What will become clear over the next 5 years is the extent to which the worldwide environment is polluted with PFAS.
Given how much PFAS has been found in remote corners of the world, I think it is safe to assume that most of the world has been touched by PFAS. Everywhere humans try to find PFAS, we find it. The reason we hear about it so often now is that we are checking for it everywhere. And like the article describes, there are new PFAS being discovered all the time.
It's actually fascinating just how much power private business has to keep their chemical lists private _now_, in the _past_ and concievably in the future.
The fact that we can't just ask them "what were you chemically making 20 years ago" is really an absurd blackhole in regulatory frameworks.
Basically, even the leading edge regulatory frameworks tackling PFAS are doing so _after it's polluted things_ and has _no idea_ what they're associated with, other than large scale manufacturing, 3M, etc.
On the one hand, it's easy to understand since manufaturing has so many different components, but a sheer "there's clearly chemists somewhere, making this shit up and detailing what they're doing" issue, it's pathetic.
It's not pathetic, it's a collection issue. Estimate the cost of setting up that regulatory framework, and the cost of that reporting on the businesses themselves, and you'll quickly understand why it hasn't been done. Even the cost of estimating, is itself a cost. Without proper awareness of the issue and incentive to fix, a lack of that information isn't anything other than a natural consequence of reality.
I grew up in a poor town that sourced water from the Cape Fear river. There were two major factories in our immediate area: one that made paper and the other made industrial chemicals. The Dupont plant mentioned in the article was 10 miles upstream from where we were. We knew it was better to buy bottled water than to drink what came through the pipes. Grateful for the scientists and journalists for their work exposing all of this.
Just remember: When you buy bottled water, you don't really know where it comes from, and what contaminants are in it.
Don't assume that bottled water is any safer (or more dangerous) than your tap. After all, when you look at the fine print of cheaper bottled waters, you'll often see something like "Sourced from the XXX municipal water supply."
I also remember staying at the Poland Springs resort and observing that they had septic tanks a 10 minute walk away from the "shrine" to the original "Poland Spring," and finding trash in the woods that had been there for years.
One 2021 study found PFAS in 39 out of 101 bottled water products that ranged in levels from almost zero to nearly 19 parts per trillion. David Strifling is director of the Water Law and Policy Initiative at Marquette University Law School. He said there’s no general assurance that bottled water is safer than tap water.
Sure. But if you know for a fact that your tap water is contaminated it’s logical to buy water from elsewhere. Maybe look for ones that have been filtered with RO.
The substantive claim against PFAS is that they're very persistent in the environment, can bioaccumulate, and end up in places we didn't anticipate (e.g., in the rain). This is a good argument for scaling back.
Separately from this, there's some science to suggest that PFAS are harmful to humans, but at doses very much higher than experienced by the general population. Many of the headlines about PFAS being detected in weird places involve parts per trillion, and at that level, no health impacts have been demonstrated. Even for lead and ethylmercury in water, the norms are in parts per billion.
Then, there's a cottage industry of anti-progress doomsayers who want to equate it to a handful of big environmental missteps of the past, so the lines get blurred. Same as with microplastics, where you're bombarded with headlines about them being found in random places and being vaguely bad for you.
> and at that level, no health impacts have been demonstrated.
Right, but since it bio-accumulates even if your exposure is low over the decades you may accumulate enough of it for it to affect your health. If your body can't get rid of it then it's not the dosage that counts anymore, it's the total exposure over your lifetime that matters.
Parts per trillion are small, but can still be bad for you. And this is an area of active study, the old threshold of 70 ppt was dropped a thousandfold recently:
The Wolverine shoe leather tannery up the road dumped their ScotchGuard contaminated scraps/waste in the swamps behind a farm owned by a family friend back in the 70s and 80s. Now my well water is contaminated with a few parts per trillion of PFAS, and the PFAS levels in my blood are significantly higher than the threshold of proven harm.
>Same as with microplastics, where you're bombarded with headlines about them being found in random places and being vaguely bad for you.
Compounds in plastics mimic hormones putting everyone (and the whole biosphere) on low grade hormone replacement. There's not a question about "if", but "how much". They are biologically active, they are present inside you.
I think many people would rather get upset about some miniscule detection in a random place than take a hard look at their own home where their highest exposure is.
As someone who lived in a place that's still dealing with pfoa contamination, your characterization of "anti-progress doomsayers" feels insensitive. If you tell people that they and their kids have toxic chemicals in their blood at 100x the normal concentration they're going to be concerned. Writing them off as outliers is dismissive and misses the point; it doesn't matter if things are safe in small doses if companies can't be trusted to avoid exposing people to unsafe doses.
From a 2016 study in Vermont:
> More than 400 wells tested positive for PFOA. More than 300 wells had
concentrations at levels greater than the state’s PFOA/PFOS drinking water
standard of 20 parts per trillion (ppt). The maximum level of PFOA detected in a
private drinking water well was 4,600 ppt.
I mean, we’ve understood negative impacts of climate change for like a hundred years now, and minimizer propaganda is still winning the information war for a majority of the planet, and some 40% of Americans.
I don’t think there’s any issue at all with getting ahead of forever chemicals and regulating them before it gets to climate change levels of disaster (in some deregulation parts of the country, it will soon be legal to contaminate the soil and groundwater with pfas and radioactive materials because some politicians friend wants to sell their companies waste to road work).
I am sorry, but I simply disagree that the issue is minimal here. We should be treating this as if it’s already out of control and stamping it out before propaganda pieces settle and let it become out of control.
The problem with PFAS isn't the amount found in the general environment, it's the amount found in the immediate area around factories that produce them or apply them to products.
>> and at that level, no health impacts have been demonstrated
But again, absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.
The fact is, our ability to detect harmful health effects, particularly over the long term, is still in its absolute infancy. There is absolutely no reason to declare things safe until proven unsafe, particularly, particularly when you look with a historical lens.
The damage of a chemical will always be greater than what we can measure, because science (measuring blood levels of tens of thousands of people with mass spectometry and correlating against long-term health events like cancer) is incredibly hard, expensive, and slow.
As a thought experiment, suppose a chemical released in the water increased emotional irritability by 1%, or ADD by 2%, or reduced sperm count by 3%? What are the odds that we'd be able to conduct a study sensitive enough to prove the link? And what are the odds that anybody would happen to guess that correlation existed and choose to look in the first place?
> Are some PFAS considered safe? Or as a class are they all harmful?
I don't think many chemists want to admit that there's very little reason to believe any PFAS formulation could ever really be safe. Perhaps one could be designed to break down faster and be less bioaccumulating in animals but realistically their mechanism of action as surfactants - the reason they're so industrially useful - is the very reason they're toxic to living organisms.
Surfactants fundamentally change the surface tension of water and other fluids which has an effect on everything from how biological surfaces adhere to each other (including to the internal extracellular matrix that most multicellular life depends on to organize its cells) to how proteins fold together. Normally surfactants like soap, lecithin in egg yolks, and glycolipids are not a problem because they're immediately biodegradable but not PFAS.
The carbon-flourine bonds that make them so resistant to breakdown and so bioaccumulating are the reason why they work in such a wide range of industrial environments, surviving high temperature and strong redox reagents that would normally rip apart any other molecule. It's the worst kind of catch 22. The whole class should be banned and the industry forced to live with the consequences like all the anti-fouling agents that are banned in the maritime industry.
This applies only to small molecule PFAS, not PFAS polymers, which are about as inert as you can get. You need the small molecules to make the polymers, but there's no reason you need to release them into the environment. Strong regulation (e.g. Chinese style, with lengthy prison sentences or death penalty for CEOs of companies violating them) could enforce strict containment of the reactions and safe disposal of the waste with techniques such as supercritical water oxidation.
This would increase the cost, but there's no good substitute for PFAS polymers, so people who really needed them would be willing to pay.
> Researchers collaborating with Baker’s lab collected samples from North Carolina’s Cape Fear River in 2016. Using this new detection method, they tested the samples and found 47 different PFAS. Of those, 11 had not been previously detected in the river, and eight had not been detected anywhere outside of a lab.
Chemours, a renamed DuPont factory, has been caught dumping PFAS into the river before. Funnily enough, it was spun off partially in order to assume liabilities against DuPont from the various lawsuits they had against them for very similar reasons.
There are also multiple superfund sites along the river. Pollution has been an issue for decades and yet nothing ever really seems to change.
> To avoid responsibility for what many experts believe is a public health crisis, leading chemical companies like Chemours, DuPont and 3M have deployed a potent mix of tactics.
> They have used public charm offensives to persuade regulators and lawmakers to back off. They have engineered complex corporate transactions to shield themselves from legal liability. And they have rolled out a conveyor belt of scantly tested substitute chemicals that sometimes turn out to be just as dangerous as their predecessors.
Well, that is interesting to detect new PFAS chemicals in water. Then, we get this this neat tidbit:
"The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) keeps a list of more than 14,000 known or potential per-and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS)."
Why do we need 14,000+ different PFAS substances? I honestly did not know there was this many out there.
So that when one is banned for causing cancer you can just tweak the formula so that it's technically different assume can bypass bans even though it's essentially the same thing and just as toxic.
I went in expecting them to just use Florine as a proxy for PFAS (which is commonly and incorrectly done) and was pleased to see some real science with actual compounds identified.
The chemists are from UNC and the article writer from NC State University.
Is it common to just use just "Carolina" when referring to locals instead of "North Carolina" (to differentiate from the South)?
Carolina, in this case, refers to the name of the institution. This is likely based on its history. UNC-Chapel Hill used to be the only public institution of higher education in the southeastern US. Over time, UNC evolved to become the name of the system of schools that includes UNC-CH, NCSU, and 15 other campuses.
To this day, however, UNC-CH is still often referred to as Carolina, UNC, Chapel Hill, or - for athletics - the Tar Heels.
to be clear, the connection is more than colloquial. NCSU and the others you mention are formally "constituent institutions" under "the UNC system" (although this comes as a surprise to most NCSU students).
Thanks for this. I went through the article again and it doesn't even hint at that usage. I suppose it's a bit like "America" coming to mean just one country.
I grew up in Chapel Hill and yes UNC Chapel Hill refers to itself as "Carolina" (in sports [1], research [2], and name [3]).
It's less commonly recognized outside the state... I live in NYC now and often have to catch myself when I say something like "I'm headed back to visit a friend at Carolina" since it almost always results in "oh? which one?"
I've spent a decent amount of time in NC (and a little bit of time in SC), and I've never heard of "Carolina" as a generic term for just NC. The closest I've heard is "the Carolinas" for both NC and SC.
Used that way Carolina refers to UNC chapel hill, not north carolina the state. It's an extremely common local usage when talking about the university sports teams. It's less pervasive but still very common for referring to the university itself.
Phosphorus in Watch Factories > Lead in Paint > Asbestos in everything > PFAS in the global water supply, (unevenly distributed but considerable just the same.)
I probably skipped a few pernicious enviro-toxin whoopsies but still--Its almost like there's a pattern about to emerge here.
Readit News
Given how much PFAS has been found in remote corners of the world, I think it is safe to assume that most of the world has been touched by PFAS. Everywhere humans try to find PFAS, we find it. The reason we hear about it so often now is that we are checking for it everywhere. And like the article describes, there are new PFAS being discovered all the time.
This is a generational issue.
The fact that we can't just ask them "what were you chemically making 20 years ago" is really an absurd blackhole in regulatory frameworks.
Basically, even the leading edge regulatory frameworks tackling PFAS are doing so _after it's polluted things_ and has _no idea_ what they're associated with, other than large scale manufacturing, 3M, etc.
On the one hand, it's easy to understand since manufaturing has so many different components, but a sheer "there's clearly chemists somewhere, making this shit up and detailing what they're doing" issue, it's pathetic.
Don't assume that bottled water is any safer (or more dangerous) than your tap. After all, when you look at the fine print of cheaper bottled waters, you'll often see something like "Sourced from the XXX municipal water supply."
I also remember staying at the Poland Springs resort and observing that they had septic tanks a 10 minute walk away from the "shrine" to the original "Poland Spring," and finding trash in the woods that had been there for years.
Let me give you the data to back it up:
https://www.wpr.org/dnr-says-bottled-water-companies-arent-r....
One 2021 study found PFAS in 39 out of 101 bottled water products that ranged in levels from almost zero to nearly 19 parts per trillion. David Strifling is director of the Water Law and Policy Initiative at Marquette University Law School. He said there’s no general assurance that bottled water is safer than tap water.
In sheer probability, your 'dont do X' is really a minority outlier and doesn't help anyone.
Details: https://www.epa.gov/pfas/our-current-understanding-human-hea...
Separately from this, there's some science to suggest that PFAS are harmful to humans, but at doses very much higher than experienced by the general population. Many of the headlines about PFAS being detected in weird places involve parts per trillion, and at that level, no health impacts have been demonstrated. Even for lead and ethylmercury in water, the norms are in parts per billion.
Then, there's a cottage industry of anti-progress doomsayers who want to equate it to a handful of big environmental missteps of the past, so the lines get blurred. Same as with microplastics, where you're bombarded with headlines about them being found in random places and being vaguely bad for you.
Right, but since it bio-accumulates even if your exposure is low over the decades you may accumulate enough of it for it to affect your health. If your body can't get rid of it then it's not the dosage that counts anymore, it's the total exposure over your lifetime that matters.
https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/news/features/stricter-federal-...
The Wolverine shoe leather tannery up the road dumped their ScotchGuard contaminated scraps/waste in the swamps behind a farm owned by a family friend back in the 70s and 80s. Now my well water is contaminated with a few parts per trillion of PFAS, and the PFAS levels in my blood are significantly higher than the threshold of proven harm.
Compounds in plastics mimic hormones putting everyone (and the whole biosphere) on low grade hormone replacement. There's not a question about "if", but "how much". They are biologically active, they are present inside you.
From a 2016 study in Vermont:
> More than 400 wells tested positive for PFOA. More than 300 wells had concentrations at levels greater than the state’s PFOA/PFOS drinking water standard of 20 parts per trillion (ppt). The maximum level of PFOA detected in a private drinking water well was 4,600 ppt.
https://dec.vermont.gov/sites/dec/files/documents/PFAS%20Sam...
I don’t think there’s any issue at all with getting ahead of forever chemicals and regulating them before it gets to climate change levels of disaster (in some deregulation parts of the country, it will soon be legal to contaminate the soil and groundwater with pfas and radioactive materials because some politicians friend wants to sell their companies waste to road work).
I am sorry, but I simply disagree that the issue is minimal here. We should be treating this as if it’s already out of control and stamping it out before propaganda pieces settle and let it become out of control.
However, if we are able to better detect them, we can build better remediation which we need.
But again, absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.
The fact is, our ability to detect harmful health effects, particularly over the long term, is still in its absolute infancy. There is absolutely no reason to declare things safe until proven unsafe, particularly, particularly when you look with a historical lens.
The damage of a chemical will always be greater than what we can measure, because science (measuring blood levels of tens of thousands of people with mass spectometry and correlating against long-term health events like cancer) is incredibly hard, expensive, and slow.
As a thought experiment, suppose a chemical released in the water increased emotional irritability by 1%, or ADD by 2%, or reduced sperm count by 3%? What are the odds that we'd be able to conduct a study sensitive enough to prove the link? And what are the odds that anybody would happen to guess that correlation existed and choose to look in the first place?
Like asbestos, we should shelve this substance, even if it's good at what it does.
I don't think many chemists want to admit that there's very little reason to believe any PFAS formulation could ever really be safe. Perhaps one could be designed to break down faster and be less bioaccumulating in animals but realistically their mechanism of action as surfactants - the reason they're so industrially useful - is the very reason they're toxic to living organisms.
Surfactants fundamentally change the surface tension of water and other fluids which has an effect on everything from how biological surfaces adhere to each other (including to the internal extracellular matrix that most multicellular life depends on to organize its cells) to how proteins fold together. Normally surfactants like soap, lecithin in egg yolks, and glycolipids are not a problem because they're immediately biodegradable but not PFAS.
The carbon-flourine bonds that make them so resistant to breakdown and so bioaccumulating are the reason why they work in such a wide range of industrial environments, surviving high temperature and strong redox reagents that would normally rip apart any other molecule. It's the worst kind of catch 22. The whole class should be banned and the industry forced to live with the consequences like all the anti-fouling agents that are banned in the maritime industry.
This would increase the cost, but there's no good substitute for PFAS polymers, so people who really needed them would be willing to pay.
Chemours, a renamed DuPont factory, has been caught dumping PFAS into the river before. Funnily enough, it was spun off partially in order to assume liabilities against DuPont from the various lawsuits they had against them for very similar reasons.
There are also multiple superfund sites along the river. Pollution has been an issue for decades and yet nothing ever really seems to change.
That's not an accident.
> To avoid responsibility for what many experts believe is a public health crisis, leading chemical companies like Chemours, DuPont and 3M have deployed a potent mix of tactics.
> They have used public charm offensives to persuade regulators and lawmakers to back off. They have engineered complex corporate transactions to shield themselves from legal liability. And they have rolled out a conveyor belt of scantly tested substitute chemicals that sometimes turn out to be just as dangerous as their predecessors.
- https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/20/business/chemours-dupont-...
Why do we need 14,000+ different PFAS substances? I honestly did not know there was this many out there.
The chemists are from UNC and the article writer from NC State University. Is it common to just use just "Carolina" when referring to locals instead of "North Carolina" (to differentiate from the South)?
To this day, however, UNC-CH is still often referred to as Carolina, UNC, Chapel Hill, or - for athletics - the Tar Heels.
https://catalog.unc.edu/about/unc-system/
It's less commonly recognized outside the state... I live in NYC now and often have to catch myself when I say something like "I'm headed back to visit a friend at Carolina" since it almost always results in "oh? which one?"
[1] https://shop.goheels.com/mens-fanatics-branded-black-north-c...
[2] https://research.unc.edu/?s=Carolina
[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kwi4dIT-jIY