So I keep seeing this headline over and over again and it pisses me off so much. This is a lie. Okay? New EPA limits on forever chemicals P fast in drinking water could cost one and a half billion dollars per year to implement. Okay, this is so misleading and BS. And I’m gonna break it down for you. Quick background on this. P fas are the toxic forever chemical, and they build up in your brain and your body with every little bit that you ingest. They are linked to brain cancer, testicular cancer, auto immune disorders, the vaccine and efficacy and a suppressed immune response. And just like generally like a shorter lifespan. These are man made chemicals that have been dumped in our water supply by a handful of manufacturers that make them like 3M and upon. Those are the big guys. The movie Dark Waters is all about this. And the EPA set limits for six of these PFS in our drinking water. No level of PFS is safe. The only safe level is zero.
This headline, the new EPA limits on forever chemicals could cost one and a half billion dollars per year is such BS. Alright, okay, so that one and a half billion dollars is a total estimate. Alright, however, where are they getting that number? Well, they’re getting it from the EPA’s fact sheet. Compliance with this rule is estimated to cost approximately one and a half billion dollars annually. Okay.
However, the paragraph right before which none of like those click baked articles ever reference is that fewer people will get cancer or liver disease. Pregnant women will have reduced risks and EPA calculated measurable health benefits based on fewer cancers, lower incidents of heart attacks and strokes and reduce birth complications. These benefits are estimated to be approximately one and a half billion dollars per year and include avoided costs of medical bills, income loss to illness and death. Okay, but there have been other estimates on how much P fast actually cost our society in all the diseases and disorders, and it’s far above a billion and a half per year. However, there’s a cost savings of one and a half billion in productivity and like money that’s coming out of your pocket, you are not the one spending one and a half billion dollars to clean the country’s water. However, you’re the one spending money on your medical bills, on your medication that’s really expensive and your inability to work because of a disease or disorder that you have that was caused by P fast. We already spend billions of dollars to clean our water every single year, okay? So this number is not on top of that.
At water supply spending totaled 113 billion in 2017. Okay? Of this spending, 28% went to capital while 72% went to operations and maintenance. One of the reasons that maintenance is so expensive is because our systems are so old. When you have something that’s really old, it is more expensive to maintain. There has never been a massive amount of federal money that has been given to updating our drinking, our municipal drinking water supplies. And so because of this, it is more expensive to maintain all the money to maintain our drinking water filtration systems come from s, comes from tax dollars, okay?
Now, in 2,022, the bipartisan infrastructure law actually allocated 20 five billion dollars into water infrastructure projects across the country. A lot of that is already going. There is already 12 and a half billion dollars allocated just this year just to clean up PFAS and set up the new water filtration systems. And the Biden administration has also allocated more money to cleaning up lead pipes than any other administration in history.
The federal government has never actually paid to remove lead pipes from schools. The heaviest concentration of lead service lines in the country are in Florida, Illinois and Ohio as money is being prioritized to communities that are bypoc, right? Because those are the communities that traditionally haven’t had the money to pay for it. A place like Orange County, they already have a P fast filtration system in place. P fast polluters depend, and 3M primarily, but there are others that they’re the ones responsible for the pollution. And there have been many lawsuits already settled. Some are still in the works where they will literally pay for the cleanup and the setup of these filtration systems to clean our water. Have to remember, those other costs of maintaining our drinking water supply are going to come down. We will now have the cleanest drinking water in he the history of the United States.