EPA edits website to drop claim that Pfoa was phased out after a nonprofit complaint

The Environmental Protection Agency has rewritten its public webpages to remove the statement that Pfoa, one of the most studied Pfas "forever chemicals," has been phased out of manufacture and import in the United States.

The old text read: "The manufacture and import of Pfoa has also been phased out in the United States." The new text reads: "Quantities of Pfoa may be produced, imported, and used by companies …" The revised site also says Pfos remains in production for some limited, ongoing uses, according to The Guardian's reporting on the change.

What the EPA changed, and why

The edit came last month after a complaint from Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER), a nonprofit. PEER argued the agency was allowing Pfoa production while telling the public otherwise.

In a response dated Sept. 18, Douglas Troutman, the EPA's assistant administrator for chemical safety and pollution prevention, wrote that the agency was updating its websites in response to PEER's request, according to The Guardian.

The complaint was filed under the Information Quality Act, which requires information published by federal agencies to be complete and accurate.

Kyla Bennett, a former EPA scientist who is now PEER's science policy director, put it bluntly. "They were giving the false impression and saying, 'Nothing to see here because Pfoa is not being produced in the US,'" she said. "But that was demonstrably false, and now they have admitted it."

The EPA did not immediately provide a comment to The Guardian.

How the phase-out worked

The 2015 phase-out was not a ban. That year the EPA reached an agreement with eight Pfas producers to phase out Pfoa and Pfos. Pfos is a similar chemical produced by 3M.

The deal followed documents made public during early-2000s litigation over DuPont's Pfas pollution in West Virginia. An epidemiological panel convened in that case found Pfoa and Pfos likely cause cancer, heart disease, liver disease and kidney disease. That panel's findings were the scientific basis for the phase-out.

Federal officials repeatedly described the chemicals as phased out. The effect, according to The Guardian's account, was to leave the impression they were no longer made or used in the U.S. PEER says both have been produced here throughout. The Guardian reports the levels are quite high by the measure of independent science, a characterization that rests on that reporting.

The Inhance containers

The live dispute is over Inhance, a Houston-based company that makes up to 200 million plastic containers a year used across the U.S. economy.

The EPA has found that Pfoa leaches from those containers at high levels into their contents, according to The Guardian. The agency is nonetheless allowing Inhance to produce them. The paparazzi.fun item describes this as part of a six-year legal fight, though the details of that case are not laid out in full here.

Bennett says the containers present an "ongoing serious and ongoing threat to public health."

Inhance rejects that. The company denies the chemical leaches out in measurable levels. In a statement to The Guardian it said any Pfoa from its products is an "impurity." The company also stressed that no ban was ever in place and that it was not one of the eight companies in the 2015 agreement.

That last point is consistent with how the program worked: a voluntary agreement among named producers, not a rule covering everyone.

The health benchmarks

The EPA itself has found that virtually no level of exposure to Pfoa or Pfos in drinking water is safe. The International Agency for Research on Cancer classifies Pfoa as "carcinogenic to humans" and Pfos as "possibly carcinogenic."

Those are the benchmarks against which the leaching dispute will be measured. Inhance's position is that its products do not release Pfoa at measurable levels. The EPA's testing, as described, found otherwise.

The accuracy question

A federal agency told the public for years that a dangerous chemical was no longer being made here. Production continued. The correction arrived only after an outside group invoked a statute requiring accurate government information.

To its credit, the agency fixed the wording when asked, and the Troutman letter says as much. What the EPA has not said is how long the phase-out language stood, who approved it, or whether other pages carry similar claims.

PEER and other critics say the episode shows voluntary phase-outs are not enough and that outright bans are needed. That is their position. No ban has been announced.

The unresolved issue is the Inhance containers. The EPA has not publicly said whether it will restrict their production, and Inhance's denial of measurable leaching remains in direct conflict with the agency's own testing results as reported.