Michigan’s PFAS drinking water limits are in the balance in Supreme Court case

3M’s real concern is not drinking water standards, but a groundwater cleanup requirement created by state law after Michigan established its drinking water standards. Companies like 3M, which produced PFAS for decades despite knowing its dangers, could face hefty cleanup costs if found liable for any of Michigan’s 329 and counting PFAS contamination sites.

During arguments Wednesday in Lansing, 3M attorney Nessa Coppinger argued that because Michigan’s drinking water standards had the downstream effect of forcing industries to clean up the contamination, the state needed to consider how much it would cost.

“EGLE (the Michigan Department of Environment, Great Lakes, and Energy) must comply with the requirements of the Administrative Procedures Act,” Coppinger argued, and in this case “it has failed to do so.”

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Assistant Attorney General Richard Kuhl, meanwhile, argued that the law does not require the state to consider the downstream effects of its regulations. He also claimed that it would have been impossible for the state to estimate cleanup costs because Michigan law does not always require the industry to publicly disclose the pollution it causes, let alone require regulators to know about cleanup plans .

As a result, Kuhl said, any cost estimates would be “guesstimates.”

The lack of transparency in Michigan’s cleanup laws was one aspect of a 2023 Bridge Michigan Survey which exposed how industries could repeatedly pollute the state with impunity.

PFAS is a class of thousands of chemicals, and studies have linked some of them to cancer, birth defects, immunity problems and other health problems.

Michigan’s drinking water standards, which set the standard for the nation when made in 2020has established regulatory limits for seven PFAS compounds in public water supplies.

Because state law requires that contaminated groundwater used as a drinking water supply be remediated to drinking water standards, the state’s PFAS rule effectively lowered the threshold for polluters to clean up PFAS-contaminated aquifers.

Industry lawyers argue the state had to consider how much that would cost.

The federal government has grown stronger since then national regulationsbut they are vulnerable to relapse by newly elected President Donald Trump, who has vowed to “remove excessive regulation.”

If state and federal regulations were to disappear, millions of Michiganders would be at greater risk of exposure to the cancer-causing “forever chemicals,” which many polluted of the state’s rivers, lakes and groundwater.