In April, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency set the first drinking water standards for PFAS, the class of manufactured “forever chemicals” that pervade everyday products like clothing, cookware and fire-fighting foam. The new limits are well below current regulations in Wisconsin, where communities across the state are burdened with PFAS-contaminated groundwater.
Before the federal standards were issued, the podcast miniseries Public Trust explored Wisconsin’s response to PFAS — short for perfluoroalkyl and polyfluoroalkyl substances — from the perspective of the residents who have been directly impacted. In four episodes, listeners meet residents and community advocates across Campbell, Peshtigo and Marinette. A visit to the Lac Courte Oreilles reservation in northwest Wisconsin profiles a tribal-driven research project that tests and studies PFAS in harvestable goods like walleye, wild rice and maple sap. The podcast was produced by Wisconsin Sea Grant and Midwestern Environmental Advocates, or MEA, a nonprofit environmental law firm.
Exposure to certain kinds of PFAS has been linked to serious health issues, including cancer, liver damage, and high cholesterol. In infants and children, exposure has been associated with immune and developmental damage.
To learn more about the series, I spoke with Richelle Wilson, who hosted and co-produced the series. Wilson, a Madison-based radio and podcast producer, reported the project during a fellowship at MEA.
The conversation below is edited for length and clarity.
How did this project get started?
I was a graduate student at UW-Madison in the Center for the Humanities, and I received a research fellowship. For these fellowships, they place research fellows with community organizations that are doing good work. So in Madison, I was placed with Midwest Environmental Advocates. They're a nonprofit environmental law firm that is in Madison, but they do work all around the state of Wisconsin, helping communities — especially at the grassroots level — to fight environmental injustices.
When I was brought on with them, they knew that I was a media professional, and they were like, “Ooh, time to make a podcast!” We did a lot of talking about what that might look like, what kind of topic we might cover, and PFAS just kept resurfacing as this really important thing going on in the state. A lot of communities [are] dealing with PFAS contamination, but a lot of people don’t necessarily know exactly what it is or how it's affecting folks here. We partnered up with Wisconsin Sea Grant. And we just took it to the communities that we knew were suffering PFAS contamination — Peshtigo in northern Wisconsin and also French island in western Wisconsin, on the Mississippi.
So you just mentioned the towns that you visited over the course of your reporting. There are so many different sources of PFAS. Can you paint a picture of what sources were most relevant to the communities that you visited?
There are thousands of different kinds of PFAS. There's PFOA, there's PFOS — some of those you might have heard of in the news. These are manmade chemicals that go into a lot of plastic-based products. You might find them in waterproof things like boots, raincoats, makeup, food wrappers. On the industrial scale, though, a lot of the PFAS that we're finding in Wisconsin is coming from firefighting foam. That's basically foam that they're using, especially at airports, to fight fires. You're just spraying that foam all over and it's going to be seeping into the ground. So those were the main sources of PFAS that were contaminating wells in Peshtigo and in French Island. It was this firefighting foam.
Right. And bring people up to speed on the landscape of PFAS regulation. What standards are there and are there not in the state?
That is the main thing that I was trying to puzzle through this entire time. Fortunately, working with Midwest Environmental Advocates — they’re environmental lawyers, they know their stuff. But I think even they would tell you, this is a regulatory kind of patchwork, state by state. There's not a lot of federal regulations, or at least there weren't until more recently.
The way that it works in Wisconsin, there's three ways to regulate PFAS in water sources. So there’s surface water, and that's essentially your lakes, your rivers and things like that. There are regulations for those in the state. There is also municipal water, which is called drinking water. That's essentially a system that serves a city or a neighborhood — a utility — and that has regulations as well.
Then the third one is groundwater. And that's the water from the ground that is going to be filtering into private wells. There's a lot of Wisconsinites getting their water from private wells, I think the estimate is about two-thirds. That has no regulations on it. And that's been an ongoing debate, when it comes to the DNR and regulating PFAS in groundwater. We haven't seen that move forward in Wisconsin just yet.
So you worked on this project while you were a fellow at Midwest Environmental Advocates. Can you talk about the solutions that MEA is calling for?
So at Midwest Environmental Advocates, you know, they're lawyers and so they're seeking legal solutions, really to have strong regulations here in the state to protect people. When it comes to something like PFAS contamination, they want to hold polluters accountable.
They're especially invested in making sure that the Spills Law remains strong. That is a law here on the books in Wisconsin that basically holds polluters accountable to remediation and clean-up when they've been the source of pollution contamination. There's a bunch of legal challenges to the Spills Law in the state, especially as it relates to PFAS. Because PFAS is this big group of all kinds of chemicals. It's not just one pollutant. So there are a lot of legal challenges to just determining who's responsible when PFAS contamination is found in a community.
MEA is seeking to bolster the Spills Law, enforce that, and also looking to see those groundwater standards for PFAS at the state level. We're looking for those to be established so that when it's your private well that has been contaminated with PFAS, there are options for you.
Working on this project and doing all this reporting — did it change your perspective on water at all?
I kind of vacillated between being a little bit, you know, anxious and even fixated on PFAS. Like, it's everywhere. It's all over our environment. There's research showing that a lot of people already have some amount of it in their bloodstream and their bodies. Here in Madison, surrounded by water, it kind of feels like a horror movie. It's everywhere.
So there was this part of me that was like, “I need to get rid of all my nonstick cookware, and I need to comb through my house and find all these things that might have PFAS and get it out of my life.” Then there were other times when I just felt like I couldn't be bothered. Like, that's too exhausting.
I think that that is a common feeling that a lot of people have. They're nervous and anxious about it, and they want to do absolutely everything they can. But at the end of the day, you also have to live your life. Many of the people we talked to feel like this should be something that corporations and governments are taking care of — and not left to the individual to anxiously try to remove PFAS from their home. I also have to say that I really valued being able to drink my tap water. You'll hear in the first episode, it's me filling up that cup. I do it every morning, I drink from the tap. And that's an act of trust in local government.
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