PIPE MIGHTMAREAs States Replace Lead Pipes, Plastic Alternatives Could Bring New Risks
Across the country, states and cities are replacing lead pipes to address concerns over lead-contaminated drinking water, an urgent health threat. But critics say that substituting PVC for lead pipes “may well be leaping from the frying pan into the fire.”
Across the country, states and cities are replacing lead pipes to address concerns over lead-contaminated drinking water, an urgent health threat. But environmental advocates are concerned that a popular alternative piping material could pose its own dangers.
A new report released Tuesday by the advocacy group Beyond Plastics warns that pipes made from polyvinyl chloride, or PVC — a kind of rigid plastic commonly used in construction — can leach hazardous chemicals into drinking water, making them a “regrettable substitution” for lead pipes. The authors urge state and local policymakers to consider non-plastic alternatives like copper and stainless steel.
“Communities that opt to replace their lead service lines with plastic pipes may well be leaping from the frying pan into the fire,” Judith Enck, Beyond Plastic’s president and founder and a former regional administrator for the Environmental Protection Agency, or EPA, wrote in an introduction to the report.
Co-published with the nonprofits Environmental Health Sciences and the Plastic Pollution Coalition, the report is a response to the bipartisan infrastructure law that the Biden administration enacted in 2021. Of the $1 trillion in federal funding authorized by the law, some $15 billion was directed to state and local efforts to tear out lead water pipes. Lead transferred from these pipes into drinking water can lead to neurological and reproductive damage, seizures, hypertension, and more, as demonstrated by the public health records of Flint, Michigan, the site of the 2014-2016 water crisis. But the EPA offered no guidance on what to replace those pipes with, leaving local governments to determine the answer for themselves.
PVC is often considered an appealing option, thanks to its low cost. But research suggests that a concerning stew of chemicals can make its way from PVC piping into the drinking water it conveys. Among these chemicals are hormone-disrupting organotins and vinyl chloride, the key building block for PVC and a known human carcinogen.
It’s unclear exactly how much of these chemicals gets transferred from PVC pipes into people, but experts say they can be harmful even at very low doses. “PVC is a horror show,” Bruce Blumberg, a professor of development and cell biology at the University of California Irvine, told the authors of the report.
