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Environmental Law Monitor

Your Guide to Emerging Issues in Environmental Regulation and Litigation.

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• Environmental Law Monitor, EPA, Water Contamination

EPA Launches Study to Strengthen Understanding of Emerging Contaminants in Water Pollution

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Earlier this month, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency announced a new scientific study with the goal of improving its understanding of what pollutants may be present in drinking water.  The research will go beyond traditional testing methods to screen for a broad array of pollutants, including pharmaceuticals, PFAS, and more than 1,000 other potential contaminants.

The study will use non-targeted analysis (NTA), which can identify unknown pollutants present in a drinking water sample. Notably, conventional testing methods typically only measure a handful of specific chemicals at a time, whereas NTA allows researchers to scan for thousands of potential pollutants.

This study comes on the heels of other Safe Drinking Water Act programs being implemented by the EPA. For example, this past spring, the EPA released its draft Sixth Contaminant Candidate List (CCL 6), which helps prioritize funding, research, and information collection to better understand the potential health risks of unregulated contaminants in drinking water. In this latest draft, the EPA, for the first time, designated both microplastics and pharmaceuticals as priority contaminant groups. Additionally, this past June, the EPA proposed its sixth Unregulated Contaminant Monitoring Rule (UCMR 6), which would require monitoring for contaminants not currently regulated but may be present in drinking water. UCMR 6 would also require monitoring using existing approved methods to detect 30 unregulated contaminants.

In other words, UCMR 6 focuses on a defined group of contaminants and CCL 6 concentrates on establishing future research priorities. However, NTA can search much more broadly to identify previously overlooked drinking water pollutants. Therefore, the EPA’s new study will complement these other efforts by filling in gaps not addressed by UCMR 6 and CCL 6. It is anticipated that the resulting insights from this study will help the EPA to better understand the occurrence of emerging contaminants in drinking, inform future research, and allow it to prioritize future actions to ensure safe drinking water.