A federal Environmental Appeals Board on Thursday heard oral arguments in a case that environmental lawyers say could reshape how regulators treat PFAS chemicals at large municipal wastewater plants, and Manchester is the test case. Lawyers for the Conservation Law Foundation argued that the Environmental Protection Agency did not fulfill its duty to analyze whether the so-called forever chemicals leaving Manchester’s wastewater treatment plant could harm the Merrimack River or the drinking water of more than 700,000 people who live in its watershed, according to reporting from NHPR.
The hearing was the culmination of a months-long fight over a permit that environmental advocates say is missing the most important piece. The EPA’s permit for the Manchester plant requires the city to monitor for PFAS in the wastewater entering the facility. It does not impose a limit on the levels of PFAS that can be in the water leaving the plant and flowing into the Merrimack. That distinction, monitoring versus limiting, is the heart of the case.
The PFAS Story That Manchester Is Telling
PFAS, or per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, are a family of thousands of synthetic chemicals that have been used since the mid-twentieth century in nonstick cookware, firefighting foam, food packaging, water-repellent clothing, and countless industrial applications. They are nicknamed forever chemicals because their carbon-fluorine bonds do not meaningfully degrade in the environment or in the human body. Exposure has been linked in published research to cancers, immune system effects, developmental harms, and elevated cholesterol.
Wastewater treatment plants do not manufacture PFAS. They are downstream collectors. Industrial users, consumer products, and rinsate from any home or business that uses PFAS-containing materials all feed into the municipal sewer system. The water arrives at a plant like Manchester’s loaded with the chemicals, and conventional treatment processes do not remove them. The PFAS that go in come back out, redistributed into the effluent that is released into the river, and concentrated into the sewage sludge that is left over.
A 2019 study of Manchester’s facility detected PFAS concentrations above federal drinking water standards in the discharge, and later studies have detected PFAS in fish pulled from the Merrimack. The Merrimack River is the source of drinking water for communities along its length in both New Hampshire and Massachusetts, including the Manchester Water Works system and downstream cities.
What the Conservation Law Foundation Is Asking For
Jillian Aicher, a staff attorney with the Conservation Law Foundation, told the appeals board that the EPA skipped the first step that should have led to PFAS limits in the permit. She framed the issue in plain terms. “This appeal has very important implications for community members in Manchester, who are exposed to uncontrolled PFAS coming from their wastewater treatment plant with no reduction measures,” she said. “And importantly here, no consideration by EPA of reduction measures.”
The foundation is not asking the appeals board to set a specific PFAS limit. It is asking the board to require the EPA to do the underlying analysis that would justify a limit. That analysis would have to look at how much PFAS is coming out of the plant, whether the levels pose a risk to water quality or to people downstream, and what reduction measures could realistically be required.
Tom Irwin, a vice president at the Conservation Law Foundation, told NHPR that Manchester is positioned to set a precedent. “If the regulators take this on the way they should, this will provide a pathway for others,” he said. “People are being exposed to PFAS in the air, PFAS are being discharged into the water.” The reference to air is to the Manchester plant’s practice of burning its sewage sludge, a process that can volatilize PFAS into the atmosphere near a residential neighborhood.
The EPA’s Position
Lawyers for the EPA argued that the agency did consider the potential of effluent from the treatment facility to harm water quality during the permitting process. They told the appeals board that federal regulators reviewed and agreed with an analysis done by New Hampshire state officials. Their position is essentially that the analysis the Conservation Law Foundation is demanding was already done at the state level and was incorporated by reference into the federal permit.
The EPA also defended its approach to environmental justice considerations in the permit. The Conservation Law Foundation argued that the agency abandoned environmental justice considerations during the permitting process without a thorough explanation, relying on executive orders that revoked Biden-era environmental justice policy. Irwin argued that under federal administrative law, an agency cannot simply reverse a policy without explaining why, citing what he described as a growing body of case law on that question.
Lawyers for the EPA responded that the agency is allowed to exercise discretion on environmental justice issues, and that the permit record does include reasons for the agency’s approach. Adam Dunville, a lawyer for the city of Manchester, participated in the oral arguments in support of the EPA’s position. Officials with the city’s wastewater treatment plant staff did not respond to requests for comment from NHPR.
The Larger Federal Picture
The case lands at a complicated moment in federal PFAS policy. In 2021, the EPA adopted a PFAS roadmap that committed the agency to restricting how much PFAS industrial facilities can discharge and to using the permitting process for wastewater facilities to reduce these chemicals in waterways. Since then, the political and regulatory environment around PFAS has shifted with the change in presidential administrations. Some federal initiatives have been rolled back, paused, or reframed.
States have been moving on their own. Several New England and Mid-Atlantic states have begun researching and regulating PFAS in the waste stream more aggressively than federal regulators. The kind of analysis the Conservation Law Foundation is asking the EPA to perform for Manchester, however, is uncommon at the federal level, Irwin said.
That is part of what makes the Manchester case important beyond the city limits. A favorable ruling for the foundation would push the EPA toward a more interventionist posture on municipal wastewater PFAS, and would create a template that environmental advocates could use to challenge permits in other communities. A ruling for the EPA would entrench the current approach, which leans on state-level analysis and on monitoring rather than discharge limits.
What Manchester Residents Should Watch
The Environmental Appeals Board does not typically rule from the bench. A decision could come in the weeks or months after oral arguments. In the meantime, the Manchester wastewater treatment plant continues to operate under the existing permit, and PFAS continue to move from the city’s sewer system into the river and into the sludge that the plant incinerates.
For residents along the Merrimack, the practical questions are familiar. Drinking water utilities in the watershed do their own PFAS monitoring and have invested in treatment to remove these chemicals before water reaches the tap. The bigger exposure questions involve fish consumption from the river, recreational contact with surface water, and air emissions near the plant’s incinerator.
The Manchester case is one of several environmental and regulatory disputes federal officials have been navigating in New Hampshire this spring, and it sits alongside ongoing legislative fights over environmental cost-shifting at the state level. The broader trend is toward more granular, source-specific analysis of pollutants that move through waste streams, and the outcome of the appeals board ruling will help define how aggressively that trend continues in the second half of the decade.
This is not a story about whether PFAS is bad. The science on PFAS health effects is no longer seriously contested. The question on the table is who has to do the analysis, what counts as a sufficient analysis, and how much PFAS reduction federal regulators can demand from a municipal plant that did not put the chemicals in the water in the first place. The answer will reach far beyond Manchester. It will reach into every river city in the country that runs an aging wastewater system and into every kitchen tap that draws from a watershed downstream of one.
