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After half a century of polluting the global environment, including Virginia, chemical company 3M announced Monday that it will stop producing per- and polyfluorinated alkyl substances (PFAS) by the end of 2025.
This is great news for the world. But in a crisis that will force taxpayers in the United States and around the world to pay billions of dollars to mitigate the crisis, 3M’s decision came too late.
PFAS are so-called “permanent chemicals” that contaminate water, soil and air. They can be measured in humans and animals thousands of miles away from where they are manufactured or used in thousands of consumer products. Close to production facilities, they can accumulate in the blood and tissues as they enter the body faster than they break down.
It is crucial to end their production as soon as possible. But so far, removing PFAS from the environment could take decades, if at all possible. 3M’s discontinuation of PFAS offers cold comfort to those who have been exposed for decades to PFAS made by the company, used as raw materials in thousands of other products, and some made and sold by 3M itself.
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As part of a class-action settlement, a scientific panel studied the public health impact of PFAS on the community surrounding a West Virginia plant that used PFAS manufactured by 3M. The team concluded that continued exposure to PFAS in the environment was associated with abnormal levels of “high cholesterol, ulcerative colitis, thyroid disease, testicular cancer, kidney cancer, and pregnancy-induced hypertension” near production sites.
Interestingly, this area is the same community where equipment used by another PFAS production plant sent to central Virginia for cleaning recently polluted a drinking water reservoir in Roanoke County.
The science panel in West Virginia exposed the cynicism of companies like 3M, DuPont and Chemours that made billions in net sales knowing they were selling products that could harm people.
The company’s denials and duplicity were most apparent in 2019, when a top 3M executive testified under oath before a congressional subcommittee that PFAS had never harmed a single individual at the levels it was present in the environment.
The outrageousness of the statement had the group’s chairman swearing in disbelief. “We have witnesses here who are seriously ill and injured,” the chairman told a reporter for the Minneapolis Star-Tribune after the hearing.
Records obtained in a settled lawsuit demonstrate that for decades, 3M knew but repeatedly failed to inform government regulators and public company studies of the potential toxicity of PFAS in products such as Scotchgard, Gore-Tex and Teflon.
As 3M on Monday touted its “commitment to innovation to reduce PFAS reliance,” the company continued to spread the myth that PFAS is harmless. A 3M press release blamed the government regulator for its decision to “phase out all PFAS manufacturing by the end of 2025” and “work to end the use of PFAS in our product portfolio by the end of 2025.” These regulators are “focused on reducing or eliminating the presence of PFAS in the environment,” the release said.
Is there a scientific consensus that the risks of PFAS outweigh their benefits?
Maybe we should check with the folks who live next to a river polluted with PFAS made by 3M near the Red Wing shoe factory in Michigan. Or check with people who live near Cape Fear River, North Carolina, where a PFAS production facility dumped so much contaminated wastewater that it will cost hundreds of millions of dollars to clean up. Or maybe we should ask dairy farmers who use municipal sludge as fertilizer and find that the levels of PFAS in their milk are high enough to prevent them from being sold.
People near military bases using PFAS-based firefighting foam face restrictions on drinking water. Private wells have been shut off and owners have been asked to drink bottled water near the production plant. Some people experience inexplicable cancer.
Meanwhile, 3M notes that it “currently has annual net sales of manufactured PFAS of approximately $1.3 billion.”
This fact, dear reader, tells an ugly truth. The potential dangers of PFAS have been known to many people for more than half a century. But nothing happened until pesky citizen scientists and government regulators stepped in. The lesson here is simple. Corporations almost always act in their own interests rather than those of society.