Environmental groups demand EPA to start monitoring microplastics in water

[BumRushDaShow]

Source: The Guardian

Sun 1 Dec 2024 08.00 EST


A new legal petition filed by more than 170 top environmental groups demands that the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) begin monitoring for microplastics in drinking water, an essential first step to reining in pollution viewed as one of the nation’s most pressing public health threats.

The scale of microplastic water pollution, the extent to which the substance is lodged throughout human bodies, and the many health implications have come into sharp focus in recent years, but the EPA still has not taken meaningful action, public health advocates say.

The petition pushes the agency to begin monitoring microplastics as an emerging contaminant under the Safe Drinking Water Act in 2026. “The EPA has been thinking about it, but they have not been acting, and the goal here is to get them to act,” said Erin Doran, a senior attorney at Food & Water Watch, one of the petitioners.

Microplastics are microscopic bits of plastics that are either intentionally added to products or shed from larger products containing plastic, from clothing to tires to cookware. The substance has been found in the clouds, atop Mount Everest, in deep ocean trenches and in the Arctic. It can contain any number of 20,000 plastic chemicals, and often is attached to highly toxic human-made compounds – like PFAS, bisphenol and phthalates – linked to cancer, neurotoxicity, hormone disruption or developmental toxicity.

Read more: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2024/dec/01/microplastics-epa-monitoring

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I hope they understand that an election just happened last month and all of what EPA is trying to do, is going to effectively be shut down. I.e., internal agency "deregulation". And if you protest it, they'll just send out their (privately contracted) jack-booted thugs to round you up, lock you up (in a private prison), and throw away the key (and the SCOTUS will uphold the deregulation).

[patphil]

1. They're about 4 years late. The Trump administration doesn't give a shit about that stuff.

The EPA will fade away over the next 4 years, along with OSHA, and any other agency that requires corporations to do anything to protect their workers, their neighbors, their customers, the environment; any and all parts of the natural world that would cost those corporations money to protect.

Public health threats are all fake news in the eyes of this new order. Money has value to them, the environment doesn't.

[bronxiteforever]

2. Like the ancient Romans ingesting lead

we are drinking microplastics. Everyone you know has this stuff camping out in their bodies. Plus the Supreme Court, by the Supreme Court I really mean Leonard Leo, the federalist society, the Heritage foundation and assorted Bond villains, have the last say on any such reg.



Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo, 603 U.S. ___ (2024), 144 S. Ct. 2244, is a landmark decision of the United States Supreme Court in the field of administrative law, the law governing regulatory agencies that overruled the principle of Chevron deference established in Chevron U.S.A., Inc. v. Natural Resources Defense Council, Inc. (1984), which had directed courts to defer to an agency's reasonable interpretation of an ambiguity in a law that the agency enforces.

[Irish_Dem]

3. The billionaires became vastly wealthy by poisoning humans and destroying the planet.

They have no intention of stopping any of it.

And they are certainly not going to pay to repair the damage they have caused.

[nmmi]

4. 24 of 91 brains sampled were 0.5% plastic

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/science/the-world-is-producing-57-million-tons-of-plastic-pollution-per-year-new-study-finds

. . . Several studies this year have looked at how prevalent microplastics are in our drinking water and in people’s tissue, such as hearts, brains (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC11100893/ ) and testicles ( https://academic.oup.com/toxsci/article-abstract/200/2/235/7673133 ), with doctors and scientists still not quite sure what it means in terms of human health threats.

. . . The United Nations projects that plastics production is likely to rise from about 440 million tons (400 million metric tons) a year to more than 1,200 million tons (1,100 million metric tons ((by 2050, according to the link -nmmi)), saying “our planet is choking in plastic.”

In the September 6 issue of The Week, there is a blurb about the situation in U.S. as far as plastics in the brain. In part:

The 2024 samples had 50% greater microplastics weight than the samples from 2016. . . . 24 of 91 brains sampled had so much plastic that it constituted about 0.5% of the brain by weight[/b]

[AZ8theist]

5. "Environmental Groups" will go the way of the Dodo bird.....

...during the next 4 years. They are wasting their time "demanding" anything from the incoming dictatorship.