Vermont Legislature SmartTranscripts:

[Matt Chapman, Director, Waste Management & Prevention Division (Vermont DEC)]: Prevention Division. Okay.

[Rep. David Durfee (Chair)]: All right, we're live.

[Rep. John O'Brien (Member)]: And that's still within DEC?

[Matt Chapman, Director, Waste Management & Prevention Division (Vermont DEC)]: It is. So the Waste Management Prevention Division is the I'm not in here very often, so let me just go ahead and step back and tell you a little bit about who I am and what we do. So I'm in the Waste Management Prevention Division. We deal with solid waste, so hazardous waste, contaminated sites. So I deal with things like PFAS in Bennington or PFAS in other parts of the state. We deal with biosolids, so that may be a topic we want to touch in on, and then underground and above ground storage tanks. So those are sort of the issues. Basically toxic and hazardous chemicals in sort of their use and operation in the environment or how we store and manage the waste products from them.

[Unidentified Member (Orleans–Coventry area)]: You deal with food waste and compost and Oh, food you need to spend a few up few days right here with us.

[Matt Chapman, Director, Waste Management & Prevention Division (Vermont DEC)]: You know, I would be more than happy to. Let me I am, of course, excuse for not a Zoom user, so I've got to remind myself every time I do this how to share my screen, so

[Rep. David Durfee (Chair)]: It's There go.

[Matt Chapman, Director, Waste Management & Prevention Division (Vermont DEC)]: I got it. And then let me go ahead and start. So I am gonna go quickly through this. This may be a little repetitive from when Mike gave his testimony. So And I will share this document. The agency is sort of the lead throughout state government on how PFAS gets managed. And one of the things that we've done is developed what we call the Vermont PFAS Roadmap. I'll share a copy with you. It's a fairly easy to read document, but at its core, it's the four things that you see on the screen. Reducing PFAS in sort of consumer products or industrial uses. So we've worked with the agency, or excuse me, the Department of Health and the Attorney General's Office on product bans, and we could talk a little bit about what's been banned and how that's working. We also operate a pretreatment program. So we work with sort of heavy industry that uses chemicals in their manufacturing process, looks what's coming out sort of the back end and work with them on either chemical substitution or treatment and management of that material before it gets out into the environment. And PFAS is sort of a key area that we work on there. Identifying sources of PFAS. So we'll talk through a little bit like the major media, so groundwater, surface water, and waste materials, what we're looking at and where the potential issues are, how we protect Vermonters, and then frankly, trying to encourage the federal government to have a larger leadership role in trying to phase PFAS out of the numerous things that PFAS has used in and coming up with better substitutes and a better regulatory regime because states can lead on these things, but we can't do it all ourselves.

[Rep. David Durfee (Chair)]: John? I just wondered, are they essentially PFAS salespeople out there?

[Rep. John O'Brien (Member)]: I mean, it's interesting how in that sort of scientific world, here's a problem in a lab and we're like, okay, like, HDPE, it's like, wow, we should really use PFAS ions here because it gets job done.

[Unidentified Member (Orleans–Coventry area)]: So

[Matt Chapman, Director, Waste Management & Prevention Division (Vermont DEC)]: PFAS were developed a long time ago. Depending on where you want to look, it's anywhere from the 30s to the 50s. They started becoming in much more common use in the 50s. My understanding, and I certainly don't often work with chemical manufacturers, normally people are looking at like, I need a chemical product that can do these functions in the industrial process that I'm having, and then the chemical manufacturer sort of manufactures that product. There's not like sort of a I want PFAS or there are occasionally I don't want PFAS in this product, and more and more that's the case. And again, when we're talking about PFAS, and maybe it's good to take just like one half of one step back. When we say PFAS, there are currently five or six PFAS that we regulate. So we have numeric standards that we regulate those. There are about 40 PFAS that we can test for. So the existing EPA testing methodologies allow us to sort of quantitatively pick up those, and I should say in drinking water or surface water. It gets a lot harder once you move out of sort of the water medium to test for PFAS, and then there are, depending on who you want to talk to, somewhere in the range of 40,000 PFAS out in commercial products, right? So in commerce. Some of those are very boutique and they're only used by in a very sort of limited way. You know, I've seen industry say there's more like 16,000 that are out and regularly in use, but it's a lot. There are a lot of different chemical formulations that are out there and in use. So, like I said, I'm really going to focus on three areas: drinking water, surface water, and soil amendments. And in soil amendments, I'm just going to talk a little bit about biosolids, digestate, compost, and indoors. So drinking water is frankly the area that we've been involved in the most and the longest. We actually have numeric standards adopted for the management of drinking water, both in groundwater and in so portable water supplies and then public water supplies. You see the numbers there. There's basically these are the twenty twenty four EPA MCL numbers, maximum contaminant levels. So these are the health values that that EPA came up with. And some of them, frankly, aren't health values. They're practical what what we can practically get down to from a quantitative level for regulatory purposes. In terms of measuring? In terms of measuring, yes.

[Unidentified Member (Orleans–Coventry area)]: Thank you, Chitt. Is there so I know you've tested water extensively down in Bennington, Dallas.

[Matt Chapman, Director, Waste Management & Prevention Division (Vermont DEC)]: Yes, sir.

[Unidentified Member (Orleans–Coventry area)]: What about those of us that may be in line of sight of the Coventry Landfill and have a deep well? Can we have our wells tested somehow, some way? So,

[Matt Chapman, Director, Waste Management & Prevention Division (Vermont DEC)]: let's sort of like break, sort of unwind a little bit. So, is not an isolated incident, but it's a good illustration of an industrial process that used PFAS in a manufacturing process that had an airborne emission. That airborne emission basically cast the PFAS in a much broader area than with what we would call sort of traditional point sources. And I'll just put Coventry sort of in there. You know, there are some PFAS issues right around Coventry. We think they're primarily from the Old Nadu landfill that's there from back when Nadu ran the landfill. We have enough wells out there that we feel pretty confident that all of that contamination is on-site, so it's confined. So we would certainly support, in other words, help you understand data that you want to collect yourself. And we can tell you where to do sampling and how to do the sampling. And we're certainly working on trying to build additional capacity in the state with the health lab and others so that it's easier for people to test for PFAS. But unless we think there is a contaminant source that's impacting your well, we typically won't have the state pay for that. Now having said that, and I flip forward a little quickly just to show you, so this is sort of the private versus public water supplies. So we, about 60% of Vermonters get their water through public water supplies, about 40 get it through private. This shows you a little bit we have about 3% of our systems have exceeded, and I haven't recalculated this since the standards have changed, but 3% of the systems have exceeded our prior MCL, and about 15% of the systems have some detectable level of PFAS in them in the public water supply realm. For private water supplies, Vermont did a randomized sample of private water supply wells to try and get a better understanding of what's out there. And this basically shows you the results. So about 2% of the wells that we tested exceed the 20 part per trillion, our prior MCL. About 4% exceed the current standard, and about 23% have some detectable level of PFAS in them. And I'm going to talk a little bit more as we go through here about what we think is going on. But I would say from my perspective, you really don't ever want any PFAS in your drinking water supply. No one really it's a man made chemical. People don't want to see it there. I think that we set regulatory standards to spur state action and then we work with people to try and do do what can be done to reduce the levels as low as we can possibly get them beyond that.

[Unidentified Member (Orleans–Coventry area)]: The reason I asked Matt Yeah. Is I could see your trash for one in the garbage truck from my house. Understood. Understood. I'm right above South Bay Okay. With a 250 foot deep well. For my house, I'm below the bottom of South Bay in my well.

[Matt Chapman, Director, Waste Management & Prevention Division (Vermont DEC)]: I mean, I'm happy to talk with folks back at the office. I mean, sense is

[Unidentified Member (Orleans–Coventry area)]: I don't want to pay it for the test.

[Matt Chapman, Director, Waste Management & Prevention Division (Vermont DEC)]: We can certainly, I mean, to be clear, we could certainly hope that happen. We have, and I don't have them with me, but we have all the resources about where to test, who to call the test. We can help people, including yourself, get a test taken so that you have data and you know what's in your well. So we can absolutely help with that. Okay.

[Unidentified Member (Orleans–Coventry area)]: Hopefully nothing's in my well.

[Matt Chapman, Director, Waste Management & Prevention Division (Vermont DEC)]: I hope nothing's in your well too.

[Unidentified Member (Orleans–Coventry area)]: I'm feeling fine.

[Matt Chapman, Director, Waste Management & Prevention Division (Vermont DEC)]: Transitioning away from groundwater and into surface water and focusing primarily on publicly owned treatment work, sort of municipal wastewater treatment facilities. So the state of Vermont, again, we've basically tested every wastewater treatment facility in the state of Vermont for at least, I think, four quarters at this point. And every wastewater treatment facility has detectable levels of PFAS in it. There is no wastewater treatment facility that does not have PFAS. And then you see the averages of those, it's 26 parts per trillion going into the wastewater treatment facility and 68 parts per trillion coming out. And it's like, well, why is that? To some degree, we think there are some processes that are going on that are basically taking PFAS we can't see and turning them into PFAS that we can't see. So it's basically what we call terminal products. So you're taking things that are PFAS that are in that group of 40,000 and turning them into the 40,000 that we can see.

[Unidentified Member]: Does that affluent being the solids and the liquids?

[Matt Chapman, Director, Waste Management & Prevention Division (Vermont DEC)]: We'll get to the solids. This is the effluent. When we talk about effluent, we're talking about the liquid being discharged from the wastewater treatment facility. And then we'll talk about the biosolids, which is the solid component of the material.

[Unidentified Member]: That outputted to the river?

[Matt Chapman, Director, Waste Management & Prevention Division (Vermont DEC)]: It's going to the river, to the lake, to receiving water that the wastewater treatment facility discharges into. And I should say these numbers are similar or lower than what you would see in household septic, domestic septic. So it's the same. We're seeing the same sorts of things, whether it's wastewater treatment facilities or it's septic. Just sort of jumping ahead, the source is us. It's the clothes you wash, the cleaners you use, the rugs in your house, the other things that are basically getting discharged ultimately to your septic system or your wastewater system, and it ends up getting into that, which is again why the first thing on our list of things to do is to get PFAS out, phase it out of as many products and product classes as we possibly can.

[Rep. John O'Brien (Member)]: Matt, just quickly, we haven't actually talked about this, but we've worked a lot in this committee on baby food and infant formula this time with heavy toxic metals. Are PFAS more dangerous for children and babies? Or is it like all of us, like Richard as well, it's dangerous to him?

[Matt Chapman, Director, Waste Management & Prevention Division (Vermont DEC)]: I mean, so generally speaking, as a general rule, guess, so I'm not the Department of Health and try not to play one in committee, but I mean, area when we were setting the PFAS standards that were primarily or one of the target groups is pregnant mothers and nursing mothers, so the youngest age group that we're talking about. And again, part of that is water consumption versus body right? Because basically your intake is much higher based on your body weight. So the answer is that's an area that we're definitely concerned about. PFAS aren't good for anybody. So these risks are risks that exist for the typical eighty kilogram man, as well as sort of smaller at risk populations.

[Unidentified Member]: Okay, welcome. So

[Matt Chapman, Director, Waste Management & Prevention Division (Vermont DEC)]: basically we went, we sort of did the easy work, which is testing at the influence and effluent of every POTW. We actually are doing a phase two on this, which is we've selected a number of wastewater treatment facilities and we're actually going into the collection network and seeing whether there are specific industrial sources that are driving higher PFAS numbers in certain community systems. We've done this already sort of pre existing the work that's going on because this work is actually the sewer sampling is going on right now. We've done that before and it basically showed that most of the mass of PFAS that is going into these systems is coming from residential areas. It's surprisingly less industrial. I mean, we will see hotspots, but yeah, it not industrial sources that are driving the PFAS loading. Alright, so everybody's favorite topic biosolids. Biosolids are the solid component. So you've got the effluent that's discharged, then you have the solid component from wastewater treatment facility.

[Rep. David Durfee (Chair)]: Matt, sorry, just to go back. Yeah, absolutely. Before we leave effluent altogether, whatever is coming out in the effluent, 68 parts per trillion on average, that's just going out into the world. Not filtered any further.

[Matt Chapman, Director, Waste Management & Prevention Division (Vermont DEC)]: Is not treatment that is going on at the wastewater treatment facility for PFAS at this time. And I should add, there is not a surface water standard for PFAS in Vermont or federally today. So that's one of the areas where there's not a regulatory control on wastewater treatment facilities. People think the drinking water standard and sometimes superimpose it on surface water. It's not a good thing to do, mainly only because drinking water assumes you're drinking it every day at a certain quantity over your life. There's much less ingestion of surface water. And so it's actually more often driven by ecological factors. How does it affect the fish? How does it affect different macroinvertebrates? The other things in the environment that PFAS might adversely affect. Alright, biosolids. You know, I think we started our biosolids journey in like 2019. So almost ten years ago at this point. And when we started, there were 30 sites, 14 permits. Not to get into it, fields are permitted under a single permit. When we started, there were 14. Today, there's like four biosolids sites. We basically required everyone to have compliance monitoring at a down gradient well that we were basically using to monitor PVOS compliance. We found that 22% the sites had a well that tested above standard, and at that point, we put them basically on a much more in-depth sampling regimen and manage them much closer. A lot of those facilities ended up deciding they didn't want to go forward. We also then tested at these either farms or other sites that were land applying all of the private drinking water supplies in and around, and we didn't find any impact. So to the extent that things were happening there, it was very localized and for the most part on-site or right off-site. As a result of that, we have adopted in 2024 what we call the interim strategy for management of biosolids. Now, primarily focuses on Class A biosolids or EQ biosolids, which are basically the biosolids that are managed without a permit, right? They've met pathogen reduction levels and have a nutrient value that is beneficial. So historically, before this, we were treating them as a product and not as a waste and letting them go kind of out into the universe. That's changed now. We've basically said that you need to test this material on a representative basis and show that the material that's going to be applied meets background soil values for PFAS. So basically, hold the concentration in your biosolids to what you would see in background soil levels, which is in about it varies depending on what we're talking about about three parts per billion. Per So that and to be clear, that's background levels and it's not just in Vermont. So we were one of the first states to do a background soil study, but New Hampshire, New York, and Massachusetts have all done background, ambient soil level testing where there's no known contaminant source. And we're all pretty much in the same range, so we feel like that's likely. It's likely the concentrations that are from either very localized sources, like from were from aerial deposition globally or a combination of the two.

[Rep. John O'Brien (Member)]: Just quickly, I thought about this either. Have your colleagues at FPR looked into like do our forests now, are they taking up T fossils that's moving in the air and the water?

[Matt Chapman, Director, Waste Management & Prevention Division (Vermont DEC)]: So the plant uptake pathway generally is not one that I am much an expert on, and it's not as well defined, in my opinion, as some of the other pathways. Think I know Steve is coming in. I don't know whether Pam is coming in tomorrow, but if Pam is looking much more at the plant uptake sort of pathway, and she's a good person to have a conversation about that with. So we basically are holding people to the background. We're also basically requiring siding restrictions on where you use Class A biosolids. So basically, you need to use it in an area where there's seasonal high groundwater that you're basically, we have siding requirements on seasonal high groundwater and drinking water supplies. And then we also are requiring the location of where it was applied, the amount it was applied and sort of a description of what's going on. So it's basically there's no such thing as an unregulated some of it anymore going forward. It's it's weird. I I I shouldn't say that. We we have some de minimis non regulatory. I can't remember exactly. I think it might be 50 cubic yards, but anything more than that, you need to report to the agency on what's going on. And I guess just before, I think our It's not necessarily a goal, but I think it's been the effect and we certainly have encouraged it, is moving away from the use of this material in an agricultural setting and moving towards its use as a manufactured topsoil in sort of more institutional or commercial or construction projects. So if a road is going in and they need to re vegetate and need topsoil to do it rather than scraping the native loam off nearby farms using a manufactured topsoil, I think we think it has a benefit from that perspective. We are not encouraging, though not prohibiting either, agricultural application.

[Unidentified Member]: This is from earlier, but the background bubble that you mentioned. Yes. That's

[Unidentified Member (Orleans–Coventry area)]: getting generated possibly from rainwater as well.

[Matt Chapman, Director, Waste Management & Prevention Division (Vermont DEC)]: It, so it could be localized sources. So it could be frankly from chemical manufacturing plants in Ohio or North Carolina. So there's a wide number of things that but yes, ultimately being deposited by rainwater onto the soils.

[Unidentified Member]: No one conversation stopped happening, but I remember as

[Unidentified Member (Orleans–Coventry area)]: a childhood learning about acid rain.

[Matt Chapman, Director, Waste Management & Prevention Division (Vermont DEC)]: It's a similar concept. PFAS is interesting. Does had never so in 2016, when I first started dealing with PFAS, we It was rare or non existent that we dealt with a contaminant that would deposit through aerial deposition and cause groundwater problems like we see with PFAS. It's we hadn't seen it. It is in some ways incredibly problematic and unique in that way. There are probably my staff are probably cringing and there's probably some other contaminant that it's equally can do, it has these properties, yeah, it's a real problem contaminant.

[Unidentified Member (Orleans–Coventry area)]: Have you has any testing been done on the old sludge receiving sites? Like, you know, we talked about common tree, you have the landfill, you have the old landfill down below, up above that land adjacent to

[Matt Chapman, Director, Waste Management & Prevention Division (Vermont DEC)]: the landfill received sludge for years and years and years and years? So I think the sludge receiving sites you're talking about have been tested just because I think they might have even still been in use when our program first started. Don't quote me on that, but we have all the data. You'll see there are blue links in here. I tried to link through to the reports and other things. So if you have an interest in diving in deeper, you can click on these when I send it to your committee assistant and try and dive deeper into some of these areas. And I'm happy to answer questions either back in committee or just offline. But we have not, I mean, the ones that are sort of the recent past that have recently been in use, we have some testing data on for the most part. We know there are some that have been out of use for a longer period of time, or maybe the wells have been knocked over because they've been plowing the field or what have you, and those we may not have data on. Though, but I mean, the ones up in the Coventry area, there's a lot of there are a lot of wells up there. All right, so I think this is where we're leaving soil amendments, but

[Unidentified Member (Orleans–Coventry area)]: we

[Matt Chapman, Director, Waste Management & Prevention Division (Vermont DEC)]: recently so several years ago, we ended up applying for and receiving a EPA Pollution Provision Grant that allowed us to basically go out and test the packaging slurries. So like the material that comes out of a depackager from organics management digestate both from a number of different anaerobic digesters, compost, and then as a part of that, a lot of the manures that were going in there. I would just say I was surprised that we found BFOS in a lot of different manures, chicken cow and horse manures, silage, wood chips, and a bunch of other compost inputs at low levels, but it was present in the tens to below 100 parts per trillion, but it was there. And again, if you're interested, you can see some of the data that's there. It's a long report that is not written in plain language and necessarily the easiest to advance. Wood chips, so to John's question So of taking to I think the data is out there that there's plant uptake. I will just say I don't understand that pathway as well. I mean, it's more complicated and I think it's very, it's concentration location dependent and it's actually plant dependent and then you get even more complicated, like the stalk of a corn is fine, but the ears have it. I've heard things like that. So it gets, and again, Pam, I think she's been tied in a little bit more than I have. Maine has done a fair amount of work with respect to plan uptake, and it's certainly an area of impact that I know is out there, but it's not my field, and I defer to my friends at the Agency of Agriculture on that. All right, this is probably small, but it gives you a little bit of a picture of what we've been up to in the product phase out perspective. We started in 2021 with sort of the highest priority products that we knew had PFAS in them and had a high potential of impacting people. So firefighting foam, we tried to make sure that firefighters had notice on the turnout gear. Stay tuned because we came back to turnout gear. Direct contact food packaging, that's actually some of the worst PFAS concentrations we've seen are in direct contact food packaging, and the reason is that your food doesn't stick to the packaging, right? So if you've got a hamburger from some fast food location that you want to be able to get out of the wrapper that it's in, there's often historically been PFAS in there. We've said that they can't intentionally add it to that food packaging anymore. So rugs, carpets, rugs and carpets are horrible. There's a lot of problems with rugs and carpets. Then lastly, ski wax. There are good alternatives at this point, but ski wax was a high concentration PFAS added product. And then we move to cosmetics. Again, cosmetics have high concentrations. Adult mattresses, apparel, so clothing, which that band starts next year with some exceptions. Artificial turf, cookware, and competency protection products, juvenile products, and then more broadly textiles, any textile, and that includes chairs, cushions. We're getting it out of everything at that point in 2027. And then you get into what we passed a couple years last year. So cleaning products, dental floss has PFAS in it, fluorine treated containers. And now we get to actually rather than just giving notice, we are banning it in firefighters or night gear and respirators as well. There's a distinction between the two. It's harder to get it out of the respirators, unfortunately.

[Rep. David Durfee (Chair)]: What's a fluorine treated container?

[Matt Chapman, Director, Waste Management & Prevention Division (Vermont DEC)]: So basically, it's a container, they're often plastic that at the inside of the container has been treated with fluorine to prevent, to increase the length of the life of the floor of the container and also to protect the normally it's a commercial chemical product that is inside the container. I mean, again, Pam and Steve can probably talk to you about this, but in so this is the only thing I will say about pesticides today. So a couple years ago, it was pretty well established and shown that there were pesticides inside fluorine treated containers where the container itself was contaminating the pesticide. And so, obviously that's a problem. There was a phase out or a prohibition at the federal level on that, but we also have a corresponding state

[Rep. David Durfee (Chair)]: prohibition. Maybe you don't know much about this, Matt, but was the list of products banned in 2021 data

[Matt Chapman, Director, Waste Management & Prevention Division (Vermont DEC)]: driven? Did those things rise to the top? Here are some obvious ways of getting into our water or to ourselves? I didn't include it and I'm happy to. There is a study that we required New England moist services of Vermont to do to basically analyze the inputs coming into the landfill to show which inputs had the highest concentrations of PFAS in them. And so they basically took a whole bunch of the things that were coming in and started frying and ground them up, and these were the sorts of And that played into our decision making process. I mean, knew things like Class B firefighting foam, we knew that that was a problem, and it's been shown to be a problem all throughout The United States. But the rest of the direct contact food packaging and rugs were up at the top. The other thing that was up at the top was textiles, functionally like they call them bulky materials, but it's furniture that's been treated with PFAS to prevent things from staining or sticking on it. Which is again, stepping back, that's really in a lot of these what PFAS is used for. It's the stain guard, it's the water resistance. Those are some of the functions and properties it has. And so that's why it's used in a lot of these different applications. It also prevents grease or other things from sticking and staining the material. So that's the end of my presentation. I mean, I'm happy to continue on if folks have other questions or areas of interest or things you want to dive into. I am more than happy. So our interest in this,

[Unidentified Member (Orleans–Coventry area)]: the

[Rep. David Durfee (Chair)]: PFAS question or topic is through application of pesticides or pesticides that have been in a package that might be treated with PFAS. And to the extent that there's possible groundwater contamination. So there's obviously, if you're treating something that you're going to eat with a pesticide, there's a possibility for ingestion showing food. But in addition to that, if it rains on a field that's been treated somehow with a PFAS pesticide, does that end up in groundwater and ultimately in somebody's drinking water?

[Matt Chapman, Director, Waste Management & Prevention Division (Vermont DEC)]: So I think it's probably good to answer that question in the context of the whole sort of agricultural regulatory sort of system that exists for how economic poisons are regulated by the agency of agriculture. So we, if it is an economic poison that is used for in accordance with the manufacturer's label, it is not subject to my jurisdiction as the Department of Environmental Conservation. Like, I don't like, if you contaminated groundwater on a farm because you used the pesticide the way you were supposed to use the pesticide, That's something that ag manages, not DEC. If there is an illegal disposal operation, in other words, you have 25 drums of pesticide that you left in a barn that degraded and is an environmental issue, that is my issue, right? You didn't use it in accordance with the manufacturer's instruction. It's a waste management related issue. Ag and us, we work collaboratively on trying to deal with those those types of problems when those problems come up.

[Rep. John O'Brien (Member)]: John? I was just thinking about all the firefighting things. Is it from what I know about if a mobile home burns up, it's not a place you would wanna be as far as toxic scope. When PFAS are ignited or burn at high temperatures, do they get worse? So

[Matt Chapman, Director, Waste Management & Prevention Division (Vermont DEC)]: PFAS are heat resistant. I'm not going to say they're not, and they're water resistant. It's part of the reason they're used in firefighting foams and in firefighter turnout gear. In the foams, they actually do a good job of basically suppressing a fire and smothering it. In the turnout gear, it's mainly for the breathability and water resistance of the material that they're using.

[Rep. John O'Brien (Member)]: I was thinking about rubs.

[Matt Chapman, Director, Waste Management & Prevention Division (Vermont DEC)]: I mean, burning it, you know, they're burning what Yeah. I mean, I think that they are probably going to become aerosolized and airborne at that point. And they are going to get up and I don't know that I've actually seen any study that looks at during like a common house fire what you're talking about as far as air emissions from PFAS, but I have to imagine, you know, for PFAS to be thermally destroyed, and I put air quotes around that because I'm not actually sure that they are destroyed, you need to get up to temperatures around 2,200 Fahrenheit. So cement kiln hazardous waste incinerator levels of temperatures. The reason I put quotes around it is because there was at least some experimental work going on by EPA down in North Carolina that showed that in a lab setting when they basically heated it up that hot or hotter, that it was still there, but it was breaking down into the three chain, two chain, smaller things that we couldn't see, but they were still what people might define as being PFAS.

[Unidentified Member (Orleans–Coventry area)]: Sure. Yes. I'm glad you mentioned three chain, two chain. A lot of the some reading I've done in the agricultural economic poisons. Sure. They call them single chains?

[Matt Chapman, Director, Waste Management & Prevention Division (Vermont DEC)]: I'm gonna let, so Pam's the agronomic toxicologist, and she can probably walk you through how things are used in an ag setting and the chemistry around it better than I can. I'm a lawyer, so I don't even try to play some of the chemistry portion of things, So I don't know about a one. I haven't heard of a one chain. Normally, I'm not saying that it's not out there, but I haven't heard of that. Normally when in the industrial chemistry, so you're looking at eight chain, six chain, and four chain PFAS compounds and that's how many carbons are linked to a fluorine atom when we're talking about that. Like I said, there's a wide, wide, wide range of chemistries that are out there that people use. That's right.

[Unidentified Member (Orleans–Coventry area)]: So in our bill, h nine eleven, part of it says in containers, our Boston packaging products packaging, that will be going away in 2027 unless it's changed. So

[Matt Chapman, Director, Waste Management & Prevention Division (Vermont DEC)]: PFAS and fluorinated containers, right? So it's sort of bifurcated into two steps. Step one is if you're taking a product that is banned and storing it in a fluorinated container, you can't do that as of 2027. So think if I have a cosmetic and I'm basically putting it, I can't put it in a fluorinated container as of next year. It's 2030 for all other commercial chemical products that would cover pesticides at that point, but it would also cover any other industrial process taking place in the state of

[Rep. David Durfee (Chair)]: Right? We've run out

[Matt Chapman, Director, Waste Management & Prevention Division (Vermont DEC)]: Easy of stuff.

[Rep. David Durfee (Chair)]: I did wanna just say that well, first of all, you know, give credit to your colleagues who have been on the ground in Bennington for a decade dealing with this issue. Richard and Richard's partner in crime retired at some point because Yeah, John. Yes. And Mollie and more recently, but just so responsive, very helpful. I hear that all the time from people, how helpful they've been throughout the years. And testing, my understanding, you had earlier put up a figure of 500 or so random tests that were done.

[Matt Chapman, Director, Waste Management & Prevention Division (Vermont DEC)]: So those were tests done where we didn't know that there was a source of PFAS. I need to look, I didn't look before we came, but we're well over a thousand, I mean, we're probably over 2,000 tests of areas where we're trying to conduct an environmental investigation to figure out what's going on from a contaminant source.

[Rep. David Durfee (Chair)]: And one of those cases where there was a positive test result, it was in Chaffery, so I happened to know about it. Then you stepped up and began testing more widely.

[Matt Chapman, Director, Waste Management & Prevention Division (Vermont DEC)]: Oh, mean, I mean, to be really clear, the 500 random tests that we did, part of what stemmed us frankly getting engaged in Bennington again, as we started seeing, again, it was a random sort of test that would statistically randomize, but there happened to be two wells in relatively close proximity in sort of the Southeast ish part of Bennington, the town of Bennington, and we're like, well, wait a second, what's going on here? Like, we're seeing concentrations we didn't expect. And like, well, let's test more, right? Which is frankly, when we see things like that, let's expand the circle of what's going on. And it showed us that there's more of a problem than we thought there was when things ended in twenty seventeen, eighteen, when we sort of stopped the last round of.

[Unidentified Member (Orleans–Coventry area)]: Would you equate this to, like, radon? You know, people get home, get it, say, or you can hire someone to come in and test your house for radon, which is probably naturally occurring. Yep. And you can ventilate, mitigate it, but you know, I'm thinking of, you know, cherry dirt people, just do you have

[Rep. David Durfee (Chair)]: a deep well at your house? You know, we are on the town water. Yeah, You know,

[Unidentified Member (Orleans–Coventry area)]: you know, people in Coventry and and sorry for keep using Coventry over. Oh, that's interesting. It's right right in my front yard. Sure. You know, and people around other places in the state got down this. Mhmm. You know, the natural not want national guard and the fire Mhmm. There. Should I mean, is there a way people could like I said, I'm not can't imagine it's too too outrageously expensive to test your water from PFAS, but

[Matt Chapman, Director, Waste Management & Prevention Division (Vermont DEC)]: It's not cheap. I mean, so, you know, so I don't know where the tests are right now. It's in the 300 to $500 range for PFAS test.

[Unidentified Member]: That's a couple 100 more than I thought

[Matt Chapman, Director, Waste Management & Prevention Division (Vermont DEC)]: it'd be. Right. I mean, generally speaking, that's high for an environmental test. They're also kind of hard to collect because if you're wearing your winter jacket, you might cross contaminate it. If you don't use the right container, some of the containers are plastic and they have PFAS in them, sometimes the tubing has PFAS in them. So you have to be careful with how you do the collection and how you manage the sample, but you can do it. And there are, I think it's more complicated and in some ways much more difficult than radon. I mean, you're looking at just ventilation at that point. You're looking at, the main concern that we have from PFAS is ingestion and specifically drinking water ingestion. The good news is that installing a carbon treatment system will address that issue, but that's a long term and not inexpensive sort of solution for people.

[Rep. David Durfee (Chair)]: Well, you for coming in. Appreciate it. Oh, you're welcome.

[Matt Chapman, Director, Waste Management & Prevention Division (Vermont DEC)]: And if questions arise, I'm happy to come back. Okay, all right.

[Rep. John O'Brien (Member)]: And those tests are just looking at those what four or five six things?

[Matt Chapman, Director, Waste Management & Prevention Division (Vermont DEC)]: No. I mean, so you can do a test and you can get up to 40 compounds. Now you may come back and say, well I've got like a 25 of this particular contaminant. I'll look at you and say, well it's not regulatory, so something's going on but you don't have and to be clear, none of them are good for you. We just haven't said we don't have enough information on how these chemicals I shouldn't say that. We haven't come to a point where we've established sort of toxicological environmental standards. It's a process we go through to do that and we aren't there for anything but the five or six that we have. One of the works of DCBs.

[Unidentified Member (Orleans–Coventry area)]: North Country High School, I'm not school board.

[Rep. David Durfee (Chair)]: I know you are, I know you are actually.

[Matt Chapman, Director, Waste Management & Prevention Division (Vermont DEC)]: I wouldn't really want either, and you know, I think I would say that it's easier for me to treat my drinking water than it is to stop breathing.

[Rep. David Durfee (Chair)]: Fair enough. Worse feeling paraquat. Yes, they're riskier than Paraquat. It's really depressing. Paraquat proceeds. We better wrap up. I'll let you drink it. Thank you.