Chicago Considers New Approaches for PFAS Management

The waters of Lake Michigan glitter alongside the entire east side of Chicago, providing nearly one billion gallons of drinking water per day to the region’s residents. Beneath the city, 65 miles of water tunnels form a complex web to deliver this water to residents, some of it running through Stickney, Illinois, home to the world’s largest wastewater treatment plant. 

Much of this water will end up flushed down the Mississippi River, where it will reach and affect communities all the way to the Gulf of Mexico. And within the waters of Lake Michigan, as in 45 percent of the water in the U.S., lurks a toxic class of chemicals called per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, or PFAS. 

PFAS are commonly found in manufacturing and consumer goods and have been for decades. They can enter the water system through industrial processes, but the majority of PFAS pollution in water comes from domestic water waste, such as laundry detergent, soaps and cosmetics. 

Often called “forever chemicals” because they never naturally break down, PFAS can accumulate in the body over time, posing health risks such as certain types of cancer, liver damage, thyroid problems, decreased efficacy of vaccines and increased risk of birth defects. 

PFAS have been found in all of the Great Lakes, which constitute 84 percent of North America’s surface fresh water. And there are very few ways of removing the chemicals. According to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, the chemical makeup of PFAS and the fact that they dissolve in water means that “traditional drinking water treatment technologies are not able to remove them.” 

In April 2024, EPA dictated a national regulatory level for PFAS chemicals in drinking water. And in November 2024, Chicago elected new members to the board of the Metropolitan Water Reclamation District, a government agency addressing just about any water-related issue in the greater Chicago area. For better or worse, MWRD’s new members, groundbreaking PFAS-related projects at Chicago universities, the EPA’s new standards and President Donald Trump’s return to the White House are all bringing a swath of changes to the potentially deadly landscape of PFAS. 

EPA set regulatory levels for the most common PFAS chemicals—perfluorooctanoic acid (PFOA) and perfluorooctane sulfonate (PFOS)—at four parts per trillion. According to the testing method EPA currently uses, PFAS aren’t detectable until the level is at or above two parts per trillion, narrowing the difference between “detectable” and “dangerous.” 

The Illinois Environmental Protection Agency (IEPA) set guidelines for PFAS levels in drinking water statewide in 2021, but these recommended levels are not enforceable and also vary from the federal levels, with IEPA establishing a standard for PFOA at 2 ppt and PFOS at 14 ppt. As of April 2024, some towns in greater Chicago were testing above recommended levels of PFAS chemicals in drinking water, according to IEPA data.

Although the state and federal government set levels they deem achievable based on current methods, “there’s no level that is acceptable for human health,” said Sharon Waller, a water engineer and newly elected MWRD commissioner. Ninety-seven percent of people in the U.S. are estimated to have detectable levels of PFAS in their blood, according to the advocacy organization Earthjustice. 

At present, there are no federal enforceable standards for PFAS levels in anything except drinking water—and no state-level enforceable standards beyond drinking water in Illinois. 

PFAS can enter human bodies through inhaling contaminated dust, dermal application of products with PFAS and eating or drinking any foods or products containing PFAS. Despite PFOA and PFOS being designated under federal law as hazardous substances, there are very limited guidelines and restrictions for their use in consumer products. The landscape of PFAS regulations is changing rapidly, and varies substantially by state. 

“That really puts us in a bind for public health,” Waller said. “We are public health professionals. We must sample. We must ask the hard questions and fearlessly sample.” 

There are also no federal regulations for a city testing its wastewater or removing PFAS from it, although on March 11, 2025, the Illinois House advanced two PFAS related bills; one that would potentially ban the sale of commercial consumer goods containing PFAS, and one that would create a PFAS Wastewater Citizen Protection Committee to formulate a plan for cleaning up PFAS from waterways and drinking water within the state. 

Illinois is also reportedly including sampling requirements in National Pollutant Discharge Elimination System permits as they are being renewed, which should phase in PFAS testing in wastewater and biosolids over the 5-year permit renewal duration. For Chicago, a highly populated city which pulls mostly clean water from Lake Michigan and then uses it and pushes it downstream, particularly toward agricultural land in the Midwest, the lack of regulation for discharge is of notable concern. 

Waller says there’s a disincentive for public infrastructures to sample for PFAS in anything they aren’t legally required to. This is because if PFAS are detected, the municipality is legally and financially liable for cleaning up the PFAS under the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act and the Safe Drinking Water Act. The process can be ruinously expensive and destructive to local businesses, particularly farms, which often use biosolids that come from wastewater treatment plants, some of which are contaminated with PFAS, to fertilize crops.

Because of this, Waller says, private water utilities are sometimes able to sample myriad sources anonymously without the financial concerns. Public utilities, in contrast, Waller says, are bound by their responsibility to taxpayers not to participate in research that could potentially lead to expensive lawsuits. 

“We have to make sure that PFAS manufacturers are held accountable so that we as taxpayers are not on the hook for a problem that we didn’t create,” said Cameron Davis, an MWRD board member. “If liability doesn’t start and end with the manufacturer, it becomes a real problem for society.” 

Despite being a public organization, MWRD conducted PFAS testing in their water reclamation plants in 2023 and 2024 and inspected around 430 nearby industrial facilities for “evidence of current or historic PFAS use,” and plans to continue inspecting and sampling “priority industrial users with a high potential to discharge PFAS,” MWRD president Kari Steele said in a statement. 

The City of Chicago also tested its water in October 2024, and found Chicago’s drinking water contained less-than detectable levels. But water delivered to the city’s inner suburbs is testing at detectable levels. Communities farther from the city have recorded higher than recommended levels of PFAS. In 2021, a trailer park in Rockford, west of Chicago, had to seal the well it had been drawing water from due to PFAS levels nearly double the national EPA advisory level, which at the time was 70 ppt. 

Waller sees limiting PFAS at the source—in manufacturing—as a necessity, so that remediation efforts aren’t eternally playing “catch up” while more forever chemicals are being poured into the environment. 

“The water industry wants to be off the hook [because they didn’t create the problem]. But if you take water industries off the hook, who’s going to clean it up? If they don’t have to clean it up, then it just goes straight back out into the environment,” Waller said. “What we really need is a PFAS ban. We need to turn off the faucet before we clean up the mess. Right now, we’re using taxpayer dollars to remove it from drinking water and to reimburse farmers [whose farms had to be shut down due to PFAS contamination], while we’re still adding it to the environment. That’s a waste of taxpayer dollars.” 

Limitations on PFAS manufacturing were imposed by the federal EPA in 2023 and 2024, requiring manufacturers using PFAS to report their usage and allow review by EPA. Illinois, notably, is one of the nation’s top 10 manufacturing states. 

Waller sees Maine as an example for Illinois. The leading state in PFAS management, Maine, conducted a “phased out” ban of PFAS by manufacturing sector, extensively tests for PFAS—in soil, groundwater, biosolids and more—and prioritized the health costs of PFAS exposure over the financial costs of PFAS remediation. 

For Chicago, environmentally caused negative health effects—beyond those of PFAS exposure—are already a prevalent issue. The city has disparate rates of health issues and lower life expectancy in the South and Southwest sides that are correlated to race. In 2022, the Department of Housing and Urban Development found Chicago in noncompliance with certain civil rights and housing acts when it facilitated the relocation of a metal recycling facility to a predominantly Black and Hispanic neighborhood.

Exposure to PFAS can compound extant environmental justice issues. PFAS chemicals have already been shown to disproportionately affect low-income communities and communities of color, particularly those near landfills. A 2023 study published by researchers at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health indicated that communities of color face disproportionate rates of PFAS pollution, specifically in drinking water. A lack of extensive regulation and regular testing makes the existing problem more challenging to solve.

“If you take water industries off the hook, who’s going to clean it up? If they don’t have to clean it up, then it just goes straight back out into the environment.”

— Sharon Waller, Metropolitan Water Reclamation District

And since President Trump cut environmental justice programs at the EPA and the Department of Justice last month, these discrepancies are likely to get worse before they get better. 

“This is not just an underserved community problem. This is not just an affluent community problem. This is an every community problem,” said Davis, who previously worked with the Obama administration to coordinate the investment of $2 billion for Great Lakes restoration, including investing in monitoring emerging contaminants, before joining the MWRD. 

MWRD is on a public education blitz surrounding PFAS—its Monitoring and Research Department shares updates online and in newsletters, highlighting changing legislation surrounding water quality and updates regarding MWRD’s ongoing inspections. 

The district is also working with the city of Chicago to implement new PFAS removal technologies, as well as with Northwestern University to investigate and test new ways to remove PFAS from water. 

“MWRD offered to provide water samples for laboratory-scale technology development and a test site for polite-scale testing,” Steele said in a statement. “Additionally, Northwestern University has access to publicly available standard water analysis data that MWRD routinely conducts for flow through the O’Brien Water Reclamation Plant.” 

In 2022, the Northwestern chemistry department spearheaded a new, far simpler and more affordable way of destroying PFAS. 

The process, discovered by a team led by Professor William Dichtel, is simply to heat PFAS in dimethyl sulfoxide, a fairly common solvent. This causes the head group of PFAS—a part frequently containing oxygen or hydrogen atoms, rather than fluorine, as in the rest of the chain—to disconnect, effectively unraveling it. What’s left behind is fluoride, which Dichtel calls “the safest form of fluorine.” 

At present Dichtel’s team has unraveled 10 types of PFAS, including two of the most common types: PFOA and GenX. While Dichtel’s work is currently still in experimental lab stages, it provides a glimpse of hope. 

Other Chicago institutions are doing their own work to solve the PFAS problem. In September, the University of Illinois Chicago’s College of Engineering received a two-year, $865,000 grant as part of the Great Lakes ReNEW program, a collaborative initiative with more than research partners around the Midwest. In the project, UIC will work with Argonne National Laboratory to test new technologies for removing PFAS from water. 

But with the Trump administration planning to cut the EPA budget by up to 65 percent and threatening existing water quality laws, every American’s right to access clean, safe water is at risk.

“Water is something that we all have in common,” Davis said. “And these days, we need as much in common with each other as we can get.”