Washington Deregulates Carbon — Water Infrastructure Keeps Getting Funded

EPA Guts Power-Plant Carbon Rules, Then Turns Around and Backs Water Infrastructure

On September 14, EPA finalized repeal of most of the 2024 greenhouse-gas standards for coal- and gas-fired power plants and simultaneously proposed rescinding the remaining GHG standards for the sector entirely — by the agency's own description, the largest power-sector deregulatory action in U.S. history.¹ EPA estimates the finalized action alone delivers more than $300 billion in regulatory savings, a figure the agency rounds to roughly $310 billion; environmental and public-health groups dispute that cost-benefit framing, and litigation over EPA's underlying legal theory — a narrower reading of the Clean Air Act's authority to regulate greenhouse gases from power plants — is expected.¹

One day later, at the same G20 Energy Abundance Ministerial in Houston where the power-plant repeal was announced, Administrator Lee Zeldin launched a G20 Water Reuse Initiative, with participating members endorsing a Water Reuse Outcome Document built around "fit-for-purpose" treatment — matching water quality to end use (industrial, agricultural, energy) rather than treating every gallon to drinking-water standards.² Then, on September 18, EPA announced a $251 million WIFIA loan to the Las Virgenes-Triunfo Public Financing Authority for an advanced water-purification facility in California that will treat wastewater for reuse and drinking-water-source recharge, reducing discharges to Malibu Creek and Santa Monica Bay.³

Four days separate a rollback of federal climate mandates from a quarter-billion-dollar federal commitment to water infrastructure. That is not a contradiction — it is a preview of how the environmental-services market is bifurcating.

Regulatory Authority Over Coal Ash Also Moved — From Washington to Indiana

EPA separately proposed approving Indiana's own Coal Combustion Residuals (CCR) permitting program, published in the Federal Register on September 16.⁴ If finalized, Indiana — which has more CCR units than any other state — would issue its own permits for coal-ash landfills and surface impoundments rather than relying on EPA's federal permit program; EPA says roughly ten states are now on a similar pathway.⁴ Devolving permitting authority to the states does not eliminate compliance obligations — it fragments them, which historically increases rather than decreases demand for consultants who can navigate state-by-state permitting, closure and groundwater-monitoring requirements.

The House Passes a Narrow, Bipartisan Battery-Recycling Bill

The House also passed the BRACE Act (H.R. 9615, sponsored by Rep. Marianette Miller-Meeks, R-Iowa) by voice vote on September 15, part of a three-bill bipartisan package on critical-minerals recovery.⁵ The bill directs EPA to reclassify lithium-ion batteries as universal waste within 18 months of enactment and would allow co-located battery storage and recycling facilities — fixing an RCRA site-adjacency requirement that has been a real permitting obstacle for domestic recyclers such as Ascend Elements, Redwood Materials and Cirba Solutions.⁶ All three bills now move to the Senate.

A UK Parliamentary Committee Tells the Government to Reject Thames Water's Rescue Plan

The House of Commons Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Committee formally urged the government on September 18 to reject the creditor-led rescue proposal from the London & Valley Water consortium and instead place Thames Water into the Special Administration Regime (SAR) — effectively temporary public control — or pursue emergency legislation to take control of the utility's financial affairs.⁷ The committee's chair went further, warning that Thames Water is likely headed for special administration regardless once its funding runs out at the end of 2026, and separately projected the utility could accrue more than £900 million in penalties over the next five years.⁷ No nationalization has occurred as of publication; the committee also called for strengthened SAR legislation and a new supervisory water regulator as part of broader sector reform, not a rushed one-off fix. Thames Water's debt load has swelled to roughly £20 billion.⁸

EU Packaging Rules Move From Policy to Enforcement

The EU's Packaging and Packaging Waste Regulation (PPWR) entered a new implementation phase in August, including restrictions on PFAS above specified thresholds in food-contact packaging — takeaway containers, fast-food wrappers, bakery paper and grease-resistant materials generally.⁹ The compliance burden is shifting upstream, from remediation after contamination occurs toward pre-market testing, supplier chemical declarations and recycled-content documentation — a structurally different, and broader, addressable market for analytical labs and product-compliance platforms than traditional environmental testing.

A reminder carried forward from prior issues: the EU's Empowering Consumers for the Green Transition Directive becomes binding across all member states on September 27, banning unsubstantiated generic environmental marketing claims absent recognized third-party certification.¹⁰ Eight days out, this is the last practical window for any client with EU-facing marketing or packaging claims to review language before enforcement begins.

Crane Pays 14.6x EBITDA for Municipal Water Pumps

Crane agreed to acquire Trillium's U.S. municipal water-pump business, serving municipal water and wastewater customers with a large installed base that generates recurring service, repair, retrofit and replacement revenue.¹¹ First Reserve acquired the broader business from Weir Group in 2019, ran it as an independent platform, and is now exiting the U.S. municipal piece to a strategic buyer — a familiar infrastructure-services private-equity playbook. The multiple is the number worth remembering: mid-teens EBITDA for a business built on pumps, not technology, because once equipment is installed inside a water system it cannot simply stop operating.

GFL's Take-Private Situation Becomes a Real, Named Auction

GFL's board formed a special committee back in July after receiving multiple unsolicited preliminary expressions of interest in taking the company private — the situation Gaya has tracked since early summer as an open, unresolved thread. This week it moved decisively. On Bloomberg's Deals TV on September 16, CEO Patrick Dovigi said he is open to considering offers to take GFL private "at a higher valuation than where its stock has been trading," describing the process as being in "the third inning of a long baseball game" and noting he intends to roll his entire stake into any transaction.¹² Bloomberg then reported that two named, competing infrastructure-investor consortia — KKR/Energy Capital Partners/Blackstone on one side, Brookfield/IFM Investors on the other — are bidding, in what could be one of the year's largest leveraged buyouts.¹³ GFL shares surged more than 10% overnight on the news.¹⁴

Elsewhere, both Onterris's board-led strategic review and BP's Archaea Energy sale process remain unchanged from prior issues — no new timetable, price or counterparty has surfaced for either.^15,16 And for scale, worth comparing this week's Trillium multiple against Clean Harbors' pending EnviroServe acquisition, reported in Gaya's August 22 issue at roughly 9x post-synergy EBITDA — a reminder that mission-critical equipment platforms with aftermarket revenue tend to command a real premium over labor-intensive field-services businesses.

AI Data Centers Are Pulling PFAS Into the Cooling Conversation

A ChemSec report, covered widely including by Fortune this week, argues that the AI data-center buildout is increasing demand for PFAS used in semiconductor manufacturing and in some advanced cooling fluids — with some operators reportedly favoring PFAS-based fluids over water for certain cooling applications.¹⁷ ChemSec is an advocacy organization, and its conclusions should be read as such rather than as a neutral industry forecast, but the underlying industrial tension is real: the same buildout increasing demand for chips, electricity and water is happening exactly as regulators and communities scrutinize PFAS and industrial water use more closely.

Google and NASA Put Methane Detection Into Orbit

Google and NASA JPL jointly developed MAPL-EMIT, an AI model that automates methane point-source detection using EMIT, the imaging spectrometer mounted on the exterior of the International Space Station.¹⁸ Space-based methane detection has mostly been discussed in the context of oil and gas leak detection; this model's applicability to landfills specifically is the notable extension — U.S. municipal solid waste landfills are the third-largest source of human-caused methane emissions, and surface-level measurement at scale has historically been costly and inconsistent.¹⁸

EPA began a second Time-Critical Removal Action at the J.H. Baxter Superfund site in Eugene, Oregon on September 14, with work expected to continue into spring 2027.¹⁹ The site is a useful illustration of one of remediation's most durable characteristics: once contamination exists in soil, groundwater, tanks or sediments, political shifts in Washington rarely make the underlying physical problem — or the spending required to manage it — disappear.

This week's other project-level items from municipal and utility trade press (Texas and Maryland wastewater and engineering procurement) could not be independently confirmed against a primary source in time for this issue and are held for next week rather than reported on secondary sourcing alone.

Five themes stand out entering the fourth quarter: water equipment (Trillium's 14.6x establishes a useful datapoint for scarce, installed-base, aftermarket-heavy assets); environmental field services (Clean Harbors/EnviroServe reinforces the strategic value of dense national networks in a still-fragmented market); testing & compliance (state regulatory fragmentation — coal ash devolution among them — supports laboratory and product-compliance demand even as Washington deregulates); industrial water (data centers, semiconductors and manufacturing are creating an investment cycle that extends well beyond municipal infrastructure); and remediation (low policy sensitivity and long project durations remain structurally attractive).

What This Week's Deals Should Prompt PE to Ask Management

• Water businesses: What share of revenue is replacement versus new construction, and how much is installed-base aftermarket service versus first-fit equipment sale?
• Environmental consultants: What share of revenue is compliance-mandated versus discretionary, and how exposed is the backlog to federal climate programs specifically (as opposed to state or municipal mandates)?
• Waste businesses: What is route density, how concentrated are disposal relationships, and what portion of EBITDA growth is price versus volume?
• Battery-recycling and critical-minerals platforms: How much of the investment case depends on the BRACE Act's co-location fix actually clearing the Senate versus current-law permitting constraints?