Zeldin saying that, "Well, this is not necessarily an indication of what we're going to be doing, we're following the science, and other regulations that we come out with might be more or less stringent than what you've already seen happen so far." So that's all to present it in the most balanced way possible, calling balls and strikes, whatever, any other metaphors that fit the occasion, that's where things are right now.
At the same time, I would also say that I mentioned the National Defense Authorization Act a little bit ago and that there's this mechanism to add new PFAS to that TRI reporting list, I have not seen discussion of changing that. There was a temporary postponement of the PFASs that were added last year, or actually the ones that were just added right at the very beginning of this year for 2025., but those did eventually go through and were added to the list. I have not seen discussion of stopping that NDAA mechanism to continue adding new PFAS to the list. So I would say that while there's uncertainty about things like, in the US, drinking water standards and what might be coming there, there's uncertainty about regulations concerning PFAS as waste, there seems to be a staying on the course of continuing on with having more and more PFAS every year be TRI-reportable with a threshold of only 100 pounds. So that's something that I think that we can count on continuing.
I'd also though say that we probably have many people from the US listening now, the US is not the world in terms of regulations and in terms of expectations. We've mentioned the EU and REACH, we've mentioned agencies and standards and agreements, like Madrid Statement and the advisory information put out by the Global PFAS Science Panel, these are widely seen as reputable and industry standards by people out there, including potential value chain partners that companies have, that are going to be wanting to reduce their liability of PFAS for themselves, and to do that, they need to make sure that their value chain partners are doing that first, because they can't reduce PFAS in their footprint if their suppliers are giving that to them or if they're a transporter and the companies that they're transporting for are giving them PFAS or their distribution facilities that are getting PFAS from upstream.
And so, all of this fits together, and more and more business in 2025 is global business, and even if you are in the US and you might be thinking, well, there seems to be a little bit of a relaxing of things in terms of the current regulatory and enforcement environment, keep in mind that business partners, customers in other jurisdictions that you operate in, communities and regulators in other jurisdictions you operate in, they all have a vested interest in this, and they are all going to continue to have expectations that you're going to do better at understanding what PFAS you have in your inventory and being able to show that you're doing everything possible to minimize the impacts that that might be having on people downstream on human health and on the environment.
Traci: Well, Phil, you can tell that you're a guy who's been in the environmental and occupational safety field for more than two decades with all the great information that you just gave to us. I appreciate that back and forth that we just had. Want to stay on top of critical topics? Subscribe to this free podcast via your favorite podcast platform to learn best practices and keen insight. You can also visit us at chemicalprocessing.com for more tools and resources aimed at helping you achieve success. On behalf of Phil, I'm Traci, and this is Chemical Processing's Distilled podcast, thanks for listening. Thanks again, Phil, I appreciate it.
Phil: Thanks, Traci. Thanks, everyone.
