Article Masthead

  • Category: Policy & Regulation
  • Topic: PFAS Discharge Permitting
  • Region: North America
  • Signal Type: Federal Water Policy and Permitting
  • Published Date: 2026-09-17
  • Original Source Date: 2026-09-15

01 What Happened

EPA’s Office of Water has rescinded a group of Biden-era water guidance documents, including the December 2022 memorandum that encouraged states and permitting authorities to address PFAS through National Pollutant Discharge Elimination System (NPDES) permits, pretreatment programs and monitoring.

InsideEPA reported the broader rescission on September 15 and a PFAS-specific follow-up on September 16. The 2022 memo had recommended using existing Clean Water Act authorities to identify known or suspected PFAS sources, require monitoring, use pretreatment tools and consider technology-based limits or best-management practices where appropriate.

The withdrawal is important, but its legal effect should be described carefully. The 2022 document was guidance rather than a stand-alone federal effluent standard. Its rescission does not eliminate the Clean Water Act, NPDES permitting programs, state permitting authority or permit-specific mechanisms that may still be used to address PFAS.

Analytical practice is also separate from the policy memo. EPA’s current PFAS methods FAQ continues to recommend Method 1633 or 1633A as the best available analytical methods for PFAS effluent monitoring in NPDES and pretreatment contexts.

02 Key Takeaways

01
The federal government has withdrawn the 2022 policy guidance that encouraged a more consistent PFAS source-control and monitoring approach through NPDES and pretreatment programs.

02
The action does not automatically remove existing permit conditions, state authority or Clean Water Act mechanisms that can still be used to monitor or control PFAS discharges.

03
For utilities and industrial dischargers, the practical result may be greater variation among states and individual permits rather than the disappearance of PFAS wastewater oversight.

03 Why It Matters

The 2022 memo was significant because it gave permit writers and pretreatment programs a common federal framework before nationwide PFAS effluent standards were in place.

Without that guidance, states and permitting authorities may rely more heavily on their own water-quality standards, narrative criteria, industrial pretreatment authority, permit records and site-specific evidence. That can produce a less uniform national approach even when the underlying statutory authorities remain available.

For publicly owned treatment works, the engineering problem is unchanged: PFAS entering a sewer system are difficult to destroy in conventional biological treatment and can be redistributed into effluent, biosolids and residual streams. Source identification and industrial-user control can therefore remain important regardless of whether one federal guidance memo is active.

Industrial facilities should also avoid assuming that rescission means monitoring will stop. Existing permits, state initiatives, local pretreatment requirements and future permit renewals can still impose sampling, reporting or source-control obligations.

04 ATLAS Engineering View

From an ATLAS engineering perspective, the main effect is regulatory variability, not a change in PFAS chemistry.

A POTW still needs to know whether PFAS are entering from industrial users, landfill leachate, firefighting-related sources or other contributors. Where PFAS are present, monitoring design should consider representative sampling points, frequency, matrix effects and consistent analytical methods.

Method 1633/1633A remains technically important because cross-facility comparisons become difficult when laboratories use different target lists, extraction procedures or quality-control criteria. A permitting authority may change its policy posture, but comparable data still matter for source tracing and treatment decisions.

For industrial users, source control often remains more practical than asking a municipal biological plant to remove PFAS after mixing. Chemical inventory, substitution review, segregation of high-strength streams and targeted pretreatment may therefore remain relevant even in jurisdictions that adopt a less prescriptive permitting approach.

The near-term signal for the water sector is fragmentation: utilities and industrial facilities will need to track state, local and permit-specific requirements more closely rather than assuming one federal memo defines the national baseline.

05 Sources