By Jaden Gerard SYRACUSE, N.Y. (NCC News) — Onondaga County is home to plenty of bodies of water for people to enjoy, and a new bill aims to start the process to keep them a lot safer. The “PFAS Surface Water Discharge Disclosure Act” was announced this week by Senator Rachel May along with other environmental advocacy groups.
This bill would enforce testing on facilities discharging industrial waste into the water supplies around New York. The purpose of this bill is to get a better idea of where these chemicals are coming from, which could reveal a clue to the scale of this issue.
Jill Heaps, senior attorney at Earthjustice, one group supporting Senator May, says that there aren’t enough regulations on discharging PFAS and it’s time for that to change.
“PFAS contamination is an urgent issue across New York and the nation. While New York has stepped up to set drinking water limits for just two out of hundreds of PFAS pollutants, there are no federal or state limits on any company dumping PFAS pollutants in our water in the first place.”
PFAS chemicals, or per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, are found in many common items. They can be in many household items, as well as industrial and food packaging. PFAS chemicals can have harmful effects on a person’s health, with the ability to cause health issues as bad as cancer.
President of the Onondaga Environmental Institute, Edward Michalenko, says combatting PFAS can only help combat the cancer dilemma.
“About one in four or one in five in our society are gonna die of a cancer. Well over 90-95 percent of those cancers are environmentally induced by chemicals, and so that is a crisis.”
