Did you hear? A few months back, scientists published a study measuring the concentrations of per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) in rain—not just in industrial areas, or even industrial countries, but all around the world. For those unfamiliar with the term “PFAS,” these are a group of several thousand “forever chemicals,” called this because they last so long.1 Their fluorinated structure—which is what makes them so indestructible—also gives them a special property: they repel oil and water. This is good—or so it was thought—because you can make really cool things with these, like non-stick “Teflon” pans (yes, that trademarked name has become synonymous with PFAS). But it turns out that these chemicals are highly toxic, and don’t break down in the environment—perhaps ever2—so contaminate everything.
Now if fluorinated chemicals were only in pans that might be not such a big deal (though anyone who has cooked on an old chipped-up Teflon pan might disagree). But somehow they’ve ended up in a huge number of products. Companies have put them in carpets to repel stains and down jackets to repel water. They’ve put them in burger and butter wrappers,3 so the chemicals go into your food and then your stomach. They’ve put them in cosmetics,4 which you put on your face. They’ve put them in dental floss, which goes into your gums and into your blood vessels. They even put them in ski wax and firefighting foam (which goes straight into snow, rivers, and water supplies).
So really, this new study—while disturbing—isn’t really surprising. How couldn’t PFAS get into raindrops—it’s in dust from your carpet, it’s burned in garbage, it’s on McDonald’s litter abrading on roadsides, it’s on airport runways after fires break out. So many ways to enter the water cycle—to the point where the levels of PFAS in rain are often higher than drinking water thresholds. And of course, that also means it’s in you, and me, in little children who are extra sensitive to its effects, and not just human children, but countless children of all species as well.
All the Children
I heard this news as I was taking a train back from the Polycrisis conference with Dr. Martin Scheringer, a co-author of the raindrops study.5 And truthfully, it made me more depressed than anything else I had heard over those five days of talking about societal collapse. Immediately an image flashed into my mind of my son sticking his tongue out to catch a snowflake and it switched from being an ‘Awww!’ moment to an ‘Ahhh!’ moment.
These chemicals, which we’ve known to be toxic since at least 1978 and have been produced since the 1930s, are now ever-present, and wreaking havoc on the health of humans and other species around the world—causing maladies such as breast, kidney, and testicular cancer, colitis, thyroid disease, and birth and developmental defects (see figure). And yet we keep producing more of them. According to data from the US Environmental Protection Agency (and nicely summarized by NRDC), in 2020, 49 facilities from 37 companies produced 6.2 million pounds of PFAS. Of these, about half the chemicals aren’t even regulated or have any health studies conducted—meaning they could be better, or worse, than those that have been tested. More frightening is that fewer than 200 of the PFAS chemicals are even required to be reported so who knows what nastiness will be discovered in the scores of unregulated fluorinated substances in products today.
Stay Calm and Carry On?
Since I learned this information, another group of scientists reported that they’ve successfully destroyed PFAS chemicals using just heat, lye and “a common solvent.” That’s huge news—as it’s currently very expensive and polluting to destroy these chemicals. So instead most PFAS is either incinerated or discharged directly into the air, water, or land, according to the EPA. If suddenly PFAS could be cheaply made into inert waste then problem solved, right?
Wrong. All the PFAS in the environment is so diffuse that this is not an option for this distributed pollution—hence why the authors of the raindrop study actually suggested creating a new planetary boundary just for PFAS.6
In theory, if companies were required to safely destroy all PFAS chemicals—both in manufacturing and at the end of the life-cycle through extended producer responsibility (EPR)—perhaps this technology would come in very handy. Though, more realistically, once laws like EPR were passed, these companies would probably just say ‘forget this’ and stop adding PFAS to most goods in the first place (who wants to deal with cleaning these up from millions of pounds of contaminated waste?). And that brings us to our punchline.
Clean Up on Aisle, uh, All of Them
Most urgently, we need to get rid of PFAS from disposable and one-time use products that can’t be recaptured. Anything intentionally being put on or into our bodies should not have PFAS in them. Denmark became the first country to ban PFAS on food packaging, and nothing is stopping other countries—or states7—from following suit (other than food, clothing, and packaging lobbies that is). Banning it from cosmetics, dental floss, carpets,8 wrappers, and anything else that causes direct human exposure is an urgent priority. Add to this putting pressure on companies to stop using it in down jackets, sneakers, and other products also makes sense.
But perhaps most strategic is to create extended producer responsibility for all PFAS chemicals—the many thousands already identified plus any discovered in the future (so companies can’t just replace a regulated one with a new, unregulated one). If companies were held responsible for PFAS’s proper destruction—not burning or burying them—these chemicals would quickly be removed from low-value products like dental floss and food packaging. Probably even down jackets, as what company would want to deal with treating millions of toxic feathers with lye and solvents to break down the PFAS that they infused in them in the first place? EPR of PFAS-containing products should be a priority POPs-community campaign (a Google search didn’t turn anything up on this but I’m happy to update this article if this is indeed an ongoing effort).
Longer term, all PFAS chemicals should be classified as highly toxic and thus highly regulated—used only for completely unsubstitutable purposes (if those truly exist). All producers should be held accountable for PFAS at the end of their products’ lifespans. Even then, as PFAS doesn’t break down in the environment, we’ll be suffering the effects of this contamination for generations, until perhaps someone designs a bioremediation strategy—wheat might work—that can take up and concentrate these chemicals so future PFAS farmers can raise and sell their PFAS crops back to 3M, DowDuPont, Chemours, and other PFAS producers, whose corporate niche/penance it’ll be to clean up the legacy pollution from decades of deceitful practices. Ok, that part is wishful thinking. More likely future farmers living in the collapse-times will be feeding wheat to their children that’s swimming in PFAS and never even know (just quietly suffer the devastating health effects, blaming God, Gaia, or their ancestors) but then again, with some applied pressure in the short-term, we can at least get these horrific chemicals out of production as quickly as possible—and there’s no downside to that.
Endnotes
1) How many exactly? This journal article comprehensively looks at 1,400 per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances. The OECD identifies 4,730 PFAS. The CDC, citing an older EPA estimate, has it at 9,000. However, the US Environmental Protection Agency’s new update from August 2022 now pegs the number of PFAS at 14,735.
2) According to this Environmental Working Group article, “Scientists have found no mechanism by which PFOA [a PFAS chemical] and other terminal PFCs can be broken down in the environment. This means that every PFOA molecule on the planet is here to stay. Opportunities for humans (and other animals) to be exposed continuously to PFOA would continue even if it were banned.”
3) Consumer Reports sampled 118 different wrappers for PFAS. Only 35 had no fluorine detected (which actually means less than 10 parts per million (ppm), reflecting the sensitivity limits of the equipment). Many had more than 20 ppm, which Denmark labels as unsafe and some had more than 100 ppm, a level beyond which California will start restricting next year. A few, like Chick-fil-A’s sandwich wrapper hit a whopping 553.5 ppm. McDonald’s bags for french fries and chicken nuggets were 250.3 and 219 ppm respectively. Yum!
4) Actually it’s in shampoos, sunscreens, shaving creams and many other products too.
5) Also accompanied by Anna Kovasna of the Global Ecovillage Network, a fellow polycrisis journeyer!
6) In 2009, scientists proposed a set of planetary boundaries that humans should not cross, but are, including loss of biodiversity, stratospheric ozone, climate change, ocean acidification, freshwater, land use change, nitrogen and phosphorus flows, atmospheric aerosol loading, and chemical pollution. This new article proposes a tenth boundary specifically for PFAS, due to their especially toxic and long-lasting nature.
7) Five states have or will have bans on PFAS in food packaging by 2023: Washington, Maine, New York, Vermont, and Connecticut. 8) Not surprisingly, babies, because they crawl around on carpets, are highly exposed to PFAS through carpets treated with PFAS. Translation: carpets shouldn’t have PFAS in them. Period.
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Erik Assadourian has been a Senior Fellow at the Worldwatch Institute for 15 years and the Director of the Institute’s Transforming Cultures project since its creation in 2009 with production and publication of State of the World 2010: Transforming Cultures: From Consumerism to Sustainability. Erik is co-author of over a dozen books and an eco-educational board game, Catan: Oil Springs. He is a leading expert in sustainable development, economic degrowth, sustainable communities, consumerism, and cultural change. In his free time, Erik yardfarms and forages edibles where he lives. Erik recently obtained a certification on Sustainable Urban Agriculture from the University of District of Columbia. He is currently writing a book on Gaianism.
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