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Several years ago, I made a movie called Dark Waters, which told the real-life story of a community in West Virginia poisoned by Pfas “forever chemicals”. DuPont – a chemical manufacturing plant – contaminated the local water supply, killing cows and wildlife, making its workers sick and exposing local residents to toxic chemicals. It was an environmental horror story.
It’s still happening across the country.
Pfas, or per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, aren’t just lingering in that community – they’re everywhere. In our air, soil, water and bodies. They’re called “forever chemicals” for a reason: they don’t break down, and once they’re in our bodies, they’re almost impossible to get rid of.
We now know that repeated ingestion of and exposure to Pfas have been linked to cancer, birth defects, developmental and reproductive disorders and weakened immune systems. Studies show they can cause kidney and testicular cancer in adults and interfere with childhood growth and behavior.
Yet, despite knowing the risks, the federal government – through the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) – has actually encouraged farmers to spread sewage sludge contaminated with Pfas across cropland and pastures (as the New York Times has reported in multiple stories). This sludge, a byproduct of wastewater treatment, seeps into the soil, contaminates groundwater and ends up in our food. And from there? It ends up in us.
Once that sewage sludge exists, it exists forever – “disposal” methods such as sending sludge to a landfill or burning it release even more dangerous chemicals into the air. We’re either poisoning our soil or polluting our lungs – there is no winning.
The problem is so severe that even the EPA, which once promoted these disposal methods, is now sounding the alarm. But sounding the alarm isn’t enough. We need action. We need regulations that put people’s health above corporate convenience. And we need them now, before forever chemicals cause even more damage – damage that can never be undone.
A national problem with local consequences
The year Dark Waters was released, 2019, many of us testified before Congress, urging lawmakers to take action on Pfas contamination. At the time, my testimony focused on what had happened in West Virginia. But this isn’t just West Virginia’s story. It’s happening all over the country, and it’s affecting all of us. Every single person in America has elevated Pfas in their body. They accumulate there. There are explosions of Pfas-related diseases happening in our communities.
One example is Manchester, New Hampshire, where a wastewater treatment plant burns sewage sludge just steps from homes, an elementary school, a baseball field and the Merrimack River. It’s the only facility in the state with a sludge incinerator, and in 2018 alone, it burned more than 4,000 dry metric tons of it. That’s happening just two miles from neighborhoods already struggling with high levels of toxic air pollution.
Manchester isn’t an outlier. As of May 2023, there were 86 sewage sludge incineration facilities operating across the country, with 170 incineration units spread across 24 states and Puerto Rico. Most of them are concentrated in the eastern US, particularly in New York, Ohio and New Jersey.
This is our reality: we are burning toxic waste near where people live, work and go to school. And with every ton of sludge that goes up in smoke, we’re making the problem worse.
Solutions at the source
Some may frame incineration as a better solution to the disposal of sludge, compared with spreading that sludge over land. But that’s a false choice – and a dangerous one. In our interconnected world, you can’t just burn harmful chemicals and expect them to disappear. They don’t. They resurface elsewhere, often with even worse consequences.
The only real solution is to stop creating these chemicals in the first place. We need to reduce the manufacturing and use of Pfas entirely. This is the most economical way of dealing with this “forever chemical” class. That means ending industrial releases of Pfas into our air and water, eliminating their unnecessary presence in everyday products like food packaging, filtering them out of drinking water and cleaning up the contamination they’ve already left behind. If we stop Pfas at the source, fewer of these toxic substances will end up in wastewater treatment plants, where they currently pile up in sludge that gets spread on farmlands, burned in incinerators or dumped in landfills.
Despite overwhelming evidence of the health risks, the EPA has been slow to act. Right now, it has a critical opportunity.
Through a proposed Clean Water Act permit for Manchester, New Hampshire, the EPA can take meaningful steps to curb industrial Pfas pollution at its source – steps that could be replicated nationwide. The EPA’s own report confirms that reducing Pfas from industrial wastewater means less contamination in sludge. It has even recommended that Clean Water Act permits include best management practices, like phasing out Pfas products. Yet the current draft permit for Manchester, remarkably, contains no such requirement.
Clean Water Act permits protect our nation’s waters from toxic pollution. Renewing Manchester’s permit with stronger protections will curb PFAS entering the facility and their eventual release into the air we breathe and water we drink.
Dark Waters was meant to be a cautionary tale; instead, it has become the future we keep choosing, at the cost of our health, our environment, and the lives of our loved ones. The EPA has a chance to send a clear message: we can no longer allow industries to pump toxic chemicals into our communities. We need the agency to lead on PFAS reduction. And we need it to act now.
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Mark Ruffalo is an award-winning actor and environmental activist, known for his roles in Spotlight and the Avengers films, as well as his advocacy for clean water and renewable energy through organizations including The Solutions Project
