Rise in PFAS Incineration Puts Spotlight on Air Pollution Risk

Less than a mile from one of the largest hazardous waste incinerators in the world, longtime activist Alonzo Spencer points to a wall of framed photos, recounting tales of his decades-long fight against a facility that researchers and local residents worry is spewing “forever chemicals” into the air.

In one photo, Spencer chats closely with actor Martin Sheen, who fought alongside Spencer in the 1990s against the construction of an incinerator by Heritage Thermal Services, known at the time as Waste Technologies Industries, or WTI. The incinerator sits less than three miles from downtown East Liverpool, Ohio, a small Appalachian town of 9,700 people at the intersection of three state borders. East Liverpool was designated an environmental justice community in 2005 for its proximity to heavy industry.

Spencer continued to fight for years against polluting industries in his town, but illness and a recent stroke have slowed him down. “I certainly am not as active as I was, you know. At my age I just can’t be active,” the 96-year-old Spencer said at his home in the East End neighborhood surrounding Heritage. “And I mean, the town itself feels like it’s dwindling.”

Concerns about the facility’s presence have risen in recent years because of its leading role in perfluoroalkyl and polyfluoroalkyl substance (PFAS) incineration, an appealing solution for public and private actors with caches of the chemicals, which have been dubbed “forever chemicals” since they don’t readily break down.

The volume of these wastes going to incinerators around the country is likely to continue increasing as water utilities build their capacity to remove PFAS, EPA’s Superfund investigations spur remediation, and states order cleanups and regulate PFAS in the air. So too will questions increase about how much PFAS escapes into the air.

Waste incineration “is the next industry type that EPA and everybody kind of recognizes is most likely to be generating PFAS pollution of some kind, whether it’s through the air or leaching water,” said John Gardella, who advises businesses and chairs CMBG3 Law, P.C.'s PFAS, Environmental, Risk Management & Consulting practice group. “I know the EPA is looking for data from that industry on this issue.”

PFAS in the air aren’t federally regulated, and research that could shed light on the risks of airborne emissions is plagued by a lack of methodology and data. This leaves environmental justice communities and other areas on the fence line of facilities like incinerators vulnerable to airborne PFAS exposure and blind to how that exposure may affect their health.

PFAS in air, water, and soil get into plants, fish, livestock, and people’s bodies. Federal health officials link some of the most commonly detected forms of the forever chemicals to health problems, including kidney and testicular cancer and a weakened immune system.

“I bought my house in 2011 for the sole purpose of teaching my grandkids how to plant a garden, and with WTI, I’ve never put a garden in to this day,” East Liverpool resident Ricardo Gonzalez said. “I don’t know what’s in the soil.”

Erin Haynes, an environmental health scientist and professor at the University of Kentucky, led a study published last year into soil concentrations in the East End, the neighborhood in the shadow of the Heritage incinerator. The research revealed that the soil is laden with PFAS: All 35 soil samples taken in 2021 had measurable amounts of PFAS.

While the study doesn’t prove incineration of PFAS-containing waste caused the contamination, the authors said their results are consistent with previous research that found PFAS in soil and water near the Norlite incinerator in Cohoes, N.Y. The data and public concerns eventually led the state to ban incineration of specialized fire suppressant containing PFAS in the city.

Set up in a small, windowless lab in the basement of Kent State University’s East Liverpool campus, Haynes and her team are back to fill in some of these gaps, this time comparing blood directly from East Liverpool residents living near Heritage Thermal Services with new soil samples from the area.

In addition to blood draws, study participants wear silicone bracelets that absorb what’s in their ambient air, which are then collected, cleaned, and analyzed.

“It at least asks a question and does something to address it,” Haynes said. “It takes one step forward in addressing ambient exposure.” She said she expects the latest study to be published within a year after receiving all of the results.

‘Playing Catch-Up’

Ohio has first-hand experience with PFAS air pollution. The state received $110 million in 2023 through a settlement with DuPont De Nemours, Inc.; Corteva, Inc., and Chemours Co. to resolve disputes over PFAS contamination.

Problems detailed in the state’s original complaint included the chemicals drifting into Ohio from a West Virginia factory once owned by E. I. du Pont de Nemours and Co. and now by Chemours. The factory’s chemicals floated with the prevailing winds contaminating an Ohio water utility’s drinking water wells.

States and scientists have known that factories and other facilities, like landfills, can release PFAS into the air, but those emissions haven’t been regulated or even monitored on a wide scale. Methods of analyzing any data have also been sparse; the EPA didn’t have validated methods to measure airborne PFAS for years.

That began to change in 2021, when EPA’s Office of Research and Development (ORD) released its first method to detect 50 semi-volatile PFAS in air emissions from stationary sources.

The agency updated that method this year based on information provided by companies and scientists that were already using it. The agency also released a second method that can measure 30 PFAS, including certain volatile ones, said EPA chemist Stephen Jackson during an Oct. 17 agency webinar on measuring PFAS air emissions. The agency is developing a third method to measure even more of these chemicals, he said.

The goal is to give PFAS manufacturers, companies, and state and tribal officials tools to track the chemicals that are made and used commercially, as well as those that are created during efforts to destroy them, Jackson said. Incineration and other technologies that aim to destroy PFAS can unintentionally leave remnants that could become other forms of PFAS, he said.

The agency’s current methods are designed so they can be adapted and improved over time, but eventually the agency anticipates some being used for regulatory compliance, he said.

“The state of the science for air is playing catch-up where soil and water science has been,” said ORD’s Jonathan Krug, an environmental engineer, during an interview earlier this year.

Opposition to Heritage

Spencer and other environmental activists sued the Defense Department over its contract with Heritage in 2020, and eventually agreed to a settlement that quashed the contract. Following public concerns about PFAS that incinerators could be releasing, Congress ordered the Pentagon in 2022 to temporarily stop combusting wastes with PFAS.

The DOD has been meeting with other federal agencies and plans to issue updated disposal guidance for PFAS-containing materials by the end of this year, the DOD told lawmakers in August.

Ohio Sen. Sherrod Brown (D) called on the Defense Department to stop incineration altogether in East Liverpool, according to a letter his office sent on Oct. 9. “Communities such as East Liverpool should not have to face additional environmental challenges from the risks associated with PFAS incineration,” Brown wrote.

While DOD’s waste isn’t being burned at Heritage’s Ohio incinerator for now, the facility continues to receive waste from companies like Chemours, the Boeing Co., Sherwin-Williams Co., and multiple universities, according the EPA’s PFAS Analytic Tools database. Some wastes may mistakenly be identified as PFAS, but the information should “not be considered an exhaustive list of all PFAS waste transfers,” the agency database says.

Heritage told Bloomberg Law that the company understands destroying PFAS is challenging, as the group may consist of more than 10,000 forms of the chemicals.

But “based on testing Heritage conducts as required by the Clean Air Act, we believe that the compounds present in the waste that we receive are destroyed,” it said in an emailed response to questions about how the company handles waste containing forever chemicals.

Thermal treatment also is the most appropriate and cost-effective way to dispose of PFAS-containing material, Heritage said. The EPA’s most recent, interim guidance on PFAS destruction and disposal says that permitted hazardous waste combustors operating under certain conditions can be effective.

But more information is needed to determine whether incineration and other thermal processes create harmful byproducts, including products of incomplete combustion or other forms of hazardous PFAS, Heritage said.

Some PFAS compounds that incineration may release include trifluoroacetic acid (TFA), a short type of PFAS that many scientists say is a greenhouse gas.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has raised concerns about TFA’s environmental effects and said the incineration of polytetrafluoroethylene, a type of PFAS that includes the familiar Teflon, can be a source of TFA.

But there are uncertainties about whether incineration unintentionally generates short or ultrashort compounds, Heritage said.

“This same concern exists for all technologies that are or may be used for the treatment of PFAS wastes,” the company said.

Measuring Emissions

Incineration is getting particular attention in the PFAS air emission space since it’s already occurring on a commercial scale, and hazardous waste combustors would generally receive waste with higher PFAS concentrations than other disposal systems, Krug said.

But “it’s important to hold all technologies to the same standard and not subject one to more scrutiny than the others,” he said.

Scientists from the Battelle Memorial Institute, an applied science and technology development company, have developed the institute’s PFAS Air Insight technology to measure concentrations of the chemicals in ambient air to use in multiple applications.

They studied a sludge incinerator and found it only destroyed about half the PFAS, with the remaining chemicals largely going into wastewater and a smaller portion releasing into the air and an ash landfill.

Examining air, water, and other concentrations of the chemicals before and after using a treatment technology gives investigators insight into the treatment’s effectiveness, said Battelle’s Shalene Thomas and Ryan James. And understanding whether operations are generating PFAS, how much they may be creating, and how concentrations of them on a particular site compare to levels found on other sites is very important for liability, Thomas added.

Environment vs. Economy

Yet while the EPA, waste management companies, and others try to learn more to improve the disposal and destruction of PFAS, they face a legacy of pollution that communities say has been forced upon them for years.

Hazardous waste incinerators across the U.S. often share a troubling trait: proximity to low-income neighborhoods predominately occupied by people of color and often surrounded by other heavy industry.

East Liverpool was once the center of the nation’s pottery industry, with a population numbering in the 20,000s during the entire 20th century. After the death of the industry, the population began to steadily fall beginning in the 1980s. East Liverpool’s population is now less than half of its peak, struggling with an ongoing opioid epidemic that has hit Ohio hard.

But like many other economically declining communities near industry, East Liverpool also relies on Heritage for hundreds of jobs, something that puts residents in between a rock and hard place dealing with pollution and the need to stay financially afloat. The East Liverpool City Council and former city officials did not respond to repeated requests for comment about the incinerator and its history in the city.

Thomas Powell, River Valley Organizing Harm Reduction Program director and East Liverpool resident, remembered local advocates fighting since the 1990s against the incinerator. Years later, after knocking on doors and asking residents about the issue, he found people tolerated what they saw as something that could make things better for the city.

“A reason for a lot of the problems in this town is, for generations, people have been taught there’s nothing you could do,” Powell said. “You know, ‘It is what it is; accept the jobs.’”