Conservation groups urge EPA to update list of toxic pollutants

In a formal legal petition, conservation groups call on the Environmental Protection Agency to update its “outdated” list of toxic pollutants required by law under the Clear Water Act. The petition urges the agency to address the various categories of toxic pollutants that have been linked to cancer and many other health and environmental concerns.

According to the petition, which was submitted by Northwest Environmental Advocates and the Center for Biological Diversity, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) hasn’t added any new pollutants to the list in 47 years.

“For nearly 50 years, [the] EPA has been ignoring the growing mountain of science about the more than 1,000 unregulated toxic chemicals contaminating our rivers and drinking water, at a tremendous cost to human health and the environment,” Nina Bell, executive director at Northwest Environmental Advocates, said. “The American people count on [the] EPA to keep our drinking water clean, remedy environmental injustice, and protect fish and marine mammals from toxic pollution, but the agency has betrayed that public trust. [The] EPA needs to grant our petition and launch itself firmly into the science of the 21st century.”

The groups urge the EPA to add more than 1,000 industrial and commercial pollutants such as “forever chemicals” or PFAS, bioaccumulative toxics, and pesticided to name a few.

While both the Clean Water Act and Congress require the EPA to add chemicals to the list over time, “the petition cites over 300 scientific reports documenting the adverse effects of unregulated toxic pollutants and their prevalence in waterways,” according to a press release from the Center For Biological Diversity.

“Our world has changed dramatically over the past 50 years, but the EPA’s acting like we’re frozen in the ’70s,” Hannah Connor, environmental health deputy director at the Center for Biological Diversity, said. “The agency has turned its back on the deluge of new, dangerously toxic pollutants that have poisoned our waterways and permeated our lives.”