NORTH CAROLINA — The Environmental Management Commission is considering a new rule that would require industries adopt PFAS monitoring plans without enforceable pollution limits. A utility association that helped draft the proposal believes it would help minimize PFAS, but critics argue it would give long-term liability protection to polluters.
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The draft PFAS Monitoring and Minimization rule would require significant industrial users — businesses that pass large amounts of wastewater into treatment utilities — to regularly sample PFAS discharges. It would not penalize industries and wastewater plants that fail to reduce PFAS pollution.
“This rule is worse than nothing,” Cape Fear River Watch executive director Dana Sargent told Port City Daily. “If established, it gives cover to all these polluting industries to continue to contaminate us for decades — without recourse.”
Industries would need to implement a minimization plan if testing shows discharges of PFAS compounds — PFOA, PFOS, or GenX — are more than 10% greater than the amount taken in over four consecutive quarters.
After the rule goes into effect, notified dischargers would need to submit a proposed minimization plan within a year to the “controlling authority” — DEQ or POTWs receiving PFAS wastewater — who would then approve or require revisions to the plan within 120 days.
From there, PFAS minimization plans would be reviewed every two years until reduction goals are met. If they are not, the discharger would need to implement a revised plan, but no further consequences are included.
“I think it does more harm than good,” Southern Environmental Law Center senior attorney Jean Zhuang said. “Because polluters are going to say this is all they have to do and they’re going to use it as a shield for liability.”
The Environmental Management Commission’s Water Quality Committee requested DEQ create a PFAS minimization plan in November. The committee was scheduled to hold a special meeting to continue the effort on Feb. 25 but abruptly canceled without explanation. Weeks later, the Department of Environmental Quality included the draft PFAS monitoring and minimization rule in Wednesday’s meeting agenda.
“DEQ drafted the rule at the direction of the EMC Water Quality Committee,” DEQ public affairs director Sam Chan told Port City Daily, “After a series of meetings with interest groups.”
PCD asked the Department of Environmental Quality why last month’s meeting was canceled and which groups were involved in the stakeholder process but did not receive an answer by press. At least three associations provided input, including the NC Water Quality Association, the NC Pretreatment Consortium, and the NC Manufacturers Alliance.
The proposed rule mirrors a stakeholder draft submitted to the EMC last week. North Carolina Pretreatment Consortium chair Amy Varinoski sent a March 6 email to Steve Keen — chair of the Environmental Management Commission’s Water Quality Committee — expressing support for a draft rule shared with him the previous day by AquaLaw attorney Paul Calamita.
Calamita is general counsel for the North Carolina Water Quality Association, a trade group representing wastewater and drinking water authorities, local governments, and engineering firms.
“Any alarmism about DEQ’s proposal is badly misplaced,” he said.
The attorney emphasized the draft rule is DEQ’s proposal rather than an industry-initiative. He said he views it as a means to reduce PFAS until formal regulatory limits are established.
“We see the rule as a backstop to these ongoing efforts by the public wastewater systems to characterize and minimize industrial PFAS loadings to their sewer systems,” he said. “The effort is already ongoing and certainly not intended to take the highly exaggerated 10 or 100 years that one commenter has suggested. Nothing could be further from the truth. We don’t know what DEQ has in mind, but the rule is structured to our reading as a two-to-three-year exercise at most.”
Calamita said NCWQA members are already making progress to reduce PFAS through minimization plans with industrial customers.
“By way of perspective, we believe that the largest PFAS loadings to most (if not all) public wastewater plants in the State come from domestic/residential contributions,” he said. “While we can and will make progress working with industrial users, the real reductions will have to come from our homes.”
Alternatively, Betsy Southerland — former EPA director of the Office of Science and Technology in the Office of Water — told Port City Daily indirect industrial discharges and landfills are the greatest source of PFAS for wastewater plants.
“All the major publicly owned treatment works plants have the authority right now to require pretreatment for indirect industrial discharges to their sewage plants under the Clean Water Act,” she said. “Then they can see what’s left from cosmetics and other consumer products washing into their sewer system. They won’t know until they require pretreatment by the big contributors of PFAS.”
Beth Eckert, Cape Fear Public Utility Authority’s deputy executive director of environmental management and sustainability, is president of the NC Water Quality Association. CFPUA environmental compliance officer Neisa Kunz is vice chair of the NC Pretreatment Consortium.
Port City Daily reached out to CFPUA to ask its position on the proposed rule but leadership was not available for comment by press.
“It was perfectly appropriate for DEQ to reach out to the public sewer utilities for a starting point proposal because we co-regulate indirect industrial discharges with them,” Calamita said.
According to its most recent tax filing, the NC Water Quality Association raised $572,477 in membership dues in 2023. It paid Calamita’s firm, Richmond-based AquaLaw, $546,852 for management fees for the year.
EMC Water Quality Committee vice-chair Michael Ellison is a program manager for engineering firm WK Dickson, an associate consultant member of the NC Water Quality Association.
EMC chair J.D. Solomon, who works as a water and wastewater utility consultant, invited Calamita to a meeting last summer to advocate the commission take greater control over National Pollutant Discharge Elimination System permits used to regulate contaminants including PFAS. The Department of Environmental Quality currently serves as the primary entity charged with administering discharge permits.
Calamita represented Brunswick County in his testimony. He said he believed giving EMC more control over permits would “level the playing field” with DEQ and noted some of his clients have been forced to accept unfavorable permits due to time constraints.
“There’s a lot of permitting flexibility,” he said. “On PFAS, do we have two tiers, five tiers, 12 tiers? Those are things that may not be in the regulations that you would have an opportunity to weigh in on.”
The EMC permit committee’s Wednesday agenda includes discussion of the draft permit for Lear Corp. — whose Kenansville facility is one of the biggest known PFAS dischargers in North Carolina — after receiving approximately 1,000 comments primarily focused on its PFAS requirements. The facility’s discharges flow into the tri-county region.
Last year, Cape Fear River Watch started a petition opposing DEQ’s draft permit for automotive producer Lear Corp. and warned the permit would serve as a “bellwether” for future PFAS policy. The draft permit required Lear to monitor PFAS but did not contain limitations for the substances.
After receiving hundreds of public comments, DEQ delayed Lear’s permit approval. It announced a revised permit in December with minimization plans, but it remains without enforceable limits.
“According to DEQ there may be 600 PFAS polluters sending their toxic wastewater to treatment facilities that cannot and do not treat PFAS,” Sargent said. “All of these facilities should be working together to stop this pollution from reaching our drinking water and farmlands and instead all these facilities got together to write a rule that makes sure they don’t have to do a damn thing about it.”
The North Carolina Manufacturers Alliance requested the Department of Environmental Quality include language in the new draft rule to provide liability protection to industries disclosing their PFAS data. NCMA’s members include major PFAS manufacturers Chemours, DuPont, 3M, and International Paper.
EMC member Charles Carter is an attorney with Earth & Water Law, listed as a business partner of the NCMA. The lobby group sent a letter to DEQ last year opposing proposed PFAS standards on behalf of both its members and business partners.
The Department of Environmental Quality estimates over 3.6 million North Carolinians — 35% of the state’s population — drink water with PFAS above federal maximum contaminant levels.
The agency has pushed to implement enforceable discharge limits for eight PFAS compounds prevalent in North Carolina for over a year, but the Environmental Management Commission has not moved forward on the request.
EMC members have repeatedly requested additional information sessions regarding the economic impact of regulation and questioned the health effects of the compounds. DEQ cited negative health effects established by peer-reviewed research and federal evaluations to justify imposing mandatory limits in a July presentation.
“Non-monetized benefits provide additional value to the state’s residents, economy, and the environment,” DEQ wrote. “Lack of action is projected to place an extensive financial burden on North Carolinians that exceeds the total costs and benefits of the proposed rules.”
The Office of State Budget and Management’s analysis of the surface water standards estimated implementing the plan would cost private and public entities roughly $9.5 billion over a 34-year period. Monetized benefits — including improved human health and property values — were projected to be over $9.96 billion over the same period.
“This is likely a significant underestimate as not all human health benefits could be monetized,” the OSBM report stated.
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