Forever Chemicals

Be sure to read this ProPublica article in the New Yorker about 3M and its PFAS forever chemicals. You know them best from ScotchGuard and flame retardants, but they're in many other products… and they're in you, everyone you know, and all the animals around us.

Because I live in Saint Paul, where 3M is based, I've been hearing about this topic for quite a while, but this story has a lot of facts I never knew, and as with big tobacco and the oil companies, those facts are about a corporation hiding the truth of its products' deadly nature in order to keep making money.

Meet the woman chemist who tested the blood of people who "shouldn't" have been exposed, yet had PFAS in their blood. Meet the men who hid her work, and the man who set her up to take the fall even though he wanted the truth to come out within the company.

Just a couple of quotes:

PFAS can be found in nonstick cookware, guitar strings, dental floss, makeup, hand sanitizer, brake fluid, ski wax, fishing lines, and countless other products.

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Recently, 3M settled the lawsuit filed by cities and towns with polluted water. It will pay up to twelve and a half billion dollars to cover the costs of filtering out PFAS, depending on how many water systems need the chemicals removed. The settlement, however, doesn’t approach the scale of the problem. At least forty-five per cent of U.S. tap water is estimated to contain one or more forever chemicals, and one drinking-water expert told me that the cost of removing them all would likely reach a hundred billion dollars.

A hundred billion dollars seems low to me.

More than 16,000 of 3M's current products contain PFAS, according to the story. 3M says it will phase it out by 2025. 

Does that seem likely, if that many products still contain the chemicals half way through 2024?

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I mentioned 3M and PFAS last year in 3M as Metaphor.