Interviewees:
Andrea Amico, resident of Portsmouth, New Hampshire, and co-founder of the Testing for Pease campaign group
Alissa Cordner, environmental sociologist at Whitman College, Washington, co-director of the PFAS Project Lab, and author of the book “Toxic Safety: Flame Retardants, Chemical Controversies, and Environmental Health”
Dan Jones, Professor of Biochemistry, Michigan State University, interim associate director of the Center for PFAS Research
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Transcript:
Andrea Amico: We had been away at a lake in our state for vacation…. So you can imagine I have, you know, small children, they're like toddlers at the time… You know, our car is full of wet towels and, just gear from the lake and clothes and luggage and things like that.
So we open the door, our dogs greet us immediately. They're jumping. They're excited to see us.
We're trying to carry in all of our stuff, our kids are excited. We're trying to get them in the house and I walk up into my kitchen and I see the envelopes on the table with a stack of mail.
Big yellow envelopes. From the state health department. Four of them - one for each member of the family.
Andrea: As soon as I saw the envelopes… I just got, like, this pit in my stomach, you know, because it was like, wow.
Everything I had been fighting for at this moment is like, this is like, such a pivotal moment… but now I have to open those envelopes…
Andrea Amico has been waiting a long time for what’s inside those envelopes. More than a year.
Inside those envelopes are the results of blood tests.
Andrea: And so there was just part of me that was scared to open those envelopes, and there was part of me that just wanted to rip them open so quickly and see what was inside of them.
And so it was just this very emotional moment for me. Because I was like, gosh, what is it going to show? What are we going to see?
The reason Andrea, her husband and their two toddlers got their blood tested – it has to do with a former Air Force base near their home in Portsmouth, New Hampshire. Toxic chemicals were used at the site for decades. They had seeped into the soil, into the groundwater. And then contaminated the drinking water.
The chemicals in question are what’s known as PFAS. That stands for per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances. Another name they go by is “forever chemicals.” Because that’s basically how long they can stick around in the environment.
Andrea: How did we even get into this position to begin with? You know, that we let a class of thousands of chemicals just be out into production that lasts forever, it's just, it's mind boggling.
Today on Living Planet – why forever chemicals have become so widespread, the toxic mess they can create, and what’s being done to clean it up.
Alissa: If we want to reduce risk from PFAS, we need to turn off the tap
Dan: Anything that has very long lifetime in the environment is not a good thing
I’m Neil King.
Ok, let’s rewind a bit and go back to the start of Andrea’s story.
It’s 2007. Andrea and her husband have just moved from Massachusetts to the city of Portsmouth, New Hampshire.
Andrea: which is about an hour north of Boston
Her husband’s got a new job there, with a company at a business park called the Pease Tradeport. It’s a former Air Force Base that was closed down in the early 90s.
Andrea: this large trade port, which now has about 200 plus businesses and the businesses range from medical office buildings, software companies, there's a Community College, tech industry, some restaurants, a golf course, you know, it's this very large trade port that's been repurposed into this place where there's lots of businesses that bring people together every day.
Around 10,000 people work at the Tradeport. It’s a nice place. Lots of trees.
They have kids. And it’s convenient because there’s a daycare right next door to her husband’s office.
Andrea: It worked out so nicely because he could drive to work and drop them off at the same time. And he was close by and we felt really great about that.
The years go by. And then, in 2014, Andrea’s life gets upended when she comes across an article in the local newspaper.
Andrea: It was the Friday before Memorial Day, so it was late May of 2014. I was sitting in my car and I was reading our local newspaper online and I came across an article that said high levels of a contaminant had been discovered in one of the drinking water wells at the Pease Trade Port and that they had shut down the well in an abundance of precaution.
Authorities had shut down the well because they had detected PFOS. It’s a toxic chemical found in a type of firefighting foam, called AFFF.
Andrea:… AFFF was designed for the military to put out petroleum-based fires, fuel fires, quickly. You know, as far back as the 1970's the Air Force was using that foam for training purposes.
Besides PFOS, they also found the forever chemicals PFOA and PFHxS – but in lower quantities.
PFOS was what set off alarm bells, though, because it was detected at concentrations of 2500 parts per trillion. That was more than 12 times above the Environmental Protection Agency’s recommended guidelines at the time. BUT more than 600 times the updated US standards today.
Andrea: Honestly, it made my heart sink. I was like, wow, what is this like, what, what does this mean? You know, my children, my husband have been drinking this water every day.
… I am not an engineer or a scientist and I don't know anything at the time about drinking water, but I knew that if there was contamination significant enough to shut down a well, that that was important to pay attention to... like, that couldn't be good, you know?
Andrea works as an occupational therapist. And she’d never heard of PFOA or PFOS before.
Andrea: Like, what are these chemicals? You know, I, I need to do more. I need to learn more.
So she began digging.
PFAS are a family of around 15,000 synthetic chemicals. And what they have in common is a super strong carbon-fluorine bond – one of the strongest in organic chemistry.
The first forever chemical was discovered in the 1930s. And by the 1950s, PFAS were being added to everyday consumer products.
They’ve been a huge part of our lives ever since.
SFX commercials for products with PFAS
PFAS are everywhere. And that’s because they’re incredibly useful. They have unique properties, like- they’re stable, heat-resistant, and can repel water, dirt and fats. They’re used in all sorts of consumer and industrial products – from non-stick pans (Teflon anyone?), to waterproof outdoor gear, to stain-resistant carpets, makeup, takeaway food containers, and fire-fighting foam.
They’re also found in medical devices, semiconductors and wind turbines, for example.
And when I say they’re everywhere. They’re also in us. We mainly ingest PFAS through drinking water and food. These chemicals are highly mobile – they can spread easily in water and wind to pollute different environments. And they bioaccumulate, meaning they build up in our bodies over time.
Exactly what that means for human health is something scientists are still learning about. Because, of the thousands of PFAS out there, only a handful have been studied. And only a fraction of them are regulated in the EU and US.
Research so far has linked different PFAS to problems including elevated cholesterol, thyroid disease, hormonal disruption, decreased fertility, and some cancers.
Andrea: What I had quickly learned that really concerned me was that these chemicals bioaccumulate and they build up in the body and they stay there for a really long time. And that they are associated with multiple different adverse health effects. And so, you know, I immediately, immediately thought of my children who were one and three at the time and thinking, well, geez, they're at critical windows of their development and they have now been drinking highly contaminated water. Like, what does that mean for them?
One of the first things Andrea did was contact her kids’ daycare. Did they know any more?
Andrea: I thought maybe they'd have some answers, you know, and sadly they were like, ‘no, we saw this article the same time you did.’
A week later, authorities organized a community meeting at the Pease Tradeport to address the contamination. There were representatives from the state health department and the Air Force on hand. And Andrea went along as well, to ask questions that had been plaguing her:
Andrea: What can we do about this? … In this kind of shock and all of these emotions that I was feeling that my family had drunk contaminated water I was like, ‘well can we get a blood test to just determine how much is in their body?’
I want to know what can I do to monitor their health? How are we going to keep them healthy? What do I need to look for?
But she says she came away disappointed. Firstly, the idea of blood tests was dismissed. At the time, she says there were only three labs in the country that could process PFAS tests.
Andrea: It was like, ‘Oh no, you know, it's not like a standard test. It's not routine, it's not needed. It's not going to tell you anything.’
…It was really just like… ‘we don't really know what these chemicals do. So we just don't have to worry...’ And I just, I saw it completely differently: If you don't know, then how can you tell me not to worry? And that was really a pivotal moment for me, that first meeting going like, OK, they don't have the answers, they don't know, and I need to keep asking questions.
Andrea set up a local campaign group with other moms from the daycare called “Testing for Pease.” She got on the phone, reached out to local officials…
Andrea: … our City Council, state representatives, EPA, I was emailing anyone I could think of, 'cause I was just a dog with a bone at this point.
Months went by, and she had hit a wall. No one was ringing her back. No one seemed to know anything. And so, fed up, Andrea reached out to the local newspaper.
They ran a front page story about her campaign to get blood tests for the community. And that gave her the boost she wanted, catapulting the issue into the public eye.
Andrea: And we started seeing action and awareness and attention. And right away, the state starts stepping up to put a blood testing program in place.
Which brings us back to Andrea’s kitchen, in 2015, … and those big yellow envelopes sitting on the counter.
Andrea: I've always been the type of person. I don't avoid issues like even conflicts in my life. I like to face things head on, like that's always just kind of how I approach things.
SFX ripping open an envelope
Andrea: So no, I, I did not wait to open those envelopes. I opened them shortly after we arrived home because it was something I had advocated for so long. And it was, it was finally here, you know?
Inside there were a bunch of documents. A letter from the health department, a lab report with charts, and a bar graph.
Andrea: it confirmed for me what I had been afraid of the whole time - that my family had elevated levels of these chemicals in their blood. My daughter being the most exposed. She was 3 1/2 when the well shut down and it was just really, it was devastating to see those results.
So they had, you know, what would be expected of like the general population had this much and like she had this much, you know, so even just the bar graph was a bit scary to look at because it's like you can just see how much higher the levels are in your own child.
At the same time, other families in the area were getting their own yellow envelopes in the mail.
Almost 2,000 people got their blood tested between 2015 and 2017. And about a fifth of them were children under 11 who’d gone to daycare at the Pease Tradeport. A health department report concluded that levels of PFOA, PFOS and PFHxS among the Pease population were “significantly higher” than the general US population – about 2 to 3 times higher.
Andrea: I had a mixture of emotions. You know, I was angry that my child had been exposed to chemicals unbeknownst to me at no fault of my own, no fault of her own… I was scared. I'm like, what does this mean? Like what's going to happen to her? Is something happening to her now? I don't see it? you know, like what does this mean for her health?
Andrea still didn’t have answers. She was frustrated. So she set her sights on the next goal – to find out whether the forever chemicals in the Pease water supply were impacting people’s health.
Andrea:Obviously you now know the levels are high, so now something else needs to be done… So you got to do a health study. You know, you got to study these people.
She started campaigning for a health study of the Pease population. And at the same time she started reaching out to other communities affected by PFAS. In 2017, she helped set up the national PFAS contamination coalition. They’re a group advocating for better PFAS regulations and for polluting companies to be held accountable.
In 2018, she testified before the US Senate in the first ever PFAS hearing.
SFX Andrea testifying
In 2019, Pease did eventually get its health study. But the data are still being analyzed. It’s part of a larger study also looking at health outcomes in seven other contaminated communities across the US. Andrea says the results are expected to be published sometime this year.
Andrea: It is frustrating to be here almost 11 years later and have blood testing and health studies and have some information, but we don't know for sure if they have found any conclusions or links to health effects in our community and we're anxiously awaiting those results.
In the meantime, Andrea says many people have come forward with health problems they believe could be related to the water. But they don’t have the science to back up these hunches.
Andrea: I heard from some families that their children had liver issues that they couldn't explain, like abnormal liver function tests in the blood.
There was a large company at Pease and one of the employees there also sent their children to daycare at Pease, and she had shared with me that 10 people in the company had thyroid cancer. So that certainly caught my attention. There were women who were sharing issues with fertility. So, you know, women that worked in offices who were saying to me, I'm one of six women in this office who either can't get pregnant or when we do get pregnant, we miscarry. And we don't know. Is this related?
I've heard from veterans who were at the base, when it was an Air Force Base and the water was likely contaminated… who said, you know, I have all types of cancers, you know, different people reporting kidney cancer, bladder cancer, prostate cancer. Again, you can't say for sure it came from the water.
But I will tell you it's a really horrible place to be, to have to like grapple with a health effect and then be like, did the water cause this?
Over the last decade, a growing number of cities and towns across the US have been affected by PFAS contamination. Often it’s because they’re near former military bases – like the one at Pease. Or industrial sites that manufacture or use the chemicals. PFAS can also leach out of landfills and wastewater treatment plants.
Andrea: In some farms they have spread them as fertilizer all over our food sources and now, particularly in the state of Maine, which is one state north from me, there's been several farms that have been highly, highly contaminated with PFAS as a result of spreading biosolids. And so now, we're not just talking about water sources being contaminated. We're now talking about our food sources being contaminated. And some of these farms produce crops and some of them produce meat and milk and those who become contaminated and chicken eggs have become contaminated. It's tragic and it's awful and it just speaks to why we need to regulate these chemicals.
How did we even get into this position to begin with? You know, that we let a class of thousands of chemicals just be out into production that lasts forever, that are going to be in our food and our water and our bodies and our, you know, it's just, it's mind boggling.
There have been thousands of lawsuits filed across the US to try to hold chemical companies to account for PFAS pollution -- major US chemical companies like 3M, DuPont (which came up with Teflon pans) and its spinoffs Chemours and Corteva.
The most high-profile of these cases involved a Dupont plastics plant in West Virginia. A class action lawsuit in 2004 alleged that the company had been discharging the toxic chemical PFOA into the local water supply for decades.
The contamination was linked to a range of health issues, including cancer, in nearby residents. Documents also showed that the company had known about the harmful effects of PFOA since the 1960s. In 2017, DuPont ultimately agreed to pay $670 million to settle, but denied any wrongdoing.
SFX movie trailer
It was a landmark case, and it served to raise national awareness about the dangers of PFAS.
There was even a film with actor Mark Ruffalo made about it.
Because of the risks known today, PFOA and PFOS are no longer produced in large quantities.
But they’re still being found in drinking water and the environment. That’s because they were so widely used for decades. And, well, they’re forever chemicals – so they survive for a long, long time.
Testing over the last 20 years shows that 98 percent of Americans have detectable levels of PFAS in their blood.
And a study by the US Geological Survey from 2023 estimated that nearly half of all tap water across the US has one or more type of PFAS.
How worried should we be though?
Most of the research around these chemicals has focused on PFOS and PFOA. Most PFAS haven’t been well studied at all. So of the thousands that are out there, how do we know which ones are toxic? Or which ones will stay in the body the longest?
Alissa Cordner: Studies are done on one chemical at a time… but even if we don't have individual studies on every individual PFAS, the overwhelming body of evidence suggests that all the chemicals that have been studied in this class are concerning in terms of persistence and bioaccumulation and toxicity.
That’s Alissa Cordner. An environmental sociologist at Whitman College in the US state of Washington. She’s the co-director of the research group PFAS Project Lab.
Alissa: And in terms of toxicity, they don't just impact one part of the body, they impact multiple organ systems and so: is it possible that there is some chemical out there that’s part of the PFAS class that isn't of concern in terms of exposure and toxicity?
I would say it's definitely possible. At this point, the overwhelming weight of the evidence says that if we want to protect public health and the environment, we should treat all chemicals with this carbon fluorine bond and with these perfluorinated carbon atoms - we should treat all of those chemicals as though they are of concern and work to reduce exposure as much as possible.
There are ways to clean up PFAS that get into the water supply and environment. That, of course, would be an obvious way to limit exposure. But these methods have downsides. They aren’t cheap, and they’re often energy intensive. Let’s take a look at what the options are.
If we go back to the Pease Tradeport in New Hampshire … The Air Force ended up installing filters made from granular activated carbon to trap PFAS at the contaminated well. They also set up two groundwater treatment plants to process 350 million gallons of water a year. That’s around 1.3 billion liters. Here’s Alissa again:
Alissa: And that type of remediation is absolutely essential for communities that are impacted with high levels of PFAS and it's essential to be thinking about technologies that do this well at the very smallest scale, so an individual private drinking water well, all the way up to drinking water system that serves millions of people.
Filtration with granulated active carbon or other materials is the main way to get PFAS out of water. But it doesn’t actually destroy PFAS. So there’s still the dilemma of what to do with the chemical waste that’s left behind.
Dan Jones: Most of the time the PFAS that is collected on filters just gets moved to a landfill somewhere and we've just moved it someplace without really destroying it…
That’s Professor Emeritum Dan Jones of the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology at Michigan State University.
Dan: It certainly can leach back out. I mean the landfill leachate is a major source of how PFAS migrating in back into the water supplies. But what we're doing more is delaying their release, or the human exposure that way, rather than really solving the problem.
He says another option would be to incinerate the PFAS. But this requires highly specialized facilities that can reach over 1,400 degrees Celsius (2552 degrees Fahrenheit).
Dan: At least in North America, there are very few opportunities or very few hazardous waste incinerators that are documented to be very effective at destroying PFAS.
There’s also supercritical water oxidation – basically using really hot and pressurized water to turn PFAS into harmless byproducts.
Dan: But most of these techniques require a lot of heat and energy to destroy PFAS effectively and to do it on a large enough scale and fast enough… to deliver to customers and to the drinking public.
There are other techniques being tested at the lab scale. Some researchers are looking into using high-frequency sound waves, electric currents, light or even microbes to degrade PFAS.
But it’s unclear whether they can eventually be scaled up to meet the needs of large public water systems. And then, they may only be able to tackle certain PFAS, or not destroy all of it.
That’s just PFAS in water. If PFAS gets into the soil, Dan says it can be much more challenging to clean up. One possibility is heating the soil to high temperatures – but that involves excavating the contaminated earth. In many cases it might go down for meters and meters below the surface.
Dan: Another option is to use water to extract it back out from the soil.
This is also called “soil washing.” But it’s very water intensive, and the contaminated water that comes out of it still needs to be treated.
Dan: So when we when we look at most contaminated soil issues, the main efforts in most of the world now are to try to keep the PFAS from migrating out of the soil and into the water, but not necessarily to try to destroy it in place because it's just a remarkably expensive procedure to try to do this.
For one project Dan’s involved in in Michigan, they’re looking at burying a type of permeable barrier in the soil to essentially block PFAS that was found in the groundwater…
Dan: … in the hope that this will slow down the migration of PFAS to where it would enter the drinking water supply. Now that doesn't solve the problem, but it delays the problem for at least a few years perhaps.
One thing is cleaning PFAS up once they’re already spreading in the soil and water. These efforts are important. But another thing is preventing these chemicals from getting out there in the first place. Here’s Alissa:
Alissa: If we want to reduce risk from PFAS, we need to turn off the tap of new and existing uses of PFAS in almost all cases, if it truly isn't an essential use, we shouldn't be continuing to put more PFAS out into the environment.
But that’s easier said than done, when these chemicals have been around for more than 70 years and are used in so many products. They’re embedded in supply chains and used in crucial technologies. They’re practically impossible to avoid:
Alissa: A study a few years ago identified over 200 use categories for PFAS. Those aren't individual products, those are categories of use. So things like wires. Things like the ski industry, ski waxes for example. Different types of protections for metal plating. So there's really broad use of PFAS throughout the economy. And I think that ubiquity also makes it more challenging to take meaningful action.
Alissa says part of the problem that’s led to this ubiquity is the way chemicals are used and regulated in the US.
Alissa: That system assumes in general that chemicals are safe, that products are safe until there's overwhelming evidence that they're not…
Rules regulating PFAS in the US are fairly patchy. There are no binding federal limits for contamination in soils, so it’s up to states to act.
It was only last year that the US issued its first-ever legally enforceable limits for forever chemicals in drinking water.
The limits apply to just six PFAS: PFOS, PFOA and PFHxS – the ones detected in high amounts at the Pease Tradeport. As well as PFNA, PFBS and GenX chemicals.
The limits are between 4 and 10 parts per trillion. To give you an idea – four parts per trillion is like one single drop in five Olympic-sized swimming pools.
If municipalities detect PFAS above these levels, they have until 2029 to install filtration technology.
Andrea Amico, the community campaigner in New Hampshire, says the new limits are something to celebrate. But she says they still don’t go far enough.
Andrea: I recognize we have to start somewhere and I'd like to see them add more PFAS, frankly, I'd like to see them regulate PFAS as a class. You know, depending on who you talk to, there’s over 12,000, 15,000 PFAS out in production. So to only regulate 6 doesn't feel super protective, you know? But this was a very, very big step in the right direction. I am worried that the current administration we have may try to weaken those standards.
The Trump administration has announced a string of rollbacks related to climate and environmental protection since the start of the year.
In January, the Environmental Protection Agency withdrew Biden-era plans to put a national limit on the amount of PFAS that manufacturers can discharge into water. This means it’s up to states to regulate.
Still, the new EPA head, Lee Zeldin, has said that addressing PFAS is a "top priority" for him.
Whatever happens, Andrea says she’s going to keep pushing for regulations to improve.
Andrea: And drinking water regulations for PFAS have been a primary goal of mine since I've been advocating because I do believe we have to stop the exposure. We have to. We can't allow innocent communities to be exposed to chemicals that are toxic due to no fault of their own.
And we need to learn from this and have better chemical laws, in terms of how we introduce chemicals moving forward. You know, we've allowed it to frankly, pollute the entire planet, and yet now we're trying to go back and clean it up, you know, community by community and blood testing and health studies and things like that.
It feels like we're always catching up, you know?
As things stand in the US, manufacturers need to submit notices to the Environmental Protection Agency for any new PFAS chemicals to come onto the market.
The EPA then assesses any potential risks to human health and the environment. But the process has faced criticism for not being strict enough.
Dan at Michigan State University says toxic chemicals that may be phased out or banned because of any risk are often just replaced by other, similarly harmful ones.
Dan: We're not really paying attention to what are the life cycles of these new products. In Europe, I think they're more insistent that, you know, you need to be able to demonstrate that these are not going to be terribly persistent and toxic. In the US, our approach has been more when there's a problem, we'll deal with it, but don't bother us with, with anything in advance.
We need to stop allowing the manufacturer or the use of products that we know are harmful… These are things that really should not be allowed on the marketplace.
PFAS are so widespread because they’re so useful. But Dan says there should be more attention paid to finding alternatives --- replacements that can do the same job without building up in the environment, or in our bodies.
Dan: I mean, my own opinion is, and I think the EU has done a much better job than the US about this, is that anything that has very long lifetime in the environment is not a good thing.
So what is happening in Europe?
One major step that could be on the cards is a ban of thousands of PFAS.
The EU’s chemical agency is currently looking at a proposal put forward by five countries, including Germany (fyi also Denmark, the Netherlands, Norway and Sweden).
They want to ban more than 10,000 PFAS.
Such a sweeping measure would avoid the sluggish process of assessing each chemical one by one. And prevent banned PFAS from just being replaced by similar chemicals that may come with similar risks.
A decision on this is expected sometime this year.
Alissa: The European Union's proposed ban would be clearly the global leader in reducing the use of unnecessary PFAS. That is clearly the most public health protective step that that is out there. And so you know where everyone is watching the final watching for the final regulatory determination with great interest.
The potential ban is expected to allow for some exemptions – for example for PFAS that are used in key technologies, or where no viable alternatives exist.
The idea has faced a lot of pushback and lobbying for exemptions.
Groups from the medical industry have warned that PFAS are crucial for medical devices and that a ban could jeopardize patient safety. Others in the green energy sector argue it could undermine the transition to renewables, given that PFAS are used to produce wind turbines and other technologies.
Alissa: This certainly is the argument that manufacturers and industries make every time there's a proposed regulation, This regulation will cause the sky to fall down upon us. So that argument is not new or surprising.
The flip side of that though is that there are uses for PFAS where perhaps there currently is no available safer substitute and that product or process is deemed essential to society in some way…
In that case, Alissa says, the use of certain PFAS could continue while the industry actively develops alternatives or comes up with new ways to make the same product.
Back in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, Andrea Amico says she would definitely back a wider PFAS ban. But she also says people can play a role by choosing which products they buy.
Andrea: You know, just because we can use something doesn't mean we should. And I certainly understand people love to have waterproof coats and waterproof boots and stain resistant carpets.
But I also think as consumers, we have to ask ourselves like, is it worth it? Is it worth a waterproof boot when these chemicals are getting in our water supply and in our food and in our fish and we're ingesting them and they're giving us long term chronic illnesses, you know, at some point we have to stop this.
While she waits for the results of the Pease health study, she’s also taken steps to keep PFAS out of her home as best as she can. She’s installed a filter in the kitchen sink.
Andrea: I still don't want my family to drink any more PFAS than they already have. You know, I'm trying to keep their exposure down.
It’s been more than a decade since toxic chemicals were found in the Pease drinking water. Since Andrea pushed for blood tests. Even though her children are older now, and doing well, she says she still feels fear and anxiety about the PFAS in their bodies.
Neil: Andrea, it's been, well, it's more than 10 years now since you read that article about contamination at the Pease Trade Port. When you look back. How would you describe the emotional toll of this PFAS exposure?
Andrea: It's, it's changed me a lot as a person. It's changed me as a mother. It's changed me as a person. I think for better and for worse, in some ways it's taken a big emotional toll. You know, my daughter's now 14. But I always worry, you know… like my daughter's an honor roll student. She plays basketball. Like, she looks OK, but there's always something in the back of my mind that's like: What, what's gonna happen to you?
You know, like, I'm always like, are you gonna get cancer someday? Like, is this gonna affect your thyroid? Are you gonna have reproductive issues someday? You know, like, it's like the fear of what might be coming. You know, like my daughter developed headaches out of nowhere last fall, like pretty debilitating headaches, for no reason at all. And it was just like immediately I'm like, OK, like this is the PFAS effects are coming in. I can't begin to describe, like one of the things that I hate about this contamination, there's many things, is the fact that it's robbed me of some of my happiness as a mother, you know … And I think that is the fear with PFAS. It's not an acute poisoning where you're going to drink it and throw up. You know, it's like, no, the chemicals build up and build up and build up. And then they stay in your body and they stay in your organs.
And it's like the effects may not show themselves for years.
This episode of Living Planet was produced by Natalie Muller and edited by Neil King. The sound engineer was Simon Berkhahn. Living Planet is brought to you by DW in Bonn, Germany.
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Living Planet reached out to Chemours, the company that spun off from DuPont in 2015 and regrouped DuPont’s chemical business. It said in a statement that “attempting to regulate such a diverse group of substances with a broad brushstroke” didn’t make sense.
It also said many PFAS offered unmatched strength, durability and reliability. And that they were "essential" for many critical products, including heat pumps, medical devices, electric vehicle batteries and fuel cells, solar thermal installations and wind turbines.
It said chemicals could be made responsibly, and that it supports a coherent regulatory approach that allows for the use of safe, better-performing chemistries and enables the sustainability of the EU industrial value chain.
For this episode, we also contacted 3M, which has been a major producer of the chemicals PFOA and PFOS in the US. We didn't get a response. But the company has said it plans to end PFAS manufacturing entirely by the end of 2025.