Lansing on Thursday became the first city in Michigan to send its PFAS-based fire-fighting foam to a hazardous waste landfill.
Stacks of five-gallon buckets, totaling 1,260 gallons and some dating back from at least decade ago, were carted to trucks operated by US Ecology. The company was the winning bidder of the $1.4 million contract to remove at least 34,000 gallons of the chemicals from hundreds of departments statewide.
The disposal effort was organized by Michigan Department of Environment, Great Lakes and Energy as part of its effort to identify and eliminate PFAS risks across the state.
Removing the foam from fire department shelves represents a next step in that work.
“We’re not just out there trying to identify and reduce exposures to contamination,” said Steve Sliver, who runs Michigan PFAS Action and Response Team. “We’re trying to prevent future contamination.”
The per- and poly-fluorinated compounds are found in industrial and consumer products, in addition to foam that is used to put out petroleum-based fires. The aqueous film-forming foam is known as AFFF.
The Class B version of AFFF was made for decades with PFOA and PFOS, two of several thousands of types of PFAS. The uses of both were discontinued in the U.S. in 2015 after years of escalating health concerns.
Use of fire-fighting foam typically results in it absorbing into soil or moving into storm sewers, where it can get into the environment and drinking water supplies. At least 1.9 Michigan residents are drinking some water containing PFAS, thousands of them at high enough levels to warrant health concerns and replacement water supplies.
Dozens of Michigan communities are dealing with PFAS contamination, with several due to AFFF use. They include Oscoda, Grayling, Marquette and Mt. Clemens.
A state inventory of AFFF with PFOS or PFOA was still on shelves of about half of Michigan’s fire departments, or 336 of the 762 participating in surveys.
By March 2020, that AFFF will be collected for disposal.
The collected chemicals will be solidified with cement kiln dust and sent to US Ecology’s facility in Grand Ville, Idaho. One reason it will go there, officials said, is because that state gets less rainfall, thus further minimizing risks that it will be washed into the environment.
Debbie Oleksienko, regional manager for US Ecology, said the collected AFFF will be stored in Detroit until there’s enough to ship to Idaho.
Michigan, she added, is US Ecology’s first state customer to dispose of AFFF at this scale.
Some fire departments switched earlier this year to fluorine-free foam, which remains in development among many chemical companies. One that has done it is Ann Arbor, which is sharing its story with other fire departments in the state. It’s finding that the new foam works as well as the old foam, city officials have said, but they’re using more of it.
Other replacement AFFF varieties still contain some unregulated forms of PFAS. While those foams may be marketed as environmentally sound, epidemiologists and toxicologists that study the chemicals warn that not enough is know about how they affect human health to consider them a safer alternative.
Among other initiatives related to AFFF, Michigan recently won a grant to study how much PFAS is in residents’ blood. A targeted group of fire fighters will participate in that biomonitoring study.
While many people in Michigan are drinking water that’s been tested for PFAS and know they face little to no risk, firefighters continue to work with the chemicals in both AFFF and their turnout gear.
According to the state, firefighters form “a subpopulation for which there is evidence of occupational PFAS exposure exceeding national averages.”
