‘An international embarrassment’: Australia criticised for lagging behind US, EU on drinking water standards

by Admin
August 12, 2024

Australian chemical risk expert Mariann Lloyd-Smith doesn’t mince her words.

“Australia cannot continue to use drinking water guidelines that are an international embarrassment,” she tells ABC RN’s Life Matters.

Dr Lloyd-Smith, a senior policy advisor for the International Pollutants Elimination Network and former member of the UN Expert Group on Persistent Organic Pollutants, says Australia is lagging behind other nations in ensuring our drinking water is safe.

“Forever chemicals”, or per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) are the subject of new drinking water limits in the US — and they’re notably more stringent than Australia’s.

The US announcement follows a 2023 World Health Organization declaration that PFOA — one of the roughly 14,000 known variants of PFAS — is a class one human carcinogen.

Dr Lloyd-Smith describes that as “very serious news” and argues the Australian government “has not responded in an appropriate way”.

“Australian standards … are out of date, out of touch and totally are not usable for protecting human health,” she says.

“We really do need to move on these chemicals quickly. And particularly when it’s in drinking water — something that everybody has to consume. It just is totally unacceptable.”

World’s ‘most toxic’ chemicals

PFAS chemicals were developed in the 1940s and 50s for their resistance to water, heat, flames and stains.

In Australia, they’ve been used widely in firefighting foam in Defence Force bases.

Two variants, PFOS and PFOA, are used in consumer products like non-stick pans and rain jackets.

“These are the most mobile, persistent and toxic chemicals in the world,” says Nick Chartres, senior research fellow at the University of Sydney’s faculty of medicine and health.

“We know that they can get into the Arctic ice caps, they can get into the ice in Antarctica, they get into the deep-sea floor soil sediment — they basically travel everywhere.”

But it’s the chemicals’ presence in drinking water that is the focus of new regulations in the US.

Dr Chartres says the US Environmental Protection Agency (US EPA) used a “rigorous evaluation of the evidence, the gold standard” to identify that exposure to both PFOS and PFOA was associated with a “really large scope of health effects”.

Most Australians are likely to have very low levels of PFAS in their bodies from exposure to everyday items like cosmetics or sunscreen.

But prolonged exposure — by, for example, drinking contaminated water over a lifetime — is associated with negative immune and cardiovascular impacts, as well as negative impacts on fetal and infant growth, Dr Chartres says.

“Not only did [the US EPA] establish those health effects, they then said, based on the best available evidence that we have … there is actually no safe level,” he says.

“So if you get exposed across a lifetime, at any level, your risk of these diseases starts going up incrementally based on the level of exposure.”

He argues that the US EPA’s evaluation should be a prompt for Australia.

“We now have to look to that and say, how do our standards [compare]? … And if there’s any type of divergence with the Australian [position], why is there a divergence?”

Testing in Australia ‘hit and miss’

The US has set a legally enforceable maximum level of four parts per trillion for PFOA and PFOS in drinking water.

That’s in stark contrast to Australian standards. Here, for PFOS and another PFAS variant, PFHxS, a level of 70 parts per trillion is the maximum.

“[That] is a lot higher than four. And for PFOA, which is so much more toxic, we’ve set a level of 560 [parts per trillion],” Dr Lloyd-Smith says.

She says that current testing of drinking water in Australia is “hit and miss”.

“It’s up to the water bodies, the people that provide the drinking water, to do the testing, and according to what they see as a priority.”

While drinking water goes through treatment plants, Dr Lloyd-Smith says it’s insufficient to mitigate the risk of PFAS chemicals.

Indeed, the Australian Drinking Water Guidelines state that “standard water treatment technologies … have little or no effect on PFOS or PFOA concentrations”.

Dr Chartres says cost is one barrier to understanding more about PFAS levels in Australian communities — but he argues it doesn’t have to be.

“[Cost is] one of the key reservations and concerns, I dare say, for authorities, about having to go and test our water systematically across the country,” he says.

“If it does cost billions of dollars, like it is going to in the US, that cost has to be passed on to the polluting industries. The government has to hold these companies to account … to account to pay for the testing, because it can be done. But it’s going to be very, very expensive.”

Individual and government actions

Dr Lloyd-Smith makes it clear that people shouldn’t rush out and buy bottled water.

“We’ve found PFAS in bottled water too, so that’s not the solution,” she says.

And while a benchtop filtration system can lower PFAS levels in drinking water, they are inequitably priced and therefore not accessible to everyone.

Rather, “try to reduce your whole exposure” beyond just drinking water, she recommends.

Check labels and do your research to make careful decisions about which make-up products you use, your clothing, your food and your food packaging, to learn how it’s made and what chemicals it might be exposing you to.

But she’s calling for action at a broader level.

“The first thing Australia must do is address PFAS as a class,” she says.

That would mean limits and standards should be applied to all the known PFAS variations, as opposed to applying individual restrictions.

“The EU has done [this and] there’s a push through [the international environmental agreement] the Stockholm Convention to do it,” she says.

“It’s not ‘pie in the sky’ stuff.

“This is what Australia must do. Number one, we must assess [PFAS] as a class and aim to restrict and eliminate all uses of PFAS.”

What’s the government’s response?

The federal government’s published statement on PFAS “is currently limited evidence of human disease or other clinically significant harm resulting from PFAS exposure”.

But Dr Chartres takes issue with that.

“The Australian government has had this information on the health effects for the last few years from the WHO, the National Academies of Sciences in the US and now the US EPA. And they’re still currently saying on their websites that there’s no known health effects,” he says.

“So this is of critical concern, because that evidence is obviously not consistent with the best available science.”

In a statement to ABC RN, the National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC), the government agency responsible for the guidelines around safe drinking water standards, says an investigation into PFAS in drinking water is underway and is anticipated to be completed by 2025.

The Water Services Association of Australia, the peak body for the country’s urban water industry, told ABC RN it is taking the issue of PFAS exposure seriously and is “investing in research and proactively working with relevant departments, as well as with our counterparts in the US”.

“We advocate for the banning of PFAS chemicals,” the statement says.

NHMRC is currently reviewing its 2018 PFAS drinking water guidelines. Public consultation is expected to start in October 2024 and the final guidelines are expected to be released in April 2025.

Full responses from Water Services Association of Australia and the Australian Government Department of Health and Aged Care are available here.