Hey all you water people out there…

Redefining the Narrative: A Call to Action for Water Professionals

“Stop making toxic stuff.” It is a simple edict, but incredibly hard to actualize. Notions such as progress versus environment - or - precautionary principles versus overwhelming evidence, may immediately spring to mind. But there is a longer and deeper story. A field of historical research has explored the various uses and cultural perceptions of toxic substances, their impact on health and the environment, and attempts to regulate toxic risk. This academic work fuses environmental history and the histories of science, medicine, and technology. While this is informative, we, as water professionals, must engage to create a new chapter in the history of toxicity.

What can we do:

I believe it is time for utility leaders to take a more prominent role in protecting society from harmful chemicals. We must have a stronger voice, and a more influential position in the management of chemicals that enter our waterways and subsequent treatment and resource recovery facilities. Without that influence, we could lose the trust of customers, and may lose the ability to meet the mission of reclaiming and producing safe, clean water. The history is clear – water utilities cannot keep up with additional treatment investments to remove the ever-growing list of emerging contaminants. That list has never gotten shorter and is continuously getting longer. Consider the implications: more compounds with toxicity at lower and lower concentrations; toxicity is now measured at the parts per trillion. When does it stop?

Yes, many of these toxic substances have benefits. Also true is that the long-term societal costs are not reflected in the net-benefits. But this argument for externalities has had limited success. I think that we can do better. Here are three angles to consider:

·???????? Minimize toxicity from the get-go: The first is to implement better processes that minimize and mitigate toxicity. We can rise to the challenge of innovating new chemicals that are less harmful to produce, less toxic, and which pencil out even when externalities are included. We should actively support “green chemistry” and processes and policies that reduce toxicity.

·???????? Couple product and removal: A second angle, for those who must have toxicity, is to require certain new compounds, or particular uses, to be coupled with a known, scalable, safe, and affordable process to remove the chemical from water, at, or before entering our ecology and treatment facilities. An approach such as this avoids the lengthy and complex epidemiological studies that delay and confound the safe use of new chemicals. It simplifies by espousing the notion that water in the public domain should be free of manufactured chemicals, thus eliminating the need to prove if a new chemical is safe or toxic.

·???????? Toxicity Tax: A third angle could be to tax chemical producers a portion of the profit they make on the sale of a chemical based on the relative toxicity of their chemical. A toxicity tax. This could serve as a means to recoup the societal costs and to incentivize companies to produce greener chemicals. A point of reference is the carbon tax, perhaps not a beacon of success, but certainly an economic model that may be leveraged to societies benefit.

While the slogan “stop making toxic stuff” is simple, the sentiment requires a tremendous effort and courage to realize. For example, it took a broad environmental movement and the creation of federal agencies dedicated to protecting workers, communities, and the environment to end the use of DDT, PCBs, lead in gasoline and paint, and asbestos in the United States. These systems were built from post World War II toxicity fears and the social movements of the 60s and 70s, which are no longer enough. I cannot see how we, as water professionals, can rely on these antiquated agencies and processes to prevent the next PFAS, fracking fluid, PCB, or pharmaceutical from entering our system and thus becoming our responsibility. We can either step up and work to make less toxic stuff, or forever lag behind the removal of the latest contaminant.

This is, I believe, an important future of our industry – to influence the production and uses of toxicity. The current paradigm has had far too many misses; we, who choose the profession of managing water, ought to be fighting for what we know to be right. We must lean harder on our numerous professional societies to move further upstream to the policies that regulate the types of chemicals we inadvertently deliver to people and our supporting ecology. We must remove our fragmentation that weakens our voice, and we must act as if we took an oath. And we should remind ourselves of our history—no other professionals support healthy civilizations like ours does. It is time to level up and stop the intentional production of toxicity.

If anyone would like to talk more about how that can be done, and how to position utilities for this type of leadership please reach out or comment below.

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