That Fluoride Added to Your Town Water to ‘Prevent Cavities?’ The EPA Says It’s Hazardous Waste
Fluoride is supposedly a “miracle mineral” when added to water to prevent tooth decay. But it’s the byproduct of phosphate fertilizer production, and is classified by the EPA as hazardous waste.
After Utah last month became the first state to ban water fluoridation, local water managers now face a dilemma: How should they dispose of the remaining fluoride?
Mainstream media, dental associations, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), and other proponents of water fluoridation repeatedly state that the “miracle mineral” fluoride is a “naturally occurring” mineral.
But the fluoride added to town water supplies is far from natural.
Naturally occurring fluoride is calcium fluoride. The fluoride added to water is the byproduct of phosphate fertilizer production, sold off by chemical companies to local water departments across the country.
The byproduct comes in the form of hydrofluorosilicic acid, which is used by most large cities to fluoridate their water.
Hydrofluorosilicic acid is considered a hazardous substance and must be disposed of following strict environmental regulations under the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act.
Scott Paxman, general manager of the Weber Basin Conservancy District, which provides water to over 700,000 Utah residents, told The Defender that he reached out to the state Department of Environmental Quality (DEQ) to inquire about fluoride disposal.
DEQ told Paxman that once the May 7 deadline to end fluoridation in Utah kicks in, any water districts that still have fluoride in their facilities will be subject to regulation as generators of hazardous waste — requiring them to follow an expensive and time-consuming set of regulatory requirements to get rid of their hydrofluorosilicic acid.
Paxman said he was outraged that his water conservancy district would be classified as a hazardous waste generator. “We aren’t hazardous waste generators,” he said. “We are just middlemen.”
He said that for years, water operators in Utah had been raising concerns about the hazards of the acid that they saw firsthand in their facilities and the health risks they and the public faced from fluoride exposure.
Water operators like Paxman were active in the campaign to end fluoridation in Utah, he said. Now they were not getting the guidance they needed to dispose of the chemicals.
‘They have no idea how toxic this stuff is’
Paxman said DEQ’s first suggestion was that the water districts run out the fluoride by stepping up the feed rates of fluoride into the water. The agency pointed out that they could go as high as 4 milligrams per liter (mg/L) — which is the current maximum contaminant level (MCL) enforceable by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).
The 4 mg/L maximum contaminant level was challenged in the recent landmark lawsuit against the EPA for failing to appropriately regulate the chemical. The EPA lost, and the judge in the case directed the agency to enact new regulations. The EPA is appealing the ruling.
Four mg/L is the level at which fluoride causes skeletal fluorosis, a debilitating condition that causes skeletal deformities. The judge in the federal lawsuit ruled that at 0.7 mg/L, water fluoridation poses an unreasonable risk to children’s health, because evidence shows it leads to reduced IQ.
Paxman said when he saw that suggestion, he realized, “Oh my God, they have no idea what they are talking about. They have no idea how toxic this stuff is.”
Other ideas floated by DEQ included selling the leftover hazardous waste to other states still fluoridating, or returning it to Thatcher Chemical, the industrial chemical distributor that sold them the so-called miracle mineral.
Better guidelines needed for handling, disposing fluoride as hazardous chemical
Paxman has worked with input from fluoride toxicity expert Phyllis Mullenix, Ph.D., and DEQ to develop better guidelines that have since been shared with water operators.
“Since this is a hazardous chemical, with elevated levels of arsenic, lead, mercury and chromium, it must be handled and disposed of as a hazardous chemical, as state and federal regulations require,” Paxman wrote in an email to colleagues.
Operators must legally continue fluoridation until May 7, when they will “mothball” all systems — disconnecting them, shutting down power and winterizing them.
Then they will hire a hazardous waste cleanup company like Clean Harbors to clean up the rest — pumping out their tanks and disposing of the hydrofluorosilicic acid at a hazardous waste facility. He anticipates it will cost his facility alone about $125,000.
Paxman said that at Weber Basin, they have lowered the levels from the recommended 0.7 mg/L to the minimum requirement of 0.5 mg/L out of concern for public safety.
Paxman’s concerns about the hazardous chemical reflect concerns long raised by scientists, even within the regulatory agencies.
In 2000, Dr. William Hirzy, the senior vice president of the EPA’s Headquarters Union of Scientists and Professionals, said:
“If this stuff gets out into the air, it’s a pollutant; if it gets into the river, it’s a pollutant; if it gets into the lake it’s a pollutant; but if it goes right into your drinking water system, it’s not a pollutant … There’s got to be a better way to manage this stuff.”
Other cities, including Branson, Missouri, that voted to end water fluoridation have raised similar concerns that disposing of fluoride will be expensive, because it is hazardous waste.
So-called ‘miracle mineral’ also contains other heavy metals
Unlike the fluoride in toothpaste, fluoridation chemicals are not of pharmaceutical-grade quality. They are unpurified industrial byproducts collected in the air pollution control systems of fertilizer production systems.
The industry formerly allowed these byproducts to vent into the air until it was compelled to mitigate them.
The phosphate industry collects the fluoride gas in a “wet scrubber,” and the resulting hydrofluorosilicic acid liquid is put into storage tanks and shipped to water departments.
In declarations made as part of the fluoride lawsuit, all three major producers of fluorosilicic acid, Mosaic, Solvay and Simplot confirmed that they have never done safety or effectiveness studies on the FDA chemicals they sell for water fluoridation.
Mosaic also noted that the market for their chemicals is “in large part based on the endorsement of fluoridation of public drinking water sources by the American Dental Association and other human health, professional or scientific groups.”
The chemicals are known to contain elevated levels of certain contaminants, including arsenic.
Recently, Mulllenix said, producers of water fluoridation compounds have moved their operations to China, where there is even less regulation — which means more dangerous conditions for workers and more contaminated material.
According to the EPA, by 2019, well over half of the water fluoridation chemicals were imported from China.
Mullenix said she has been frustrated for years by the fact that public health policy makers and public health departments “have totally turned a blind eye to the chemical.”
“They gave no attention to what’s going to happen if you have an overfeed, how do you dispose of the chemical if it’s spilled or leaked? They paid no attention to that or to what the chemical really was,” she said.
This posed a serious problem for water operators. She has worked for years advising workers injured at work handling hydrofluorosilicic acid or sodium fluoride, which smaller communities sometimes use to fluoridate their water.
Mullenix said regulations control only the contaminant level for fluoride itself — which extensive research, including her own, has shown to be a neurotoxicant. The regulations don’t account for other heavy metals present in the acid. “What about the arsenic MCL?” she asked, “What about the lead?”
Unseen risks in the technical process of fluoridating water
Paxman said fluoridating water isn’t as simple as turning a switch on or off, and it’s not cheap, despite what the regulatory agencies told water operators in Utah when they began fluoridating the water in the early 2000s.
Davis County spent tens of millions of dollars to build ten water fluoridation stations, he said. “And we found out very quickly that you don’t fool around with the fluorosilicic acid that we feed into the tanks. It’s super, super corrosive and it off-gases, even from the sealed polyethylene tanks.”
He said the gases etch the glass, corrode the door frames and all of the electronics. It also impacts the health of the operators, he said, who complain of migraines and other health issues when they have to enter the fluoride facilities on a regular basis.
After one of their operators in 2012 was hospitalized when he inhaled fumes during the delivery of hydrofluorosilicic acid from Thatcher, Weber Basin began periodically contracting a state-certified external lab to analyze the chemicals provided, so they could check the contaminant levels themselves and compare them to the company’s claims.
The certificates of analysis show that the shipments of fluoride that then go into the water system regularly have extremely high levels of arsenic and sometimes lead or other metals.
A comparison of the certificates of analysis provided by Thatcher and those done by an independent lab also showed discrepancies between what the company certified and what was in the fluoride that Weber received, which had higher levels of antimony, arsenic, cadmium and other metals.
He also said that the systems have a complex technology in place to measure the amount of fluoride going into the water, but that the dose of fluoride in water inevitably varies. “We have maintained the 0.7 level, but that’s an average,” he said. The actual levels are always “bouncing all over the place,” depending on water flow rates.
He said this is a challenge for fluoridation systems all across the country, and it means that sometimes fluoride levels in drinking water are over the 0.7 mg/L recommended dosage — which is the level that already poses a risk to children’s health.
Accidents, cover-ups, corruption and lack of accountability ‘happening everywhere’
Fluoride accidents and overfeeds happen regularly, according to the Fluoride Action Network, which tracks publicly recorded accidents on a webpage. Accidents range from a small, 10-gallon spill in 2012 in Connecticut to an incident in New Orleans in 2008, where the fluorosilicic acid ate through its storage tanks and then through a concrete containment tank.
To avoid a “catastrophic mix of toxic chemicals,” the environment department discharged nearly half a million gallons of the toxic acid into the Mississippi River.
In the city of Sandy, Utah, in 2019, a malfunctioning pump in the water fluoridation system released undiluted hydrofluorosilicic acid into the water in 2019, affecting 1,500 households, institutions and businesses and sickening over 200 people.
An investigation revealed that officials failed to notify the public for 10 days and that fluoride was detected in the drinking water at 40 times the recommended levels.
Fifth-grader Max Widmaier drank that over-fluoridated water in school and soon after spiked a high fever, developed tics, had severe emotional swings, and had developmental regression so severe that at one point he lost the ability to put together sentences, his mother, Jenny Widmaier, told The Defender.
Medical records shared with The Defender showed that after Max was exposed to the over-fluoridated water, he had high levels of several heavy metals in his blood. Several months of intense therapies and strict dietary changes eventually helped Max to recover.
However, Jenny said, Max has essentially no memory of the entire year and to this day cannot be exposed to any fluoride — even food cooked in fluoridated water — without a severe reaction.
The family received no compensation from the city.
Lorna Rosenstein, executive director of Waterwatch of Utah, told The Defender that Sandy was just one of the accidents in Utah in recent years.
In 2007, an estimated 1,500 gallons of hydrofluorosilicic acid was released in a tank rupture at a treatment plant in Salt Lake County, Deseret News reported.
In North Salt Lake in 2014, a feeder pump malfunctioned, and 140 gallons of hydrofluorosilicic acid spilled from the drinking water well house out to the curb and gutter and into the storm drain, according to documents Rosenstein obtained via public records requests.
She has been holding water officials, politicians, and health agency officials accountable for their actions regarding fluoride for years through her public records requests and public advocacy.
Rosenstein said the rules, violations, accidents, cover-ups, corruption and general lack of accountability that kept fluoridation going in Utah are happening everywhere.
Related articles in The Defender
Thanks to The Defender for your reporting. In case anyone reading this is interested, I fact checked a fact check of the topic of water fluoridation here: https://mooreamaguire.substack.com/p/i-fact-check-a-fact-check-of-rfk-2fa
Check into borax for neutralizing fluoride.