PFAS: the forever chemicals poisoning our planet

Microplastics are everywhere, including in your bottled water. But one of the more troubling aspects of microplastics is the stuff that sticks to microplastics and comes along with them. And one group that has been of particular trouble to human and environmental health are the Per- and Polyfluorinated Substances, also known as PFAS. And our exposure to harmful chemicals extends to food too. Whilst some plastic substances are banned from being put into recycled packaging, they are often present in the same packaging plants and so get into our food packaging anyway.  Birgit Geueke is senior scientific officer at the Food Packaging Forum, and she outlined the findings of her work in an interview last year..

Birgit - So if you use the recycled plastic in food packaging, for example, the souce should be pretty clean. PT bottles should only be recycled into new PT bottles or other containers. However, there are cases where you find residue of your old TV in food packaging or similar materials, and that's for sure not intended and shouldn't be like this. According to the law. There are several concerns. We don't know that these chemicals exist in these products. Additionally, of course, many of these chemicals have been tested and shouldn't be there. For example, there are carcinogens that cause cancer that interact with the hormone system. These chemicals shouldn't be there.

These PFAS compounds are so hardy and difficult to shift, they’ve earned the name ‘forever chemicals’. But their existence, and their effect on their surroundings wasn’t fully understood until a landmark lawsuit in the US was filed against chemical company DuPont. The man that spearheaded the lawsuit was Robert Bilott…

Robert - This is an entire family of chemicals that are completely man made. None of them existed on the planet prior to about the time of World War II. Some research as a result of the Manhattan Project, looking for a nuclear bomb, basically resulted in this new type of technology that companies were able to use, principally the 3M company in the United States, of being able to connect carbon and fluorine atoms together. And that is something that really doesn't exist in nature. And so when you put these carbon and fluorine atoms together, it creates an incredibly strong chemical bond. That's something that's really useful in manufacturing. But that strong chemical bond also means that when those chemicals get out into the world, they don't break down under natural conditions. And when living things, including people are exposed to those chemicals, our bodies really don't know how to get rid of these man made chemicals. So they stay there, they build up, and they persist for long periods of time. And unfortunately, we now know that they're incredibly toxic as well.

Chris - And their applications? Why are we making them?

Robert - Because they're incredibly useful. These chemicals are used to make materials waterproof, stain resistant, grease proof. If you're talking about chemicals that have been used to help make things like non-stick surfaces, waterproof or stain resistant clothing, carpeting, things that are slippery like dental floss, even in things like firefighting foams or computer chips. Just an incredibly wide variety of uses for these types of manmade chemicals.

Chris - What was your association with them? How did you get involved in this story?

Robert - Well, I had actually got involved with this family of chemicals about 25 years ago as a lawyer in the United States. I was working primarily with big chemical companies, helping them comply with all of our different environmental rules and laws about what can go into the air and water and soil. And I got a call one day back in 1998 by a gentleman who was raising cows in West Virginia, and his cows were getting sick after drinking white foam that was getting into the creek that they were using for their drinking water. And when we agreed to take that case on for this farmer, it was through the litigation and the lawsuit that we brought back in 1999 that allowed us to begin getting access to documents from the companies that were making these chemicals and using them.And that led to what became the next 20 to 25 years of nonstop court cases and litigation and court battles to get access to this information and documents. It was through that process of digging into these internal company documents that we found out that these chemicals even existed and how toxic they were, and most disturbingly that the companies that had been making them knew how toxic and dangerous they were, but had actually been intentionally covering that up, withholding that information from scientists, regulators, and from the public.

Chris - The action that was then taken, it was a class action. You got lots and lots of people together who had all been impacted in some way. Is that how it played out? And, and the amount you won was north of £500 million, wasn't it?

Robert - The original case started off with just one family. Once we had figured out what was happening with the cows and with the exposures that family had, we ended up then bringing claims on behalf of the entire surrounding community, who we found out had the same chemical in their drinking water, some 70,000 people. And we did that.

Chris - This was coming from a local chemical company, was it?

Robert - Correct. This was exposure that was coming from a DuPont Teflon manufacturing plant along the Ohio River in the United States. We found out that the chemical PFOA that they were using to make the Teflon had gotten into their drinking water, some 70,000 people. So we pursued that case as a class action. We then ended up finding out the same chemical and related chemicals were used in other communities. We brought additional cases for others. And over the last 20 years, we have pursued that all over the United States. Now that we're finding out these chemicals are in drinking water all over the country. We are representing hundreds of cities, municipalities over a dozen different states that are bringing claims for the same drinking water contamination and environmental contamination. And just last summer, we were able to reach settlements with 3M and DuPont, where they're now agreeing to pay up to over $13 billion to remove this from drinking water.

Chris - Presumably this problem is not unique to the United States.

Robert - It is not. Over the years as we scoured all these documents and really started to learn where these chemicals were used and all of the different products they've been used in, and what we've learned is these chemicals have made their way all over the planet. There's one product in particular that was very effective in getting these chemicals sprayed out all over the world. And that was a certain type of firefighting foam called aqueous film forming foam, where you may see it referred to as AFFF. And how are you told to use that foam? To spray it out all over the ground? And that foam, historically, has had PFAS, these chemicals in it and high concentrations. And although the companies making those chemicals knew that that information wasn't shared with the firefighters, with the military personnel or with anybody else, that this stuff, if you used it and sprayed it out all over the place, was going to put PFAS into the ground, into the water. So now we're finding these same chemicals in drinking water, in groundwater, in soil, all over the planet.

Chris - What's been the impact of your work on regulation? Are things now tightening up? Presumably with potentially billion dollar settlements looming over them, the manufacturers have had a rethink.

Robert - You know, it's been an incredibly long, tedious process to get this story out to the world about the fact that these chemicals even exist, what types of products they've been used in, and the fact that what happened here in the United States, what started in West Virginia, these are the same chemicals that are now being found in the water in the UK, in Italy, in Australia, in Japan. That this is a global contamination story. It took a long time to get that information out. It took things like having to do a feature film like Dark Waters or a documentary, The Devil We Know, or the book Exposure to help get the public to understand what had happened. And the fact that it's the same chemicals now that are being found everywhere. But once that story finally came out, and we saw that particularly the last couple of years with these films and books, we saw the power of that information. Lawmakers started proposing changes to the laws in the way we handle these chemicals. The public started demanding that companies take these chemicals out of their products. And so now we're seeing changes not only across the United States in the laws in the regulations, but globally as well, the EU proposing a potential ban on all of these chemicals. And even the original manufacturer, 3M coming out and saying finally that it will agree to stop making any of these chemicals by 2025.