VALVE MAGAZINE Spring 2024

VMA PFAS RESPONSE

The industrial valve industry provides a vital role in the production of products essential to improving the public’s quality of life and protecting the planet. The current focus on banning all PFAS raises a significant threat to our industry and beyond. Understanding how and why PFAS are used in these applications, the highly beneficial reasons they are used to help protect health and the environment as well as operations, and understanding the differences in the types of PFAS is absolutely critical to avoiding substantial and wide-ranging negative conse quences to our way of life. VMA and Valve magazine first started reporting on and tracking governmental activity surrounding PFAS over two years ago, in January 2022, with the winter issue of Valve . Throughout the past two years, information on PFAS concerns as well as the benefits of PFAS have become more accessible and commonplace. Information on the approaches that governments may take to regulate PFAS, the different types of PFAS, how the industrial valve industry uses PFAS — and how extremely prevalent it is in so many manufacturing processes, facilities and end-use products — is readily available. While discussions around the long-term effects of PFAS is not a new issue or topic, it may seem like it. In the early 2000s, the EPA and the chemical industry worked together to phase out the most prominent long-chain PFAS (PFOA and PFOS). Research, testing and a focus on the health and environmental impacts continued, and more information became available about PFAS found in drinking water, as well as other environmental impacts. In April 2021, the EPA Council on PFAS was charged with developing: “A bold, stra-

VMA PFAS RESPONSE VMA Responds and Looks Forward on PFAS Implications

Raising awareness, the Association continues to work on educating legislators and regulators.

BY: HEATHER RHODERICK, President VALVE MANUFACTURERS ASSOCIATION (VMA)

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VALVE MAGAZINE

SPRING 2024