Tag: lead

Getting the lead out of getting the lead out

People have recognized the dangers of lead at least since Hippocrates linked lead to poisonings circa 370 B.C., but the U.S. did not begin regulating the lead content in public drinking water until enactment of the Safe Drinking Water Act (SDWA) in 1974. Two years later, the U.S. banned lead in new pipes and solder, but millions of miles of lead-containing pipes and lead-based solder remain.

An illustration of the chemical element lead (Pb) with its atomic number (82) and atomic weight (207.2), accompanied by several rocks representing lead.
Lead element symbol and raw ore. 3D rendering isolated on white background

From CFACT

By Duggan Flanakin

People have recognized the dangers of lead at least since Hippocrates linked lead to poisonings circa 370 B.C., but the U.S. did not begin regulating the lead content in public drinking water until enactment of the Safe Drinking Water Act (SDWA) in 1974. Two years later, the U.S. banned lead in new pipes and solder, but millions of miles of lead-containing pipes and lead-based solder remain.

As if a doubtful nation had not taken the SDWA seriously, EPA did not issue its first comprehensive Lead and Copper Rule until 1991. The rule established an action level of 15 parts per billion for lead, as well as required corrosion control, public notification, and lead service line replacement programs. It did not mandate immediate replacement of all lead service lines.

The first Trump administration finalized the first updates in decades to the SDWA’s Lead and Copper Rule. Its 2019 proposal, finalized in October 2020, “require[d] more replacements than ever before” for aging water systems leaching lead and posing a public health threat.

The Trump rule also lowered the action level for forcing providers to work with state regulators to replace lead service lines from 15 ppb to 10 ppb but kept the 15-ppb level for requiring communities to replace 3% (rather than 7%) of known or suspected lead lines each year. However, as then-EPA Administrator Andrew Wheeler noted, the rule also closed loopholes that had kept actual replacement rates at near the new levels anyway.

It took nearly all of President Biden’s four-year term for the administration to issue its own Lead and Copper Rule Improvements that, among other things, sought to require all U.S. drinking water systems to identify and replace any remaining lead pipes within the next decade. Such an expedited timetable had been eschewed by Trump 45 as achievable only via smoke and mirrors.

At the same time, the EPA announced $2.6 billion in new drinking water infrastructure funding through the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, with nearly half set aside for disadvantaged communities. Other new funding included $35 million in competitive grants for reducing lead in drinking water and funding to support lead pipe replacement projects.

The EPA and its affiliates combat lead in drinking water by testing at the tap — because even the purest water that leaves a treatment plant can be contaminated as it travels through corroded lead service lines. If lead (or copper above set levels) is detected at the tap, any corrosion control treatments have been ineffective, and the service line becomes a candidate for replacement.

Public education is aimed at both making people aware of the potential problem and incentivizing affected people to demand positive action on their behalf. One difficulty is separating fact from presumption — for example, EPA’s own estimates of the number of lead service lines that must be replaced have run from 3 to 4 million to over 9 million.

The 1991 Lead and Copper Rule required states to replace a minimum of 7% of lead piping each year. States may exceed those figures — but are not supposed to fall short, even if replacement costs are exorbitant. But not until 2021 did Congress create a $15 billion fund, to be released by the EPA in $3 billion annual increments, to help states identify and replace corroded lead piping that threatens public health.

Some states prefer to bank their allocations until they can fund larger pipe replacement projects using multi-year funding, while other states merely use the federal dollars as reimbursements for work they already completed. Only a few may be ahead of the 10-year timetable.

It is the EPA’s job to determine each state’s share of that $3 billion a year — and in 2025, EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin explained a five-month delay in determining those allocations, noting that this year’s formulation was based on an updated approach using information from the 7th Drinking Water Needs Survey and Assessment, as well as “certain adjustments” from lead service line inventory data submitted by states that shed more light on the size of the job.

Simply put, there has not been a new legal installation of a lead service line since 1986, and many older properties (including apartment complexes) that had lead pipes have been demolished. However, there is no accurate count and no strategy to ensure high accuracy levels.

Zeldin believes some revised state counts are more accurate and is also aware that many federal programs can be plagued by fraud or incompetence. If State A claimed twice the number of lines to be replaced as actually existed, and State B did not, and no one noticed the discrepancy, State A would be robbing other states of their rightful share. Without oversight, the door to fraud is wide open.

The American Water Works Association, which had intervened in court in support of the 2020 (Trump) Lead and Copper Rule revisions, quickly filed a lawsuit against the 2024 (Biden) rule. In 2021, the AWWA boasted of the “tremendous progress water utilities are making to identify lead service lines, share that information with households, and overcome the legal and financial barriers to replacement.”

But the AWWA was “deeply concerned” that the Biden revisions incorrectly assume that a water system “controls” a lead service line when it has “access” to that line. The SDWA distinguishes access from control, yet the Biden upgrades attempt to expand the definition of a public water system to include private property and makes water utilities responsible for issues on private property they cannot necessarily legally address.

The Biden rule, said the AWWA, also posed affordability challenges for households struggling to pay for essential needs. With a nationwide price tag for replacing all lead service lines above $100 billion, many consumers will crumble financially when hit with huge water bills already ballooned by compliance with the PFAS rule.

That’s why the 2025 Trump action backs away from the idealism behind the 2024 Biden rule. They, too, do not see the 10-year timeframe as feasible — unlike the typical bureaucrat who has never had to grapple with building consensus among utilities, government, consumers, and other stakeholders to allocate the dollars needed to replace every lead service line in America.

America’s battle to eliminate lead from tap water started slowly — and only forty years ago. No one wants another Flint, Michigan, horror story — but the simple truth is that in America it takes far more than Washington federal mandates and money for people at the local level to identify lead service lines and prioritize those in the greatest need of immediate replacement. The legal battles alone can take a decade or more.

Meanwhile, the EPA and all of Washington over the past several decades have been hyper-focused on “climate change” while — until Trump 45 — ignoring real-world problems like water and wastewater infrastructure and the electric grid. If today’s timetable is too slow, look backward for the blame.

We could have started replacing lead service lines decades ago. But exceeding the speed limit is not the right way to make up for being late to the courthouse to fight a speeding ticket.

On the other hand, by setting more reasonable timetables, local communities may find that the pressure relief enables them to accelerate replacement without bankrupting public drinking water systems or their customers.

Aussie NSW Farmers Call for a Ban on New Solar Projects

Australia’s largest state farming organisation, NSW Farmers, is calling for a temporary ban on the construction of new large-scale solar farms in the state, amid concerns developers are not acting in the long-term interests of regional communities.

From Watts Up With That?

Essay by Eric Worrall

NSW Farmers, Australia’s largest farming organisation, is demanding a prepaid decommissioning fund for solar farms, to prevent farmers being left with the bill for decommissioning and disposal.

Farming lobby wants ban on new solar farms, as renewables resentment festers in regions

Sophie Vorrath 27 July 2023

Australia’s largest state farming organisation, NSW Farmers, is calling for a temporary ban on the construction of new large-scale solar farms in the state, amid concerns developers are not acting in the long-term interests of regional communities.

In a motion passed at the Association’s 2023 annual conference last week, NSW Farmers agreed to call on the state Labor government to place a moratorium on large scale solar developments until “planning deficiencies” around plant decommissioning and remediation are addressed.

“Current planning and approval provisions for large scale solar energy facilities do not take into account the long-term interests of agricultural land, rural communities and the rural landscape following the ‘decommissioning’ of the facility,” notes on the motion say.

“Agricultural land, rural communities and rural landscapes are at risk in the future and there should be no further development approvals granted until these planning deficiency issues have been fully addressed.”

The call from NSW Farmers follows a recent warning from Australian Energy Infrastructure Commissioner, Andrew Dyer, that landowners may wind up lumbered with responsibility for cleaning up renewable power projects at the end of their lives, by default.

Read more: https://reneweconomy.com.au/farming-lobby-wants-ban-on-new-solar-farms-as-renewables-resentment-festers-in-regions/

The demand for a prepaid cleanup fund echoes existing arrangements in the mining industry, in which mining companies have to pay into a fund to ensure mining sites are restored after the mine is exhausted, even if the mining company fails.

Solar panels frequently contain toxic heavy metals, like lead and arsenic, which potentially pose long term contamination issues for farmers seeking to rehabilitate end of life solar installations as agricultural land.

I wouldn’t be surprised if a Chernobyl style topsoil removal was required to completely eliminate the threat. Arsenic chemically mimics phosphorus, so chemically removing arsenic would also remove all the phosphorus from the soil. Lead is believed to mimic iron, calcium (lime) and Magnesium, so removing lead would strip other key minerals. At the very least during treatment the soil would likely have to be made acidic for a prolonged period, to try to leach the contaminants out of surface strata. Such treatment could lead to ground water contamination, which might in turn require extensive deep drilling and ground water strata barrier construction to remediate. Strong acidification would also likely kill the soil, leaving the soil devoid of beneficial bacteria and other beneficial organisms.

NSW renewable operators are already reeling from a recently announced grid “access fee”. An in my opinion entirely reasonable demand for massive upfront payments to cover land remediation after end of life could push some renewable projects well into the financially non-viable zone, even with generous government subsidies.

Given the debt levels being carried by some Aussie state governments, all these new charges and demands for money are likely only a prelude to the regulatory financial shakedown renewable operators, and anyone else who invests in Australia, are likely to face in the near future.

Right, CBS, Wind and Solar Facilities Do Produce a Lot of Hard to Manage Waste

As these problems have become more evident, as CBS discussed, companies are seeking different ways to dispose of turbine blades. With proper environmental protocols in place, used blades can be shredded and burned in kilns or power plants. This, however, releases air toxins and carbon dioxide.

From ClimateRealism

By H. Sterling Burnett

CBS News published a story, titled “A black eye for green energy? Renewable energy growth brings mounting waste challenge,” detailing the fact that it is difficult, if not impossible, to recycle many of the components of wind and solar projects. This is true. Those who designed wind turbines and solar panels, the developers erecting them, and the federal and state governments pushing their use, largely failed to consider how to manage the large amounts of waste produced when turbines and panels fail prematurely or are decommissioned and replaced at the end of their useful lives. This already amounts to millions of pounds of waste annually.

CBS News described the present management of solar panel and wind turbine disposal thusly:

[A]s the [wind and solar] industry expands, a new problem emerges: what to do with the mounting waste generated by worn-out solar panels and wind turbine blades.

More than 90 percent of discarded solar panels end up in landfills. By 2030, the retired panels are estimated to cover an area equivalent to about 3,000 football fields.

The wind industry is also producing waste — creating an estimated 47 million tons of blade waste annually by 2050.

Although CBS suggests the waste problem is one for the future, problems with disposing of the hundreds of turbines and thousands of panels that need replacing annually, are already evident.

Wind turbine blades are difficult if not impossible to recycle. They are composites, consisting of what one publication referred to as “a toxic amalgam of unique composites, fiberglass, epoxy, polyvinyl chloride foam, polyethylene terephthalate foam, balsa wood, and polyurethane coatings.”

As such, as of 2020, decommissioned or broken wind turbine blades were already amounting to 50,000 tons of waste annually, an amount expected to grow drastically in the near future. Almost all of this waste is either being left standing to rot, being taken down and temporarily stored on site until sufficient landfill space is found, or being shipped to landfills. Yet landfill space is becoming scarce, and for economic and liability reasons, becoming scarcer all the time.

As reported on at Heartland Daily News, a separate tractor-trailer is needed to haul each blade to a landfill, and cutting them up requires powerful specialized equipment. With as many as 8,000 blades a year already being removed from service just in the United States, this amounts to 32,000 truckloads over the next four years—a number that will five times higher in just a few years. That’s a lot of carbon dioxide emitted in the turbine disposal process, emissions unaccounted for when the emissions profile of industrial wind facilities are compared to traditional power plants.

Some wind energy companies have taken to cutting the blades into shorter sections before sending them to landfills, because most landfills lack cutting tools. Today’s turbine blades are 20 percent longer and their towers up to 200 feet taller than most of those currently being landfilled.

Turbine disposal costs are upwards of $400,000 apiece, amounting to $24 billion to dispose of the 60,000 turbines currently in use in the U.S. The cost and the toll on existing landfills will rise as more, longer, heavier blades reach their end of life.

That’s if landfills will take them. Because of the potentially toxic elements in them and the huge amount of space they take up, only certified landfills accept decommissioned wind turbine parts. Yet, municipalities running certified landfills are increasingly rejecting wind turbine blades, even when they can charge double the amount per ton for accepting turbines, because they take up tremendous amounts of space, must be crushed at considerable expense, and take hundreds of years to break down.

As these problems have become more evident, as CBS discussed, companies are seeking different ways to dispose of turbine blades. With proper environmental protocols in place, used blades can be shredded and burned in kilns or power plants. This, however, releases air toxins and carbon dioxide. Currently the emissions from burning decommissioned wind turbine blades is small, but if the practice becomes more widespread, such emissions could become considerable.

It is also difficult to dispose of or recycle decommissioned solar panels. Currently, most used solar panels are either shipped to landfills or shipped for use overseas.

Solar panels are typically removed when the energy they produce declines significantly, usually between 20 and 30 years, if they have not been damaged or become non-functional previously. Such panels still produce energy, just significantly less than required for homeowners, businesses, and utilities to benefit from them. Some companies have found a growing market for used, substandard solar panels over seas in developing countries. However, because the panels’ useful lives do come to an end eventually, over the long term, this just shifts the waste disposal problem from the United States, to poorer nations.

Solar panels contain a mixture of components, some of which can be recycled, some of which can’t. Although many of the material in solar panels are valuable and recyclable, like glass, copper, silver, and various critical materials, because of the way the panels are composed, it is expensive to do so. In addition, solar panels contain toxic metals like lead, cadmium, and selenium. The blending of these recyclable and toxic elements makes teasing the small amount of the valuable materials out from the toxic ones prohibitively expensive.

“The reason you do not see more companies doing solar panel recycling is because the economics don’t make sense,” AJ Orben, vice president at We Recycle Solar, told GreenBiz. “It costs more to break a panel down and recover the raw materials than what the raw materials themselves are worth.”

As CBS News notes, government incentives and subsidies are being used to encourage solar panel recycling but at the present they haven’t closed the gap between what it cost to capture the recyclable material from the panels and their value. As such, less than one in 10 solar panels are recycled, with thousands of panels each year piling up in landfills, potentially leaching toxic heavy metals into the soil and groundwater.

The waste disposal problem for green energy technology is big and growing bigger. CBS News did the public a service by bringing this problem to light. As CBS wrote, the waste “challenge” is, “black eye,” for the green energy industry. Maybe next CBS will take on the challenge of recycling or disposal of electric vehicle battery packs.

H. Sterling Burnett

H. Sterling Burnett, Ph.D., is the Director of the Arthur B. Robinson Center on Climate and Environmental Policy and the managing editor of Environment & Climate News.

In addition to directing The Heartland Institute’s Arthur B. Robinson Center on Climate and Environmental Policy, Burett puts Environment & Climate News together, is the editor of Heartland’s Climate Change Weekly email, and the host of the Environment & Climate News Podcast.