The Environmental Protection Agency has established drinking water standards for six types of toxic substances known as PFAS. (Photo: Getty Images)
Six years ago we couldn’t even pronounce perfluoroalkyl and polyfluoroalkyl substances. Now the terms roll off our tongues like rain off a PFAS-treated Goretex jacket.
The Chemours Fayetteville Works plant in northern Bladen County is responsible for forever contaminating the drinking water supplies of hundreds of thousands of North Carolinians with GenX and other PFAS. (The United Nations in November alleged that Chemours is violating the human rights of North Carolinians by discharging and emitting PFAS into the water and air.)
So one would think that importing GenX from another country to North Carolina would be, well, inadvisable.
Not at the EPA, which in September authorized Chemours to import as much as 4 million tons of GenX from its Netherlands facility to Fayetteville Works “for recycling” over the next year.
Newsline broke the story in October. The subsequent public outcry – environmental groups, Congressional representatives, Gov. Roy Cooper, even regular people who just want to brew a pot of sweet tea using clean water – pressured the feds to temporarily halt the imports until Dec. 1.
Then a magical thing happened. Chemours did some bad math. They misstated the amount of GenX it would import/export – and with the use of a calculator or an abacus or their fingers and toes, figured out that Fayetteville Works didn’t have the capacity to recycle 4 million tons of GenX in a year.
The EPA now had grounds – erroneous paperwork – to revoke the authorization.
Still unresolved, though, is how the EPA came to its initial conclusion, and how state regulators knew nada about gigantic shipping containers containing tons of GenX-contaminated wastewater entering the Port of Wilmington and then being trucked to northern Bladen County.
It seems like something that would be good to know.
In other PFAS progress, the EPA recently ordered Inhance Technologies, based in Houston, to stop producing PFAS in the manufacture of plastic bottles made with HDPE. (That’s short for high density polyethylene.) These bottles, labeled with the number 2, often contain milk, shampoo, soap, detergent and motor oil.
To produce those HDPE bottles – 200 million of them annually – Inhance uses PFAS chemicals.
The EPA said that three of the compounds that Inhance manufactures – PFOA, PFNA and PFDA – “are highly toxic and present unreasonable risks that cannot be prevented other than through prohibition of manufacture.”
The manufacturing ban becomes effective Feb. 28.
The EPA’s directive was the result of a lawsuit brought by Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility and the Center for Environmental Health.
Inhance released a statement disputing the scientific basis for the EPA decision and said the company “will pursue all legal options to protect its customers, suppliers, and employees and to ensure the continued operations of this environmentally critical technology.”
And any minute now – literally, as this is supposed to be done by the end of 2023 – the EPA is expected to finalize its drinking water standards for six types of PFAS, including GenX.
The proposed standards, released in March, are very strict: 4 parts per trillion for PFOA and PFOS, which are especially toxic.
Meanwhile, the N.C. Department of Environmental Quality is laying the groundwork with the Environmental Management Commission to pass rules regulating several types of PFAS in lakes, rivers, streams and groundwater.
In other slow-rolling disasters, 2023 is on track to be the warmest year ever recorded, according to federal climate officials, with November marking the 537th consecutive month with temperatures above the 20th Century average.
Climate change descended on North Carolina not in the form of rain, but in the absence of it.
Nearly every county experienced some form of drought. The western part of the state plunged into the “exceptional” and “severe” categories, with voracious wildfires burning the parched vegetation. Entrenched in a moderate drought, the Triangle saw parts of Jordan Lake transform into a lunar landscape. The receding waters revealed the remnants of Lockville, a town razed by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers when it built the reservoir in the 1970s and early 1980s.
How to explain this crazy phenomenon? Oh right, the world’s relentless belching of greenhouse gases.
Like methane, from natural gas.
Undeterred by the specter of planetary disaster, on Dec. 19, FERC – the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission – approved a gas consortium’s request for more time to complete the MVP Southgate project, a natural gas pipeline that will cut a 46-mile gash in North Carolina.
The Southgate project is an extension of the main MVP pipeline, which originates at a fracked gas plant in West Virginia and route 300 miles through environmentally sensitive mountain terrain in Virginia. MVP Southgate would enter North Carolina in Eden, in Rockingham County, Senate Pro Tem Phil Berger’s district. From there, the pipeline would continue roughly 46 miles southeast, ending near Haw River in Alamance County.
Construction could begin next year, and the company has the legal authority — a gift from the state legislature — to invoke eminent domain to seize private property. Gas shipments are scheduled to start in June 2026.
In total, the Southgate project would cross 207 streams, three ponds and temporarily affect 17,726 linear feet of streams, 6,538 square feet of open waters, and 14 acres of wetlands; another 0.02 of an acre of wetlands would be permanently damaged.
Nearly 14 acres of riparian buffers would also be affected. MVP Southgate would cross the Dan River, home to endangered and threatened species, and Stony Creek Reservoir, the main drinking water supply for the City of Burlington.
In addition to the damage to waters and wildlife, natural gas pipelines leak methane, a potent greenhouse gas, from all points of its infrastructure: the fracking facility, processing plants, transmissions lines and metering and regulation stations, according to the EPA.
While many Republican lawmakers and industry representatives support the project, Gov. Roy Cooper, dozens of Democratic state lawmakers, and U.S. Reps. Kathy Manning and Valerie Foushee had petitioned FERC to deny the request. Cooper noted to FERC that because of a 2021 state law, any new gas-fueled energy plants, “will be forced to retire before the end of their useful lives, leading to sunk costs that will be charged to North Carolina’s ratepayers.”
What else exhales greenhouse gases into the air? Burning wood pellets.
Enviva – the company with four pollution-spewing wood pellet plants in North Carolina, the company that chops down entire forests and juliennes the trees into pellets, the company that ships the pellets across the world’s oceans to countries that burn them in power plants and pretend that wood is “clean energy” – is broke.
As in digging-in-the-couch-cushions-for-change broke. Its stock tanked and bleeding cash, in November Enviva axed its CEO who now knows what it feels like to be a felled oak tree.
What the financial tumult means for the Enviva plants in Ahoskie, Hamlet, Faison and Garysburg, all communities of color, is unclear. What we do know is that despite the company’s promises to buoy local economies, the poverty rate in all of those towns is astonishing: Ahoskie (24%), Faison (30.7%), Hamlet (25%), Garysburg (29%). That’s twice – or more – the statewide average of 12.8%.
It’s time to say the quiet part out loud: The state’s Environmental Justice & Equity Advisory Board has accomplished little since former DEQ Secretary Michael Regan, now EPA administrator, created it in 2018.
A lot of hoo-ha surrounded the board’s unveiling. “Environmental fairness and equity for all is not just a soundbite, a feel-good exercise.” Regan said at the time. “It’s an achievable goal for all parts of our state. But we have some work to do.”
Fast forward nearly six years: Because of the limitations of the advisory board, which has no legal authority, communities of color and low-income neighborhoods across North Carolina are no less disproportionately burdened by myriad pollution sources. Stench and vectors emanating from thousands of ginormous hog and poultry farms. Contaminated drinking water. Air pollution. Landfills. Old toxic waste sites.
To be fair, the board members all care deeply about environmental justice. And because of their feedback, DEQ did strengthen a few permits, including one for a landfill gas plant in Sampson County.
But ask the residents of West Badin, Goldsboro, Rose Hill, Lumberton, Greensboro, Gaston or Dobbins Heights if the environmental conditions in their neighborhoods have improved, and they would likely say no.
So, what should the state government do?
Create a new advisory board.
In November, Gov. Roy Cooper issued Executive Order 292, “Advancing Environmental Justice in North Carolina.” Although it lacks the force of law, the order nonetheless creates a new advisory council under the governor’s office, as well as directs cabinet agencies to develop three environmental justice goals and measurable outcomes by February.
(The Department of Agriculture, which has long fought environmental regulations, is not a cabinet agency, so it gets a pass.)
The order contains several other initiatives: the establishment of an online environmental justice hub and an improved mapping system to show the location of these sources, which could help agencies determine permitting, enforcement and economic incentives decisions.
To see Exhibit A of environmental injustice, gaze west from the Governor’s Mansion 58 miles to Burlington. There, for more than 30 years, the former Tarheel Army Missile Plant has festered just a block north of Church Street, seeping toxic solvents beneath a low-income, non-white neighborhood.
Last month, environmental advocates Omega, Brenda and Ayo Wilson of the West End Revitalization Association in Alamance County corralled more than 100 heavy hitters into the same room for a day-long discussion about the plant and the neighborhood. All of the main alphabet agencies attended: EPA, DEQ, DHHS, NIEHS, as well as their local counterparts.
Unfortunately, a Very Important Panelist canceled: a representative from the governor’s office.
With more agency attention to the TAMP, it’s possible, although not a lock, that meaningful cleanup begins in 2024 at the 22-acre site. The Army is responsible for remediating the pollution below ground; the private owner David Tsui, is on the hook for contamination, such as asbestos and lead, in the buildings.
Meanwhile, Tsui, who tried to enroll the property in the state’s Brownfields program but was deemed ineligible because of his criminal history of defrauding the U.S. government, is trying to offload the property. He purchased it in 2018 for $1.7 million. New price tag: $6 million.
Now that conservative state lawmakers have regained a veto-proof majority, expect 2024 to sing refrains of the Gov. McCrory era. That’s when the legislature neutered all manner of environmental protections and hollowed out the DEQ budget.
North Carolina has yet to recover from those actions: too few inspectors and too few air and groundwater monitors; too little legal recourse for residents and too little transparency.
Earlier this year, the legislature got a head start on razing environmental regulations. It passed a law reconfiguring several appointed bodies, including the Environmental Management Commission.
The 15-member EMC is the state’s most powerful non-elected body, at least with respect to environmental issues. It makes (or weakens) rules. For example, in 2020, after 18 months of squabbling, the EMC established stricter rules regarding air emissions of methyl bromide, a neurotoxin. But it also collided with the EPA over classifying fewer water bodies as “impaired” – too polluted to serve their purpose for drinking, recreation or fishing.
The EMC’s tack is often guided by those who appointed its members. Previously, the governor had eight appointees to the EMC and the state legislature, seven. Now the governor has lost two appointments to the Agriculture Commissioner. That’s currently Republican Steve Troxler, who once held a rally on Bicentennial Mall opposing people’s right to sue hog farms for nuisance.
Troxler, who has been agriculture commissioner since 2005, is running again next year. He faces fellow Republican Colby Hammonds in the March 5 primary.
The winner faces Sarah Taber, a Democrat, and Libertarian candidate, Sean Haugh, in the November election.
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