The Environmental Protection Agency proposed Thursday to include microplastics and pharmaceuticals for the first time on its list of contaminants in drinking water, a move that could ultimately lead to new restrictions on these substances for water utilities.
EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin said the agency is responding to Americans concerned about plastics and pharmaceuticals in their drinking water. The gesture is also intended to be a victory for Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s MAHA campaign, which has been pressuring Zeldin for months to further crack down on environmental pollutants.
EPA’s Contaminant Candidate List identifies contaminants in drinking water that are not regulated under the Safe Drinking Water Act. The agency has published a draft of the sixth version of the list, with a 60-day public comment period. We plan to finalize the list by mid-November.
“I can’t think of a more pressing issue for American families than the safety of drinking water,” Zeldin said at EPA headquarters.
Studies have investigated the prevalence of microplastics in drinking water and in people’s hearts, brains, and testicles. Doctors and scientists are still assessing what this means in terms of a threat to human health, but say there is cause for concern. There is also growing concern about pharmaceuticals entering the water supply because humans excrete them and traditional sewage treatment facilities cannot remove them.
The EPA uses this list to prioritize research, funding, and regulatory decisions, but it rarely removes contaminants from the list to set limits on amounts allowed in public drinking water. The EPA announced in March that it would not develop regulations for any of the nine pollutants on its recently reviewed list.
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“This is the beginning of a very long process that always ends with nothing happening,” said Eric Olson, a senior attorney at the Natural Resources Defense Council who works on drinking water protection.
Still, some who want the government to do more to stop plastic pollution say the announcement is a good start.
“Including this on the list would be the first step toward ultimately regulating microplastics in public water supplies, and we hope it’s not the last step,” said Judith Enck, a former EPA regional administrator who now heads Beyond Plastics.
Dr. Philip Landrigan, director of the Boston University Global Health Observatory, said the EPA is moving in the right direction, but it will mean little if the U.S. does not curb the accelerating increase in plastic production that leads to plastic pollution. The United States is participating in treaty negotiations to address the global crisis of plastic pollution, but strongly opposes limits on plastic production.
Food & Water Watch says the list is important but ultimately falls short of calling for oversight. EPA uses the Unregulated Contaminant Monitoring Rule to collect data on contaminants suspected of being present in drinking water.
The American Chemistry Council, an industry group, said it supports monitoring of microplastics in drinking water and research to better understand their potential impacts, as long as monitoring is standardized and consistent across the country.
Plastic pollution is part of MAHA’s challenge
Kennedy and Zeldin’s joint move comes as activists in Kennedy’s MAHA movement have expressed frustration with a lack of action on priorities such as pesticide regulation despite a fragile political relationship with the EPA.
The movement erupted earlier this year over President Trump’s executive order aimed at boosting production of a controversial herbicide ingredient known as glyphosate. President Kennedy said he was disappointed with the executive order, but believed it was necessary for agricultural stability and national security.
The EPA has hinted at future MAHA agendas, saying they will address issues such as permanent chemicals, plastic pollution, food quality, Superfund cleanup, and lead pipes. In February, EPA spokeswoman Brigitte Hirsch told The Associated Press that the topic was in its “final stages.”
President Kennedy, who focused part of his 2024 independent presidential campaign on tackling plastic pollution, also announced a $144 million initiative to improve the measurement, understanding, and removal of microplastics that enter the human body.
The plan, called STOMP (Systematic Targeting of Microplastics), involves building tools to detect and quantify microplastics, map how they move through the body, and ultimately remove them from the human body, he said.
“You can’t deal with what you can’t measure, and you can’t regulate what you can’t understand,” President Kennedy told the EPA on Thursday. “Together we will define risks, build tools and act on the evidence about microplastics.”
EPA publishes a list every five years
The Safe Drinking Water Act, as amended in 1996, directed the EPA to publish a list of potential contaminants every five years. The agency must then decide whether to regulate at least five of the pollutants on the list. In five cycles of the process, EPA determined that regulatory action was not appropriate or necessary for most of the contaminants considered.
President Trump is calling for reductions in environmental regulations. In May, about a year after the Biden administration decided on the first-ever national standard, the Environmental Protection Agency announced plans to eliminate limits on some less common “permanent chemicals” in drinking water. NRDC and other environmental groups are fighting to keep the Biden-era rules in place in their entirety.
The new draft list includes four contaminant groups: microplastics, pharmaceuticals, PFAS, and disinfection byproducts, as well as 75 chemicals and nine microorganisms that could be found in drinking water, the EPA said.
— Jennifer McDermott and Ali Swenson. Michael Phillis and Matthew Daly contributed reporting.
