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New Virginia laws take aim at ‘forever chemicals’

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Public concern about the ubiquitous man-made chemicals known as perfluoroalkyl and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) has finally translated into bipartisan legislation at the Virginia General Assembly. 

Several different bills are now awaiting action from Gov. Abigail Spanberger by April 13. Among these are requirements for industrial users to test their wastewater for PFAS and for sewage treatment plants to test sludge for the presence of these contaminants before it can be applied to farmland. 

Enactment of the laws won’t mean we’ve solved the problem of the notorious “forever chemicals” that accumulate in the body and cause a wide array of neurological problems. Thousands of different PFAS variants are manufactured and used across the U.S. economy, and they have so polluted our air and water now that they are found even in rainfall.  

The problem goes back many decades, but only in the last few years has our state government even begun to take notice. 

When Virginia’s Department of Environmental Quality (DEQ) finally started collecting data on PFAS in drinking water in 2024, it found elevated levels in public water systems serving about 2.29 million people across the state. In December 2025, the nonprofit Wild Virginia sued the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) for its failure to protect Virginia waterways from PFAS contamination.

Virginia’s new legislation won’t stop these chemicals from being produced and used in consumer products, or from getting into waterways. They could, however, reduce how much PFAS gets into the food produced on Virginia farms. 

Yes, that’s a modest goal. Yet it is more than Virginia has tried to accomplish before now, and it puts us among only a minority of states actively working to protect residents from the health effects of PFAS. The federal government, which ought to be setting standards for the whole country, has dropped the ball. It wasn’t until 2024 that EPA even imposed limits on a few kinds of PFAS in drinking water – and it has been backpedaling under the administration of President Donald Trump. 

New sewage sludge standards

The main route for PFAS to get into our food supply comes from the practice of spreading sewage sludge across farmland. It is both the cheapest disposal method for the enormous quantity of this wastewater treatment plant byproduct and a way to fertilize crops that’s free to farmers. It’s also a perfect way to ensure our crops and farm animals are maximally exposed to contamination. 

The federal government has taken no action to limit the disposal of sludge on farmland. In January of 2025 EPA issued a draft risk assessment for two of the oldest PFAS chemicals (PFOA and PFOS) in sludge, but (surprise, surprise) the agency has neither finalized the document nor issued regulations to protect farms since Trump took office. 

Now Virginia’s General Assembly proposes to take up the slack. HB 1443 from Del. Alfonso Lopez, D-Arlington, and SB 386 from Sen. Richard Stuart, R-King George, require that any owner of a sewage treatment works that applies or sells sludge for land application purposes must begin sampling and testing the sludge for PFAS by January 1, 2027. The test results must be provided to anyone applying the sludge to their land. Sludge generated outside of Virginia is also subject to this requirement if the sludge is applied here.

The legislation does not stop with monitoring and notification. If the concentrations of PFAS in the sludge exceed 50 micrograms per kilogram, the sludge cannot be land applied or distributed.  Levels of PFAS between 25 and 50 are subject to less stringent restrictions, and below 25, the only requirement is to notify the landowner of the test results before the sludge is applied. 

This sliding-scale approach puts Virginia among the minority of states that regulate PFAS in sewage sludge. Maine takes the most protective approach, prohibiting any amount of PFAS in sludge applied to land. The zero-tolerance approach reflects the science, since there is no safe level of exposure for these chemicals. 

Unfortunately, though, PFAS are both so ubiquitous and so hard to remove from wastewater that a standard of zero is impossible to meet. The result is that all Maine sewage sludge has to be landfilled, and the one landfill in the state that accepts it is rapidly filling up. This may be why only Connecticut has followed Maine in adopting a zero-tolerance rule, though other states have set limits more protective than Virginia’s. 

Maine is a standout in another way: it’s the only state that has created a program to help farmers deal with land contamination, including buying out farms that are too contaminated to be used to produce food for either humans or livestock. 

Without a program like that, landowners may have little incentive to find out what’s in the “free” fertilizer being spread across their fields. Small farmers especially are under tremendous economic pressure, and may not easily be able to afford alternatives. 

The problem is that PFAS are called “forever” chemicals because they don’t break down in the environment. Years of applying contaminated sludge can result in levels of contamination high enough to destroy a farmer’s livelihood, as has happened in Michigan as well as Maine. David Sligh, water program director at Wild Virginia, told me in an email that he thinks this could happen in Virginia as well. 

“One real fear I have, among many, is that some farmers will eventually bear a big cost in loss of their land values, water supplies, etc., after they’ve been sold on this practice for so many years,” he wrote. 

While the Virginia response relies just on testing for now, the new legislation also calls for DEQ to convene a work group to study ways to reduce PFAS in sewage sludge. 

Assisting that effort will be SB 138 from Sen. Jeremy McPike, D-Prince William, and HB 938 from Del. Nadarius Clark, D-Suffolk, under which every publicly-owned wastewater treatment plant will have to require industrial users to test for PFAS and report the results to DEQ.  

One other piece of legislation is also relevant. Virginia law already allows localities to adopt ordinances providing for testing and monitoring the land application of sewage sludge. HB 1072 from Del. Amy Laufer, D-Albermarle, makes it explicit that this authority includes testing for PFAS. It does not, however, require any kind of monitoring. Sligh told me, however, that Laufer’s bill is “definitely useful,” and he hopes localities will begin taking advantage of it.

Originally published in the Virginia Mercury on April 8, 2026.

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Is sewage sludge laced with ‘forever chemicals’ contaminating Va. farmland?

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It’s out of sight and out of mind, and it might just be killing people.

For decades, American factories have been sending their wastewater to municipal sewage treatment plants across the country, which handle it along with the effluent from other industries, homes and businesses. At the other end of the process, the separated and dried-out solids are often delivered to farmers as free fertilizer. The land application of this “sewage sludge” has long been encouraged by environmental regulators as a way to deal with what would otherwise be a vexing waste disposal problem. 

Yet not all of that wastewater, or the sludge that becomes fertilizer, is benign. An increasing number of industries discharge effluent laced with toxic per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS), which most treatment plants aren’t equipped to remove. PFAS are notoriously long-lasting, so much so that they are nicknamed “forever chemicals.” And now some states are finding that PFAS-laced sewage sludge is contaminating farmland and poisoning consumers. 

PFAS are a relatively new class of synthetic chemical, emerging commercially in the 1950s to find their way into a wide range of useful products, including non-stick pans (most notoriouslyTeflon), waterproof clothing, stain-resistant fabrics and firefighting chemicals. Unfortunately, exposure to PFAS has been shown to cause an almost equally-wide range of environmental and human health harms, including cancer, kidney disease, thyroid disease, reproductive problems and obesity. 

After years of foot-dragging, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency finally took action against two early types of PFAS that had already fallen out of use, setting drinking water standards for those and a few others. At the same time, however, chemical companies have been turning out literally thousands of new iterations that have been little studied and remain largely unregulated. PFAS have become so ubiquitous in the environment that scientists estimate 98% of Americans — and even some newborns — have detectable levels in their blood.  

In recent years, public health advocates have started to worry that PFAS may also be entering our food supply via the sewage sludge applied to farmland. According to the New York Times, five states – Texas, Michigan, New York, Maine and Tennessee – have detected PFAS on farmland treated with sewage sludge, sometimes in high levels. Crops grown in contaminated soil absorb the chemicals and pass them up the food chain. 

In Maine and Michigan, officials shut down farms after finding high concentrations of PFAS in the soil and in the meat of grazing animals. Maine officials found contamination on 56 farms and in 23% of more than 1,500 groundwater samples taken from farms and residences. 

In 2022, Maine banned the use of sewage sludge on agricultural land and prohibited most uses of PFAS in consumer products starting in 2030. The state is now working with affected farmers to compensate them or find alternative uses for contaminated land. Officials note that the testing programs are just beginning and fear that they may be seeing only the tip of the iceberg. 

The New York Times did not include Virginia among the states known to have PFAS-contaminated farmland. That’s not because we don’t have a problem. Rather, it’s because the Virginia Department of Environmental Quality (DEQ), which issues permits to municipal wastewater treatment plants, doesn’t require sludge to be tested.  

What little we do know is cause for concern. The conservation group Wild Virginia analyzed data submitted to DEQ in 2022 by a small number of drinking water and wastewater treatment plants that voluntarily tested their effluent. Limited and incomplete as it was, the information revealed that 20 of the 21 wastewater treatment plants that tested for PFAS found significant concentrations in their effluent. Only 8 of the plants also tested their sludge, but all 8 reported significant concentrations of PFAS. 

I talked by phone with David Sligh, Wild Virginia’s conservation director and a former DEQ employee, who told me the group plans to publish a report on this problem in the coming week. DEQ, he said, has the authority to regulate PFAS in treatment plants’ effluent and sludge and should be doing so to protect the public. His group has joined other members of the Virginia Conservation Network in calling on DEQ “to place the responsibility and cost of cleaning up PFAS on the industries that use and manufacture PFAS by requiring PFAS disclosure, monitoring, and limits in pollution discharge permits.”

DEQ, however, seems to be in no hurry. Neil Zahradka, manager of the land applications program at DEQ, wrote in an email to Tyla Matteson, a Sierra Club volunteer who works on sewage sludge issues, “To date, DEQ has relied upon the EPA biennial reviews to determine if additional regulation of biosolids is necessary beyond that contained in current permits, and no additional limits or criteria for PFAS have been set. … [A]ccording to the EPA PFAS Strategic Roadmap, they plan to complete the risk assessment for PFAS in biosolids this year.  We do plan to update the DEQ biosolids fact sheet once we have additional substantive information to offer landowners.”

Waiting for EPA to act first is convenient, but it does a grave disservice to Virginians. EPA itself has stalled for so long that Potomac Riverkeeper, Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER) and other groups finally sued the agency this year for its failure to regulate PFAS in sewage sludge used as fertilizer. According to PEER, EPA identified 10 different types of PFAS among some 250 pollutants contaminating sewage sludge, yet insists it is only obligated to identify the toxics in sewage sludge, not do anything about it.  

I suspect EPA and DEQ’s hesitance is due to the fear of what they would find in any extensive testing program. If testing confirmed widespread contamination in sewage sludge, DEQ would – one hopes – feel obligated to stop the practice of spreading it across the farms that produce our food. After all, if you identify a poison in your product, the answer is probably not to spread it among as many people as possible. 

Annoying as it would be for DEQ, industry and even farmers to learn the truth, though, the alternative is worse. PFAS can be removed, either in the wastewater treatment process or, ideally, before it leaves its industrial source. Not testing and treating means needlessly exposing farmers, their families and their animals – and ultimately all the rest of us – to chemicals that have no safe level of exposure. 

Given what we know about the harms PFAS causes, DEQ’s inaction is inexcusable. If Maine can tackle this threat to its land and people, surely Virginia can do it as well. We should expect no less.

This article was originally published in the Virginia Mercury on September 26, 2024.