What's going to happen with all of these non stick chemicals you've been hearing so much about, and who's going to pay for whatever it is that's going to happen this week on Parts per Billion, Moshi Moshi, and welcome back to Parts per Billion, the podcast from Bloomberg Environment.
I'm your host, David Schultz. So if you've listened to this podcast before, or read our website, or just encounter with one of us on the street, you've probably heard us talking about this class of nonstick chemicals called pfast. That's pfas. It's an acronym for a scientific word that I'm not going to attempt to pronounce on a podcast.
These are chemicals, these p fast chemicals. They were using things like teflon, Scotch Guard, some food packaging, and lots of firefighting foam, and they're great for stopping fires and for making things not stick to other things. But as it turns out, they're not great for the environment. EPA recently came out with a big plan detailing how plans to address the environmental issues around pfas. So we thought we'd bring in our environmental reporters who've been covering this
issue pretty exhaustively. We have Sylvia Carrion in here, who's been reporting on the issues surrounding the cleanup of p fas and to talk about how these chemicals affect drinking water. We have me I'm me hi everyone, So Sylvia, thank you for joining us. First off, we went into a little bit about what p fas chemicals are, but let's get a little bit more into depth about that. What exactly are they and what have they been used for
in the past other than teflon, which everyone knows about. Sure. So, the thing that makes these chemicals so effective is that they have this very strong carbon fluorine bond. It's one of the most one of the strongest chemical bonds found in nature, and that's also that's what makes them effective for nonstick applications, but it's also what makes them persistent in the environment, right, so they stick around for a long time. They call them the forever chemicals because they
just never go away. And as we mentioned, they were used in stick packaging, nonstick fabric treatments, but also firefighting foam and it seems like that's one of the big areas where people encountered it the most, is that they would use it in this foam. They would spray it on runways a lot of times on military bases, and it would seep into the groundwater, and that's where it would start to be a big problem. Why are people concerned about it? What kind of health effects does this
potentially have for humans and other creatures. We have some idea of the potential effects of these p fast chemicals, but there are so many in the family of p Fast. There are, you know, potentially thousands of chemicals in this family. We don't know exactly how each of the chemicals would affect the human body. So atsdr is part of the CDC.
Part of the CDC, they are doing a study of communities near military bases where they found these kinds of chemicals to get a little bit more information about how they affect the human body, especially through drinking water. Right, and you mentioned the two biggest ones that I think people have heard a lot about are p FOA and p FOSS pfoh, And there are some of the chemicals that we know the most about. There's also one called gen X, which has been produced in North Carolina. It's
a big problem there. So you're right, there are so many chemicals we don't totally know how they affect people, but there can be a lot of health issues, not just for humans, but also for cows. Apparently that's something that we've been hearing about recently, that cows that drink water that has been contaminated with these chemicals can get sick.
That's going on New Mexico right going on in New Mexico, apparently a farmer had to euthanize thousands of his own cows because they were drinking water contaminating with pefast and the milk that they were producing was also contaminated, so he wasn't able to sell any of that product. Right. There aren't a lot of regulations on these chemicals right now. I mean, I guess it's sort of it's all relative.
But right now, the EPA has an advisory level that says you should only have seventy parts per billion or sorry, parts per trillion, right, m Yeah, parts per trillion. We should only have seventy parts per trillion of these chemicals in water. But that's advisory, it's not enforceable. Some states have implemented their own binding water regulations, but it's kind of the patchwork quilt across all fifty states. So what is the EPA thinking about doing on this moving forward?
They just announced this big plan. What's next? Right on Valentine's Day last week? You forgot it was back active Administrator Andrew Wheeler had said, you know, we fully intend to regulate these chemicals and drinking water. So that would mean that the EPA would set this overarching federal standard for PIFOA and p FOSS and that would be that would become an enforceable standard, so they could tell people to clean it up and they would have to do
it right. So not yet. Not only would they have to clean it up to that level, but they'd also have to filter out the water to make sure that there's safe levels of pfas, and that would apply to every utility water utility across the country. That's not going to happen for a while though, right, I mean, these regulations take years and years and years to be implemented.
One of the issues with that is that so many different states are sort of getting in on the p fast standards train, and they're all setting very different because there's really no agreement in a scientific community about how much of it is safe for us to be drinking. So the EPA is going to have to figure out how much they think is okay for the entire country, and then once they get to that point, you know, they ask the public what they think, and then way
down the line they might eventually set a standard. So in the meantime, we basically we have this advisory standard, not legally enforceable, but that's what the EPA thinks is you know, could cause some health problems. We have no enforceable standards either for cleanup or for drinking water for a long time. In the meantime, though, there are lawsuits, lots and lots of lawsuits against the companies that manufactured
these chemicals and the companies that use the chemicals. Is that do you think that's where the action is going to be at least for the next few years. Yeah.
Every time a new community finds out that it has PFO or p foss in the water, they want to find out, you know, who's responsible for this, and a lot of those actions result in lawsuits for the big companies that originally manufactured p foss or pifoa mo are the ones that use it in their own products, like Wolverine Worldwide, which makes a lot of different kinds of shoes, what kinds that they make? What kinds of shoes did they make? I know Keds is one of the brands
that they make. There's just so many other ones. So the nonstick coatings for your keads are now the subjects of environment. So the waterproof, yes, the waterproof. We're probably not frying eggs on your shoes. Yeah, that's I guess. Yeah, you wouldn't want your shoes to be nonstick. I guess that would That would cause a number of very obvious problems. So, you know, we've talked about the companies that made the chemicals. You've talked about the communities where they have this in
their water. There's one sort of stakeholder here. I hate that word stakeholder, but let's call the mistakeholder is the military because as we mentioned, you know, this was in firefighting foam. It was used on a lot of military bases. The military could potentially be on the hook for a lot of the cleanup of these chemicals. Where are they at, what's their stance? What's going on with with the Pentagon
in in terms of PFAS. So the ats your study that we talked about earlier, they have picked eight communities that they want to study that are near former or current military properties. They're all military communities, especially, so this would have been especially where the fire fighting phone would have been used, and maybe the foam chemicals from the phone got into the groundwater and maybe they contaminate the
drinking water as well. So at least eight places, but there are more communities that are not part of that study that are also finding these effects from the chemicals. So that's notable in and of itself, because it seems like the CDC is sort of acknowledging that, you know, communities that are either on military bases or used to
be on military basis are the most affected here. This is not something that you know, there are a lot of communities that maybe they were next to a plant that produced p fas, or maybe they were you know, just happened to have p FASS in the water for unexplained reasons. But it sounds like what we're really talking about here are you know, communities that are near military bases. Those that's where the problem is most acute. Correct, And it seems like the military is a little let's let's
say ambivalent. That might be the most charitable way to put it about its role in this in this issue. You know, they're trying to work with the EPA to develop clean up standards for how to clean this out of water. But the military could be on the hook for literally billions of dollars in future cleanup costs. And I think they have budgetary priorities just like any other federal agency, and they're getting a little worried. Is that
fair to say? Sure? I think as we're starting to find out the health effects of these chemicals and slowly determining what standards to use to clean them up, the Department of Defenses thinking about, you know, how much is this eventually going to cost us in the long run,
and it is probably billions of dollars. Yeah, we're talking I think the two years ago I heard someone say two billion dollars, And that was two years ago, and we knew a lot less about pfas back then, and especially if the EPA implements really tight standards for cleaning up out of water, that two billion dollars is going to look small compared to what it will be you know, right,
it could be a lot more ten years from now. Yeah, all right, that was Bloomberg Environment Sylvia Carridenin and Bloomberg Environments myself talking about p FAS chemicals. For much much more of our reporting on this issue, visit our website at newsdop Bloomberg Environment dot com. That website once again is NEWSTT Bloomberg and Environment dot com. This episode of pars Revillion was produced by myself with up from Jessica Cooms. Our editor is Marissa Horn and our audio engineer is
Nicholas Anzelata. Special help today from Pat Rizzuto, Bloomberg Environments Chemicals Reporter. Thanks Pat. The music for pars Pervilion is a message by Jizar and thank you for listening.