MAINE PUBLIC • October 22, 2021
The Maine Department of Environmental Protection on Friday released a list of 34 towns where staff will soon start looking for contamination with so-called PFAS chemicals. The testing is part of a years-long plan targeting sites where sludge, septic tank sewage and industrial waste was spread as fertilizer. Kevin Miller reports. Staff within Maine’s environmental and agricultural agencies have been working for months on plans to test more than 700 sites potentially contaminated with PFAS. The chemicals have been used for decades in various household products. But some types of PFAS have been linked to serious health problems and the so-called forever chemicals have turned up on several Maine dairy farms that use sludge as fertilizer.