The House Environment Committee voted Tuesday in favor of advancing H.238, a bill that would further phase out the sale and production of consumer products containing added PFAS, a class of thousands of hyper-durable chemicals linked to a host of cancers and health issues in humans.
The bill would expand the state’s existing limits on PFAS-containing consumer products to include a ban on manufacturing and selling cleaning products, dental floss and containers lined with perfluoroalkyl and polyfluoroalkyl substances.
In May 2024, Vermont’s wide-sweeping ban on PFAS in cosmetics, menstrual products, artificial turf, incontinence products and cookware became law — to largely take effect in 2026. The restriction also included a ban on PFAS in a broad range of “juvenile products,” a category that includes cribs, children’s electronic games and other items marketed to people under 12 years old. The state already regulates PFAS in rugs and carpets, ski wax, firefighting equipment and aftermarket stain and water-proofing treatments for fabric and furniture in residential settings.
“This bill takes important next steps to protecting Vermonters from PFAS chemicals in consumer products, and reducing the amount of PFAS that we will need to deal with in our environment in the future,” the bill’s cosponsor Rep. Ela Chapin, D-East Montpelier, wrote in an email. “This will be an ongoing and iterative process over time as we learn more and manufacturers develop alternatives to using PFAS in consumer products.”
This year’s expansion comes in response to a January report from the state’s Agency of Natural Resources, which detailed areas where the existing law could expand.
Currently, PFAS is regulated through the Attorney General’s Office, which can enforce the restrictions on the chemicals through consumer protection laws. This means in Vermont, consumers can raise a complaint about products containing PFAS chemicals, which could then prompt fines and penalties.
But the 2024 law also tasked the agency with exploring options for the state to regulate PFAS in consumer products more directly, meaning the agency could ensure that products, before they even entered the state for sale, were free of PFAS.
Since PFAS are a broad class of more than 15,000 chemicals, the agency said running such a program would require focusing on a smaller scope of the most harmful PFAS, rather than the expansive category of chemicals.
“It was a smaller universe, but it was defined, and there was a reporting mechanism at the federal level that existed for it,” said Matt Chapman, director of the agency’s Waste Management Division, which authored the report.
Under the Agency of Natural Resources proposal, Vermont would have joined Maine and Minnesota as the only states in the country that have state regulatory programs for PFAS in consumer products.
However, committee lawmakers decided not to take that step yet.
“It leaves us a place where we’re not necessarily going to be leading on this issue, which is, OK,” Chapman said.
The legislation does require his division to follow those states’ product phase out and continue reporting back on their progress.
“The best strategy for dealing with PFAS in the environment is keeping them out of consumer products in the first place,” Chapman said. “We have to stop turning the tap on PFAS further upstream.”
PFAS contain strong chemical bonds, which make them extremely effective in repelling water, oil and grease — useful for nonstick pans, raincoats and ski wax. But, because the bonds are so strong, they also almost never break down.
These “forever chemicals” accumulate in water, soil and in human bodies where they are associated with weakened immune responses, hormone disruption and heightened cancer rates, especially for kidney and testicular cancer, Health Commissioner Mark Levine testified to the House Environment Committee.
Levine offered just a few examples of the diverse array of health impacts brought by these chemicals, which scientists suspect scramble the body’s messaging systems and gum up immune responses, causing such a range of harms.
In 2022, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency set a health risk threshold for two prevalent PFAS chemicals — PFOA and PFOS — to near zero in drinking water. In 2024, the agency set national restrictions for the same two chemicals to 4 parts per trillion, a number lower than Vermont’s existing restrictions of 20 parts per trillion at the time.
Read the story on VTDigger here: House bill would add floss and 2 more products to Vermont’s PFAS regulations.