Dramatic History of PFAS Leads to Present-Day EPA Actions
I’ll admit it — I’m a true crime junkie.
It started with a podcast and has moved into documentaries. Never, not once, did I imagine that my professional life would seep into my guilty pleasure. I was happily binging on a new podcast when suddenly the topic went from unsolved historical mysteries to the Dupont Chemical Scandal, which is a 20-year legal battle between Dupont (the manufacturers of such products as Teflon) and a West Virginia farmer whose cows kept mysteriously dying. Bonus: There’s a newer movie about this case as well! Dark Waters contains a rather star-studded cast too including Mark Ruffalo, Anne Hathaway, and Tim Robbins.
A recently proposed EPA rule has once again brought Per- and Polyfluoroalkyl Substances (PFAS) or ‘forever chemicals’ into conversations and compliance questions. For more technical information on what PFAS are and the proposed rule, check out our blog post on the topic.
Dupont Chemical and PFAS: An Extremely Abbreviated History
In 1802 (not a typo…1800s, people!), Éleuthère Irénée du Pont, who emigrated from France after the French Revolution, founded a company to produce gunpowder called E. I. du Pont de Nemours and Company near Wilmington, Delaware. Being a horrid name for all the marketing reasons (kidding, I have no idea why), the company was later renamed Dupont. Fast forward to 1930 when Dupont and General Motors joined to form Kinetic Chemicals to produce Freon.
In January 1935, E.I. du Pont de Nemours and Company formally opened the Haskell Laboratory of Industrial Toxicology, which at the time was "one of the first in-house toxicology facilities." According to a 1935 news item in the Industrial and Engineering Chemistry journal,“the purpose of the du Pont facility was to thoroughly test all du Pont products as a public health measure to determine the effects of du Pont's finished products on the health of the ultimate consumer and that the products are safe before they are placed on the market.”
Now, I’m not going to throw stones or try to spoil the ending here but based on what happens next, I’m not so confident that this Haskell Lab crew was cut out for the job.
In 1937, a 27-year-old research chemist named Roy Plunkett was working with Freon refrigerants and accidentally (yes, accidentally) invented a new chemical. Polytetrafluorethylene (PTFE), a saturated fluorocarbon polymer, would become known as the "first compound in the family of Perfluorinated Compounds (PFCs).” PFCs are a group of hundreds of human-made compounds collectively known as Per- and Polyfluoroalkyl Substances or PFAS or forever chemicals.
After ten years of research, this saturated fluorocarbon polymer would be introduced under its commercial name, Teflon. Side note: Roy would later be inducted into the National Inventor’s Hall of Fame for his invention of Teflon.
DuPont chemical plant in Washington, West Virginia, started using PFAS in their manufacturing process in 1951. Shortly after which, a Dupont employee received an inquiry into the possible toxicity of ‘C8.’ Quick explanation in the most simple way I can: C8 is basically an eight carbon chain chemical structure that includes Perfluorooctanoic Acid (PFOA) and Perfluorooctane Sulfonate (PFOS), which are long-chain PFAS. C8 is super stable and hardy and literally takes forever to break down. OH!! and it’s really good at attaching to soils and migrating into aquifers. So, in 1956, a study at Stanford University found that PFAS binds to the proteins in human blood, and five years later an in-house DuPont toxicologist deemed C8 to be toxic and should be handled with extreme care. Around this same time, it is known that DuPont buried as many as 200 drums of C8 on the banks of the Ohio River near the plant. SPOILER ALERT: This was not a well-thought-out plan.
Alright so that’s the backstory blip as it pertains to DuPont, but please note I’ve left out A LOT about 3M (Minnesota Mining and Manufacturing Company), the Oakdale Dump, PFAS in firefighting foams, Wolverine, and just general poor handling of a potentially toxic substance since way back.
Fast forward to 1998 when Robert Bilott with Taft, Stettinius & Hollister LLP (a Cincinnati based attorney) took the case to represent Wilbur ‘Earl’ Tennant. Tennant was a farmer in Parkersburg, West Virginia, who blamed DuPont’s Washington Works facility for his cattle dying. Ok, so that sentence doesn’t even do it justice. Over 250 of Tennant’s cattle died of a ‘mysterious wasting disease.’ While the cause of death was never conclusively linked with the chemical contamination from DuPont, the company quietly settled with the Tennant family for an undisclosed amount. Sidenote: This farmer did dissections on his own cows in attempts to determine and document cause of death because area veterinarians didn’t want to get involved. He recorded and documented his findings on video including “blackened teeth, liver, heart, stomachs, kidneys and gall bladder; unusual discolorations — some dark, some green — and textures; cows with stringy tails, malformed hooves, giant lesions protruding from their hides and red, receded eyes; cows suffering constant diarrhea, slobbering white slime the consistency of toothpaste, staggering bowlegged like drunks.”
The Tennant family purchased 68 acres along West Virginia Route 68 in 1968 but in 1984 they sold a portion of their adjoining land to Dupont. This land was to become the Dry Run Landfill. The Tennant family claims that there was noticeable difference in the land within a year of the property sale. Cattle began to die, deer carcasses were found, and “there were no minnows in the streams.”
In 1999, Bilott filed a federal suit in the Southern District of West Virginia on behalf of Wilbur Tennant against DuPont. A report commissioned by the EPA and DuPont and authored by six veterinarians (three chosen by the EPA and the others by DuPont) found that Tennant's cattle had died because of Tennant's "poor husbandry," which included "poor nutrition, inadequate veterinary care and lack of fly control."
While performing research during the suit, Bilott found an article identifying a surfactant called perfluorooctanoic acid (PFOA aka C8) in Dry Run Creek. So, in 2000 he requested more information through a court order to DuPont. DuPont was ordered to submit 110,000 pages of documents dating back to the 1950s. A year later (2001), DuPont settled out of court with Tennant for an undisclosed sum. Shortly after which, Bilott made a substantial submission to the EPA and US Attorney General demanding that "immediate action be taken to regulate PFOA and provide clean water to those living near."
While Tennant settled, Bilott filed a class action suit against DuPont in August 2001. According to a 2004 report by ChemRisk, an industry risk assessor hired by DuPont, “Dupont's Parkersburg, West Virginia-based Washington Works plant had dumped, poured and released over 1.7 million pounds of C8 or perfluorooctanoic acid (PFOA) into the environment between 1951 and 2003.”
In 2017, DuPont agreed to pay $671 million to settle with approximately 3,550 personal injury claims involving the leak of PFOAs used to make Teflon in Parkersburg, West Virginia. DuPoint denied any wrongdoing.
Obviously, this is a seriously brief snapshot and by no means an exhaustive history of DuPont’s use and handling of PFAS or use in other applications. Find more information and actions to address public health at https://www.epa.gov/pfas.
From the Center for Disease Control’s website:
“In the Fourth National Report on Human Exposure to Environmental Chemicals (Fourth Report), CDC scientists measured PFOA in the serum (a clear part of blood) of 2094 participants aged 12 years and older who took part in the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES) during 2003–2004. Serum PFOA levels generally reflect exposure that has occurred over several years. By measuring PFOA in serum, scientists can estimate the amount of PFOA that has entered people’s bodies.
CDC scientists found PFOA in the serum of nearly all the people tested, indicating that PFOA exposure is widespread in the U.S. population.”
In summary, some guy accidentally invented a chemical that has been around since the late 1930s and is now being phased out because it has been shown to cause increased cholesterol levels, low infant birth weights, effects on the immune system, cancer (for PFOA), and thyroid hormone disruption (for PFOS)...oh and it will definitely mess up your livestock if they drink from a contaminated water source!
Time to go buy a cast iron skillet!
