3

The Forever Chemicals

the name dupont is synonymous with American industrialism and wealth. What began in 1802 as a gunpowder manufacturer is, since its 2017 merger with Dow Chemical, now the world’s largest chemical manufacturer and developer. Many of the oddly named substances that are a part of today’s American life—brand names like freon, nylon, and Lycra—were born in DuPont laboratories.

That list of substances includes Teflon, the nonstick material used as a coating on cookware, food wrappers, electrical cables, and waterproof clothing. Today, everyone knows the product by its trademarked name; as the ads say, not even geckos can stick to Teflon. It was discovered in 1938 by a chemist working for DuPont who in researching refrigerant gases accidentally synthesized a waxy material with an interesting property: almost nothing would stick to it. This laboratory creation was perhaps the first example of a class of chemicals known as per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, or PFAS. They are not found in the natural world, but chemists have created literally thousands of variants in the lab. It was soon apparent to those at DuPont that their new chemical could be used to manufacture a coating in an assortment of products, and mass production of Teflon began almost immediately at the company’s Washington Works plant in Parkersburg, West Virginia. Sales followed. By 1948, the company was producing 2 million pounds of the substance per year.¹

During the same period that DuPont was ramping up Teflon, scientists working to develop an atomic bomb for the Manhattan Project during World War II were desperate for an efficient way to isolate the required U-235 isotope from the raw uranium found in nature; isolating U-235 was the first step in weaponizing it. A researcher named Joseph H. Simons had a “Eureka” moment in this quest when he passed raw fluorine—a greenish-yellow natural gas known as the “wildest hellcat” of elements—through a carbon arc and providentially produced a carbon-fluorine compound that worked beautifully for making bombs. After World War II, Minnesota Mining and Manufacturing (later named 3M, another iconic American research and manufacturing company) bought Simons’ patent and brought in some of the Manhattan Project’s scientists for the company’s “Fluorochemical Project.” The most famous product of this scientific incubator was created by accident in 1953, when a mixture of chemicals splashed on a lab assistant’s canvas shoes. Just as the DuPont chemists found with Teflon, the 3M team learned that the chemical splashed on the assistant’s shoes repelled water and grease. Later patented under the name Scotchgard, this was a new PFAS, one that would be heralded by the company as one of its greatest inventions.²

A note on PFAS nomenclature, which can be confusing: two of the most prominent types of PFAS are often referred to by their own acronyms, PFOS (used in Scotchgard) and PFOA (used to manufacture Teflon—and also known as C8). All four abbreviations will feature in this story. The overriding point is that it’s all one big family of organic compounds with amazing (and valuable) characteristics. Because PFAS repel oil and water, are stable at high and low temperatures, and reduce friction, the list of commercial uses is now virtually countless, including all manner of textiles, paper goods, and automotive and aerospace components. PFAS are almost perfect for leak-proof food wrapping and packaging. The compounds are also terrific in fighting fires where the flames are fueled by a combustible liquid, like gasoline, which water is ineffective at extinguishing. Accordingly, PFAS compounds have been used widely in fire protection at military bases and commercial airports.

The chemical bonds in PFAS are almost impossible to break down Their “half-life”—basically a measure of how long a molecule lives—in the environment is very, very long, so long the scientists have not been able to even estimate the length.³ For that reason, and because the PFAS-intensive, fire-suppressing foams tested or applied at hundreds of airports and military bases have inevitably, inexorably seeped into the wells and water systems in hundreds of nearby communities in the United States, it is all around us, especially in the water we drink. This problem of what is now widely labeled the “forever chemical” is not exclusive to the United States: contaminated drinking water systems have caused outrage from Australia to Italy to Japan, with many more certain to be discovered in years to come. PFAS also enters our food, and therefore our bodies, through migration from packaging (like fast food containers, microwave popcorn bags, and pizza boxes) and from eating fish and other animals that have bioaccumulated PFAS from the environment. There is also exposure, particularly to infants and toddlers, through hand-to-mouth contact with furniture, carpets, and other surfaces treated with PFAS to prevent staining.

Of course, the ubiquity of PFAS in the environment would not be a major health concern if PFAS were not also, by now, ubiquitous in human bodies. Even if these chemicals were not in our drinking water (and data suggest that, for almost all of us, they are), all of us have also been exposed through food and environmental contact.

In 1998, 3M’s own scientists undertook a series of studies to determine exactly how widespread the chemicals had become, testing blood samples from numerous studies in the United States and abroad, both recently and in the past. This included samples remote in time (1957, Sweden) and place (1994, rural China)—intersections of time and place where Scotchgard, Teflon, fire extinguishers, and other accouterments of industrial society would hypothetically have been relatively distant. The researchers’ findings were sobering: PFAS had migrated everywhere. Only one of the 11 population samples showed no presence of PFAS in the subjects. That outlier was a group of 10 U.S. military recruits whose blood had been drawn and tested between 1948 and 1951.⁴ Today, detectable levels of PFAS can be found in the blood of virtually all residents of the United States.⁵

The next and most important question: do these chemicals have effects on humans and other animals? In short, yes. And whereas most studies of human exposures to chemicals present ethical and funding challenges to conduct, we now know quite a lot about the health effects of PFAS—more than for almost any of the thousands of products that have provided consumers with “Better Things for Better Living through Chemistry,” DuPont’s advertising slogan for many years.

As recognition of the toxic effects of PFAS exposure has grown, it has prompted greater national interest in addressing the issue, including efforts to rid food and packaging of them and to produce cleaner water supply infrastructure for communities whose systems are contaminated. Some federal and state agencies are mobilizing. People who are sick and believe their illnesses are related to exposure are suing for compensation. As the industries have dug in to protect their interests, their tactics in doing so have checked all the boxes of a classic misinformation and “uncertainty” campaign: money, toxic exposures, hidden documents, mercenary scientists, lawsuits, government agencies trying to protect the public, and political interference in those efforts.

DuPont is among the foremost offenders in the PFAS saga, responsible for one of the most extensive and harmful drinking-water supply contaminations in American history. At the company’s Washington Works plant in West Virginia, some 2.5 million pounds of the substance were lost in processing or discharge, with most of that occurring in the 1980s and 1990s. Much of it was released into the atmosphere as steamy air emissions, while some was dumped carelessly along the banks of the Ohio River or buried in nearby landfills. Such landfills were not suitable depositories of dangerous waste, and enough PFAS waste entered the ground to infiltrate the water supplies of surrounding communities. Over time, residents near the Washington Works had elevated blood levels of PFAS.

Early indications of the adverse health effects of this exposure were seen in farm animals. One farmer in Parkersburg, Wilbur Tennant, had previously sold a portion of his grazing land to DuPont, which in turn used it to dispose of waste from the Washington Works. When Tennant saw his cows (who continued to graze nearby on the farmer’s remaining land) becoming deranged and then dying from a strange, inexplicable condition, he suspected chemicals from DuPont’s nearby plant were the cause. He contacted an attorney, Rob Bilott, who brought suit against DuPont in 1998.

In 2000, while reviewing the thousands of DuPont documents obtained in discovery, Bilott found reference to a chemical, PFOA (or C8), with a name similar to PFOS—the Scotchgard chemical that 3M had just pulled from the market. He requested that DuPont further provide him with all their internal documents on this chemical. Teflon’s manufacturer obliged, sending 110,000 documents—perhaps in an attempt to overwhelm the attorney. The effort was not successful. After months of digging through the documents, some of them more than 50 years old, Bilott pieced together a powerful indictment of a company that was aware of how toxic PFOA actually was, how widespread the exposure, and then took strides to cover it up.

The internal documents from DuPont illustrate both the company’s acknowledgment of and attempts to contain the problem with PFOA. When the company tested its factory workers in the 1970s, the workers were found to have high concentrations of PFOA in their blood. In 1981, DuPont was informed by 3M (from which DuPont actually purchased much of its PFOA) that the chemical had been shown to cause birth defects in rats; DuPont then looked at data from its Washington Works Teflon division employees and found that, of the employees’ seven most recent births, two babies had eye defects. Ten years later, DuPont’s own scientists set an internal safety limit for PFOA concentration in drinking water at one part per billion; later that same year, DuPont measured the concentration in one local water district at three times that level. These are only a few examples of what DuPont learned—and what it kept secret from its workers, nearby residents, and public health agencies—until forced to reveal it by attorney Bilott’s suit.⁶

Bilott’s work was just starting. Seeing proof that that C8 had contaminated far beyond Tennant’s farm, the attorney filed another lawsuit, this a class action on behalf of 80,000 residents in six water districts of Ohio and West Virginia. The suit alleged that humans—not just cows—were being sickened by PFAS and demanded medical monitoring as a part of any financial restitution. Recognizing the larger public health implications of these documents, in March 2001 Bilott sent letters to the EPA and the Justice Department informing them of what he learned. DuPont’s response? The firm went to federal court, requesting a gag order to block Bilott from speaking to the EPA. After a federal judge denied the request, Bilott shipped his entire file to the regulatory agency, and in 2004, the EPA also filed suit against DuPont for violating the Toxic Substances Control Act. Federal regulations require that firms disclose information about the toxic effects of their products to the EPA upon discovery; DuPont had clearly failed to do that.

Facing this onslaught of legal action, DuPont did not face the music. Instead, the company set out to convince both the public and government agencies charged with protecting the public that exposure to PFOA was simply not that dangerous for humans. Predictably, DuPont hired a product defense scientist to lead this campaign—a company called ChemRisk, led by Dennis Paustenbach. After performing an initial retrospective assessment of the available research on PFOA, Paustenbach wrote, “The predicted historical lifetime and average daily estimates of PFOA intake by persons who lived within five miles of the plant over the past 50 years were about 10,000-fold less than the intake of the chemical not considered as a health risk by an independent panel of scientists who recently studied PFOA.”⁷

The phrasing is rather opaque, but Paustenbach meant to argue that the West Virginia and Ohio residents’ cumulative exposure to PFOA would have been well below the level that was identified as dangerous by an independent panel of experts. Readers may have already flagged the telltale word in that statement: “independent.” It is rare to see manufacturers hire truly independent panels of scientists. Typically that’s the last thing they want. In this case, the allegedly independent panel had been set up for the state of West Virginia by another product defense firm, Toxicology Excellence for Risk Assessment (TERA), which was recommended to the state government by DuPont because TERA could “assemble a package and then sell this to EPA, or whomever we desired.” (That admission is thanks to an internal company email.) TERA’s “independent” panel included scientists working for DuPont, ostensibly charged with working in the interests of the state. And the panel gave DuPont what it needed. In 2002, West Virginia set a safe level in drinking water at 150 parts per billion (ppb)—some 150 times the safe level that had been determined earlier by DuPont’s scientists for the company’s internal use.⁸ The faulty state standard of 150 ppb served to lessen DuPont’s legal obligation to provide clean drinking water to West Virginians, who continued to be exposed at levels soon found to be dangerous. (Also noteworthy: Michael Dourson, at the time the head of TERA, was later nominated by President Trump to head the chemical safety office of EPA. As I recount in Chapter 15, that nomination failed.)

Another product defense firm, the Weinberg Group, provided DuPont with further assistance in navigating the federal and civil claims related to PFAS. In a 2003 letter signed by Weinberg’s vice president of product defense, P. Terrence Gaffney, and uncovered by journalist Paul Thacker, the consultant group outlines its comprehensive strategy for defending DuPont—and in doing so more or less opens the product defense playbook for public edification. All emphases are original:

The constant theme which permeates our recommendations on the issues faced by DuPont is that DUPONT MUST SHAPE THE DEBATE AT ALL LEVELS. We must implement a strategy at the outset which discourages governmental agencies, the plaintiff’s bar, and misguided environmental groups from pursuing this matter any further than the current risk assessment contemplated by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the matter pending in West Virginia. We strive to end this now.

Weinberg’s experts would also seed the scientific literature “with papers and articles dispelling the alleged nexus” between PFOA and health problems that were claimed by community residents. The Weinberg Group would further undertake to “develop ‘blue ribbon panels’ of thought leaders on issues related to PFOA … to create awareness of safety regarding PFOA in areas of likely litigation, and in particular where medical monitoring claims may be brought … ; begin to identify and retain leading scientists to consult on the range of issues involving PFOA so as to develop a premium expert panel and concurrently conflict out experts from consulting with plaintiffs … ; reshape the debate by identifying the likely known health benefits of PFOA exposure … ; coordinate the publishing of white papers on PFOA, junk science and the limits of medical monitoring … ; [and] provide the strategy to illustrate how epidemiological association has little or nothing to do with individual causation.”⁹

DuPont denies hiring the Weinberg Group to work on PFOA, although this claim appears to be contradicted by documents, including invoices that surfaced in the litigation.

The advice and work of the product defense firms turned out to be of limited value to DuPont.¹⁰ The EPA’s action against the company was easy to address because it arrived at a very advantageous moment in history: 2005, a period of notoriously weak EPA enforcement under the George W. Bush administration. Without admitting liability (as is common in such deals—the EPA accepts such terms in order to get the outcome without a risky court fight), DuPont settled with the federal agency. The company paid a $16.5 million fine, which was the largest civil penalty the EPA had ever obtained to that date. It amounted to pennies for the company, especially given the profits it made from Teflon and related products.⁶

In the civil claims, DuPont evidently lacked confidence that the analyses from ChemRisk and TERA would be enough to overcome the multitudes of victims who were claiming injury. (Civil justice proceedings can be much more diligent enforcers than actions by regulatory agencies, especially in the matter of penalties incurred.) The company agreed to pay $107 million to these plaintiffs, a sum that included measures to improve water treatment facilities and to fund research to determine if there was a “probable link” between C8/PFOA exposure and human disease.

This last stipulation was fraught with danger for DuPont, because the discovery of any such direct link would require it to fund an expensive medical monitoring program and to financially compensate for exposure victims. Three renowned and truly independent epidemiologists, chosen jointly by the attorneys representing the claimants and the company, were given carte blanche to study the health effects of PFOA in this population. These “C8 Studies,” as they are called, are why we know a great deal about the health effects of exposure to this class of chemicals. They also represent a massive scientific undertaking involving 69,000 subjects, most of whom provided one or more blood samples and filled out extensive questionnaires to help catalog health and exposure histories.¹¹ The project has resulted in dozens of scientific publications.

The C8 Studies found that PFOA exposure increases human risk of testicular cancer, kidney cancer (among workers at the manufacturing plant), ulcerative colitis, thyroid disease, pregnancy-induced hypertension, and elevated cholesterol levels. This last morbidity is of great concern because it is a risk factor for cardiovascular disease, the nation’s leading killer. At the same time, the panel also rejected links with many other diseases.¹² In the end, DuPont and a company it spun off, Chemours, later paid out an additional $670 million to 3,550 residents of West Virginia and Ohio exposed to PFOA.¹³

In 2012, Harvard epidemiologist Philippe Grandjean published a study in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) reporting that PFAS exposure appeared to interfere with children’s antibody responses to routine childhood immunizations. (This would be bad. The body’s antibody response is what provides humans with immunity to the diseases for which we’re vaccinated.) His research found that children with higher PFAS levels in their blood had lower concentrations of antibodies, which suggested that PFAS exposure was limiting the function of the immune system.¹⁴ In response, 3M scientists wrote a letter to JAMA critical of the Grandjean paper, citing several other published studies and asserting that these findings offered by the company should be “reassuring to those concerned with the immune system, childhood infectious diseases, and [perflourinated compounds].”¹⁵

Years later, Grandjean, preparing to testify as an expert witness in a lawsuit against 3M, uncovered evidence of a longstanding disinformation campaign: studies conducted by 3M and other manufacturers as far back as 1978, all showing the impact of PFAS exposure on immune system function. None of these results was revealed to regulatory agencies or the scientific community for decades; in coverage of the revelation in 2018, Grandjean told an interviewer, “Had I found out in 1978 that this industrial chemical was toxic to the immune system, I could see all sorts of examinations of exposed kids that could be done, but I was not told, so it had to wait, [in] this case 30 years, before I turned my attention to this.”¹⁶ Ensuing reporting by the Intercept’s Sharon Lerner corroborated and expanded on the discoveries in the lawsuits.¹⁷ By 2016, the U.S. National Toxicology Program had reviewed the extensive human and animal evidence that had been published in the scientific literature (including Grandjean’s 2012 study) and concluded that the PFOA used in Teflon and PFOS in Scotchgard are presumed to be immune hazards to humans.¹⁸

DuPont and 3M were not alone in seeing the wheels fall off their campaigns to evade financial responsibility for cleaning contaminated water systems and toxic dumps (as mandated under the “polluter pays” model of Superfund program administered by the EPA). Nor were they alone in their efforts to defeat a host of civil lawsuits alleging broad PFAS-related liability. PFAS manufacturers of every size and scale have paid hundreds of millions of dollars toward settlements, with many more likely to come. These firms also face threats to their future business. To stem this tide, the industry has returned time and again to the tobacco industry’s playbook: manufacture uncertainty about the science, then attack the public health agencies trying to protect the public.

Big Tobacco demonstrated for all hazardous industries that scientists are needed to produce the source material for misinformation campaigns. For manufacturers producing PFAS and countless other chemicals, this means employing firms that will churn out papers, present them at scientific conferences, and publish them in journals edited and peer-reviewed by other product defense scientists. These papers are rarely primary research—studies in which scientists collect new data in the field or the laboratory and analyze the results. Instead, they are reviews and re-analyses of the existing literature, relying on manipulation of the numbers to reach the preordained conclusions. In the case of PFAS, the product defense studies almost uniformly minimize effects of toxic exposures: The chemical in question is not nearly as dangerous as those biased public health agencies are saying; these exposure levels won’t make anyone sick; there’s no corporate liability; there’s no need to clean up dumps, landfills, and water supplies.

Alongside the alternative “science” sowed to defend PFAS compounds, an organization called the American Council for Science and Health has carried water for the industry in public debates. Based on the group’s history, this is not a surprise. ACSH is an industry-funded organization with a typically rosy-sounding name that specializes in inserting itself at the middle of many public health controversies, with particular expertise in downplaying the risk of exposure to toxic substances. On its website it has published articles opposing regulation of mercury emissions from coal-burning power plants¹⁹ as well as diesel exhaust emissions,²⁰ while promoting climate change deniers²¹ and attacking the science that finds harm from consumption of sugar²² and alcoholic beverages.²³ For PFAS, one ACSH report concluded that “the current data indicate that we can expect no risk to human health associated with the levels of PFOA exposure found in the general population.”²⁴ This was issued before the C8 studies were published, but ACSH has defended their report even after the independent scientists found significant health effects in exposed humans.²⁵ Such is the fundamental problem for these product defense specialists and their industry patrons: their arguments age terribly, becoming more suspect and harder to defend in the face of the accumulating counterevidence.

The findings of the early PFAS studies that were suppressed for decades by the companies producing the substances have motivated scientists across the world—epidemiologists, toxicologists, exposure assessment experts—to conduct more research. Hundreds of new studies on PFAS appear in the scientific literature annually, and today it is clear that the health effects of these ubiquitous, dangerous chemicals are profound and diverse. So are many of the routes through which human exposure to these substances can occur. In 2014, for example, scientists working with the data gathered in the C8 study showed that breastfeeding is a major source of PFAS exposure.²⁶ This discovery lends particular importance to the work of Grandjean, who has demonstrated that PFAS exposure during infancy is associated with subsequent immune deficiency.²⁷

DuPont, 3M, and other companies, and their product defense collaborators, can back and fill as hard and as fast as possible, but the weight of this evidence is overwhelmingly against the manufacturers. There is a limit to how much uncertainty mercenary scientists can manufacture, and the PFAS industry may have reached it. It becomes clearer by the day that the level of safe exposure to PFAS (if there is one) is far lower than industry’s scientists claim.

Recall the misbegotten episode in which the product defense firm TERA, working for DuPont, helped West Virginia set a safe level of PFAS in drinking water of 150 parts per billion. That was in 2002. Since then, independent science has driven that number down repeatedly. The European Food Safety Agency has expressed concern that PFAS exposure is pushing up cholesterol levels and therefore increasing heart attacks, so in 2018 the organization started a process to decrease PFAS intake through food.²⁸ Recognizing that drinking water levels must be lowered substantially to avoid PFAS transmission through breast milk, in 2016 the EPA published an advisory that stipulated a maximum of 70 parts per trillion (ppt—the t is trillion, not billion) for PFOA and PFOS in water.²⁹ The amount is almost unimaginably small: the equivalent of 70 drops of water in an Olympic-sized swimming pool. This is also more than 2,000 times lower than TERA’s proclaimed “safe” level.

In other words, there appears to be virtually no safe level of exposure to these chemicals, and new studies keep finding new health effects. Researchers in Veneto, a region in Italy with contaminated water, found that young men exposed to PFAS had lower sperm counts, lower sperm mobility, and shorter penises (!) than unexposed men.³⁰

These extremely cautionary, restrictive numbers put both the manufacturers and the military (especially the Air Force, which has to clean up the contamination around its bases all over the world) in a difficult position. The Trump White House and its EPA actually tried to block release of a lowered exposure standard from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, with one staffer calling it “a public relations nightmare.”³¹ The ensuing public outcry was enormous and prompted serious pushback from both Democratic and Republican legislators representing districts with military bases and otherwise PFAS-contaminated water supplies. The administration had no choice but to release the report, increasing the pressure on the EPA to tighten regulations—and on the military to focus more resources on either cleaning up the toxic material or providing bottled water on and around the bases.³²

3M stopped manufacturing PFAS in 2002.³³ Of course, this cessation didn’t resolve the company’s legal problems. Because PFAS persists in the environment, the lawsuits persist in the courtrooms. The state of Minnesota sued 3M, accusing the local company of dumping large amounts of these chemicals while knowing that they were extremely hazardous and covering up the dangers of exposure.³⁴ 3M’s attorneys countered this action by hiring Barbara Beck (of yet another product defense firm, Gradient) to provide a report for the court in which she claimed that the state overestimated any risk and that current exposures are far below a level that could make people sick.³⁵ Gradient also teamed with Exponent to challenge the National Toxicology Program’s decision to categorize PFAS as an immune hazard. Exponent’s scientists published their evaluation in Critical Reviews in Toxicology, one of the favored product defense journals, asserting, not surprisingly, that “available evidence is insufficient to conclude that a causal relationship has been established between PFOA or PFOS exposure and any immune condition in humans.”³⁶

In 2018, 3M settled the Minnesota law suit for $850 million without admitting any liability. It was the third-largest payment for an environmental damage claim, after the Deepwater Horizon and the Exxon Valdez spill. After the settlement, the Minnesota attorney general released many of the documents that she would have used in trial, providing fascinating insight into 3M efforts to defend PFOA—including payments of millions of dollars to academic scientists to produce papers that were intended, at least in part, as “defensive barriers to litigation.”³⁷

DuPont, unable to purchase PFOA from 3M after 2002, built its own factory to manufacture GenX, a PFOA replacement, and other PFAS in Fayetteville, North Carolina. Chemours, the DuPont spin-off that inherited the facility, continues to produce the products that are central to Teflon manufacture. DuPont may be out of the business of producing PFAS, but with Chemours, the drinking water saga continues. Chemours was sued by the state of North Carolina for dumping GenX and contaminating the water supply of 250,000 residents of the area who get their drinking water from the Cape Fear River.³⁸ In 2018, the firm settled with the state, agreeing to pay $12 million, improve the pollution controls at the plant, commit to regular environmental monitoring, and conduct testing on five PFAS chemicals whose toxicity has not been adequately characterized.³⁹ That was not even a slap on the wrist, but I have already reported on the earlier DuPont settlements in West Virginia for real money—hundreds of millions of dollars total.

Some manufacturers that once used PFOA and PFOS in their products have now substituted new, presumably safer compounds—although the safety of all PFAS compounds is very much in question.⁴⁰ In 2020, we even have a new product defense organization defending the manufacturers of the old PFAS products. It’s the Responsible Science Policy Coalition, funded by 3M and other producers, and two of its professed goals are very much on-brand for a corporate front group: “Provide scientific resources to public policy decisions at federal and state level”; and “Coordinate investments in research with other stakeholders to maximize value and to accelerate results.”⁴¹

The beat goes on.