States’ PFAS Controls Headed Toward Landfills, Wastewater Plants

States are likely to increase their regulation of landfills and wastewater treatment plants as testing programs find “forever chemicals” in those places, attorneys said Thursday.

The chemicals—called per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, or PFAS—end up in landfills and publicly owned treatment plants because they’re used in so many products.

It’s also because “landfills and wastewater treatment plants are aggregators of society’s waste,” said Louise Nelson Dyble, an associate in the San Francisco and Chicago offices of Troutman Pepper Hamilton Sanders LLP.

The result is that the chemicals end up in landfills; industrial effluent and landfill leachate ends up in wastewater treatment ...