Michigan’s Other Water Crisis: PFAS’s Prevalence in Private Wells

Seeking peace and quiet amid hectic careers, Sandy Wynn-Stelt and her husband Joel moved to Kent County, Michigan, in 1992. They picked out a home surrounded by woods and across from a Christmas tree farm, which Wynn-Stelt said was “about as Michigan as you can get.”

She was working in the mental health field. He was a social worker investigating child abuse. Their peace in the idylls of rural Michigan lasted 25 years, but ended unexpectedly. In 2016, Joel developed liver cancer and died within three weeks of his diagnosis. The next year, the state’s environmental agency found extremely high levels of per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, PFAS, in the home’s well water.

The first test of the Wynn-Stelt’s water came back with PFAS levels at 24,000 parts-per-trillion, much higher than the 4-10 ppt limits the federal government would later set for the chemicals in 2024. It was such a high number local officials thought it had to be an error, but subsequent tests have shown numbers as high as 100,000 ppt for various PFAS, known as “forever chemicals” because they do not readily break down in water, soil, wildlife and humans. 

PFAS are manmade chemicals that give the materials they coat heat-, water-, and stain-resistant properties. They have been used in consumer products since the 1950s, but since the chemicals’ risks for human health came to light in the early 2000s, public concern has grown—especially since PFAS can linger in the environment, seeping into and accumulating in people’s bodies from tainted air, food or water.

Michigan has been ahead of the curve when it comes to testing for PFAS and mitigating the issue in municipal water, but 2.6 million residents get their water from private wells. This means there are large gaps in the state’s ability to mitigate contamination, leaving residents with the responsibility to test and filter their own water. In such an industry-heavy state, these are important tasks—even in places residents wouldn’t expect to find PFAS.

“It turned out that that Christmas tree farm that we loved, in the ’70s, had been where Wolverine World Wide … dumped tannery waste,” Wynn-Stelt said.

For over 100 years, Wolverine World Wide Tannery made the leather for many well-known shoe brands, many of which were coated with Scotchgard, a water and stain repellent created by 3M. The product has since been reformulated without PFAS, but from the 1950s until 2002, the primary ingredient was perfluorooctane sulfonate, or PFOS, one type of PFAS chemical that has been largely phased out from use. PFOS is one of the most pervasive forever chemicals, and can contaminate soil, water and our bodies.

PFOS and related chemicals aren’t just used in leather and textile production, they are ubiquitous in many industries. Airports and military bases use the substances in the foams used to fight chemical fires, paper manufacturers use them to create glossy finishes, and the automotive industry—Michigan’s largest—uses them in metal-plating processes and in the creation of water- and stain-resistant materials throughout a vehicle. Beyond this, the chemicals’ broad uses in cosmetics and other household products mean they end up accumulating in wastewater, which is often processed and repurposed as biosolid fertilizer for commercial farms.

Since some industries started scaling back their use of the chemicals in the early 2000s, PFAS concentrations in people’s blood have decreased significantly, but nearly everyone in the United States still has detectable levels of forever chemicals in their bodies, according to the Centers for Disease Control.

“PFAS can accumulate in the body over time and small amounts have been shown to cause health effects,” said Jennifer Redmon, director of the Environmental Health and Water Quality Program at RTI International, a scientific research institute. Some of these health effects include high cholesterol, thyroid and liver issues and an increased risk of certain cancers. PFAS exposure can also impact the immune system, metabolism and development.

Despite the numerous health risks associated with PFAS, until recently there were few federal regulations on the substances. The first limits for the levels of PFAS in drinking water were set by the Environmental Protection Agency just last year, and already, the Trump administration has moved to roll back these protections. This has left states mostly on their own to set standards and organize responses to the risk.

Michigan, still reeling from the Flint water crisis in the 2010s, became the first state to test all public drinking water supplies in the state for PFAS. Over the course of the analysis, which concluded in early 2019, more than 1,500 municipal, school and tribal water systems were tested. Collecting this data has been a cornerstone of the state’s approach to PFAS.

“It’s really important to be able to go upstream and figure out who’s discharging PFAS to the wastewater treatment plants so that we can stop those sources,” said Abigail Hendershott, executive director of Michigan PFAS Action Response Team (MPART), which coordinates testing and mitigation efforts within the state.

Stopping PFAS at the source is important because it’s very difficult to get rid of once it’s in the environment. It doesn’t biodegrade, so it easily moves through the ecosystem and through the food chain to people. PFAS can be eliminated by incinerating soil or other solid materials containing it. For water, the main option is filtration using either granular activated charcoal or reverse osmosis.

The state has been able to filter public water supplies, but the millions of residents who get their water from private wells are largely on their own. 

“Our state loves to brag that we’re ahead of everybody … but we have done nothing else to correct this problem,” Wynn-Stelt said. “It’s like a firefighter going in and charting your house and deciding where the fire is, and then moving to the next house.”

While Michigan accepts well water samples to test at their state lab and provides recommendations for filtration systems, many residents are driven away by the price of the process. Each test is $290—down from about $1,000 when the program started in 2017—and installing a filtration system typically costs several thousand dollars.

“With a million water wells in the state and $300 a sample, you’re talking some pretty big math,” Hendershott said. “I would love the funds to do that [at the state level], but it’s not something that I see happening anytime soon.”

In addition to cost concerns, some people are concerned about what a finding of PFAS in their water could mean for their lifestyle or property values, especially considering relatively few mitigation options are available. The result, Hendershott said, is that only 20 percent to 40 percent of landowners have responded to letters from the PFAS Action Response Team urging them to test their private wells. 

For some landowners, other organizations have stepped in to provide education and help mitigate risks. Michigan State University Extension’s PFAS Contamination in Agriculture program, for example, is working with commercial farmers to test their soil and water, hoping to prevent PFAS from spreading through contaminated crops. But, program educator Faith Cullens-Nobis notes this work only covers a fraction of the risks.

“It’s really important to test your well,” Cullens-Nobis said. “That’s what you’re drinking every single day, so I would be a lot more concerned about getting my water tested than getting my tomatoes tested.”

In the short term, this makes for what can seem like an insurmountable problem for state officials and residents in Michigan. Still, seeing other states start to implement long-term solutions has brought hope to some impacted residents, like Wynn-Stelt, who turned to advocacy after learning her community was contaminated and has kept close watch of the changes happening at the state and federal level when it comes to PFAS.

Wynn-Stelt noted that states like Minnesota have implemented bans on PFAS in more than 11 categories of products, and Maine has banned the use of PFAS-containing biosolids on farmland. She is holding onto hope that Michigan will follow suit, or that another solution is on the horizon.

“There’s so many environmental things going on right now, so many that I worry it becomes like white noise,” Wynn-Stelt said. “But [for PFAS], I really do feel like we’re going to be able to find a solution.”