Why PFAS Legal Risks Persist for 3M, Peers

or what are also called forever chemicals. I'm delighted to be joined today by Scott Wilson, President and CEO of regenafis, a global leader in environmental technology. Scott has devoted a significant amount of time to p fast for mediation. So Scott, thank you for joining us. Can you tell us a little bit about your background and what ReGenesis does.

with bacteria back in the day. And I then moved into the environmental industry and was with one of the first groundwater treatment firms, in fact, the first public company treating groundwater that was groundwater technology back in the day. And then then I went back to school and got an NBA from Kellogg and then have been with ReGenesis for now twenty five years or so. So that's a bit of my background.

world to restore polluted land and contaminate the land. So we have we have a pretty broad understanding of the global problems that are that are confronting us with the use of different chemicals in our everyday lives that get into the media that we breathe and that we that we you know, eat and drink, and that sort of thing. So, yeah, so that's what we do, got it?

tends to pull the molecule into water. The other end, I should say that the rest of the chain has fluorine atoms all over it, and and that that that end of the molecule really doesn't like water at all, so it tends to stay more on the surface of of of materials and or into into oil or for fats. So, so what you have is that these molecules, there's' be like five thousand different variations of these. But but they have really unique characteristics, much like soaps, if you want

to look at it that way. They will tend to move in water somewhat depending on the length of the molecule. The more the more long, the longer the chain of carbons, the more it does not want to be in the water. But but what happens is that is that these molecules will tend to aggregate the surface of water and air and they make bubbles. Uh And and as a result, they've been used in products such as aqueous film forming foams,

which are firefighting foams. So you see, uh, you know, on on airports and so forth, you see these foam that they spray down on the on the runway. That's often what's known as a triple F or firefighting foam that's made with p fast molecules. And and it turns out that that the way, the way this whole thing started was when when these were invented, they realized that it changed the surface of materials that were sprayed with

these compounds. For instance, you could you could spray, you know, put it on a frying pan and it would make it nonstick. You could put it into clothes and and and water wouldn't penetrate it, but but air could breathe through it. So we these molecules have found there their their way into all sorts of products in our daily lives. The non stick little cupcake holders often had pea fastened, and the little the little paper paper doily things put

around cupcakes, for instance. So I mean there is in all sorts of materials, but probably the most insidious area that we see it is in the firefighting foams. And the reason for that is the firefighting foams were formulated with the longer chain pa fasts, the eight or the eight carbon long type molecules, and those tend to not want to be in well. They tend to want to

accumulate in oil and in fat molecules. So if you drink those like let's say that some of that firefighting foam gets into groundwater and then it gets into well and you recover that for drinking. Even a very small amount of that going into your body over time will be detrimental simply because it's building up in your body.

It's what's known as bioaccumulation. The long chain, the long carbon chain surrounded with fluorine tends to accumulate in the fat cells of the fat and the cells in your body, and it doesn't go out with your urine, So your body accumulates it over time, and when we get larger, when we get these higher concentrations, as it builds up,

it starts to have toxic and carcinogenic effects. So that's sort of a little bit of background on the types of molecules, where they're used, and the impact to human health and the environment. What happens the humans also happens to all sorts of life in streams and surface water bodies, et cetera.

It came from upgradients someplace, and that would be let's say an airport or a military base, an industrial facility, maybe a landfill. And what happens is, let's let's for an example, let's look at an airport, the fire training area where they were spraying these foams regularly to train. That's filled with some peafast and the soil there well.

Then rain comes and drives it down into the subsurface soil down to a point where it impacts the groundwater table, which is a point in the subsurface where the soil is filled with water. It's saturated. Once it's down there, then it tends to move off site and down down gradient if you want to look at that weight. So those are what I call the source sites. Those source

sites are the sites that need remediation. Certainly on the very downgradient where we're recovering it for drinking water, we'll have to treat that for drinking but also the sites that are causing the problem are the source sites. And to answer your question, Holly, those include airportsli terry bases,

and industrial facilities. And those industrial facilities could range from manufacturing facilities for textiles that were coating with p facts to making dishware that was coated with teflon type substances, to landfills, to a whole range of different industries that have used this material in the past. Does that answer the question?

some sites that have been remediated. We have we have actually treated about forty project sites or between forty and fifty project sites to date, and they've included everything from a small furniture manufacturing facility that was using p fas, to a major refinery that was having p fasts leave its facility into a river, to a superfund sites which was an old landfill that that was trying to go through a hazardous Waste Closure Action and they realized p FASc was on the site and so that us EPA

has utilized our technology to restore that site as well. So a broad range of facilities.

a remediation and clean up themselves. There's also UH sites that are named as a super Fund Project site by the U s c p A, whereby responsible parties will get together and they'll do the clean up themselves under the auspice or under the direction of the U s c p A, and they can be named as a super Fun site as well. Got it.

right to designate certain compounds as hazardous substances. And when a substance named as a hazardous substance under CIRCLA, it means that that there has to that anyone having spilled that material has to under the National Contingency Plan, has to alert the U s c p A, and then has to to implement a cleanup. So that's that's really

what that means. At at this point in time, the U s c p A has come forward and said, hey, we we put forward a roadmap on p fas Administer Reagan put together a roadmap that that that says that we will in fact designate this as a a hazardous substance under circlet. But it has not yet been done. That has not been that has not happened, and and

the thought is it will happen early next year. However, states themselves have taken this, have taken the action to implement regulations and put in clean up levels for for for p fas, particularly p f O S and p fo A, which are two specific molecules within the PFAS family. So states have implemented clean up levels. However, federal facilities like military bases, FAA controlled airports, and so forth, are not obligated to clean up to those state levels, and

they're waiting for federal guidance. So once the federal government that is, the e p A, implements this rule making and says, hey, we're going to make p facs a hazardous substance, these military bases in the FAA will have to comply.

treat drinking water. Do you have any idea of how many of the other sites, the non water authority sites you described exist.

and it was published last year, late last year. And what they did is they put together a probabilistic model and tried to statistically estimate how many project sites or how many sites out there in the US are impacted by pfasts or contaminated by PFAST and they came up with about five hundred and nineteen airports, thirty five hundred

military bases, and some forty nine thousand industrial facilities. And those industrial facilities would include landfills, refineries, and manufacturing, et cetera. So it's a huge number. And in terms of liability, I mean, I can tell you, you know, a remediation, a remediation of the refinery site that I mentioned that

we had completed. A large engineering firm, multinational engineering firm undertook that cleanup and they compared our technology to the typical technology of pumping the water from the ground and treating it and they said, just you know, just the installation alone would have been twenty some million dollars just for the installation of the pumping system implementing our technology. They were able to do that for about three point

five million. So there's a huge looming latent liability out there to clean these sites up, and the typical way to do that is to try to recover the water from the subsurface and put it through different techniques to concentrate it, whether you're bubbling it and skimming off the bubbles or whether you're putting it on ato activity carbon. Those pumping systems are trying to flush the pfast out

of the subsurface. And flushing it out of the subsurface is what's been coined by a leading researcher remediation of perpetuity. Trying to wash pfasts out of the subsurface aquaf for by pumping the water out will take more than my lifetime, your lifetime, your children's lifetime. It's going to take one hundred plus years of pumping. So it's at a huge cost on an annual basis. So it's really a looming huge liability.

known as ion exchange resins. Much like a water software takes takes takes minerals out, there are certain ion exchange resins that that will pull p fasts out and then they can regenerate those or dispose of them, or they'll put it through activated carbon which is like charcoal, huge charcoal filters that they'll put the water through and it'll strip the p fass out onto the carbon. So that's the types of technologies that they will implement at the water at the water authorities.

clean it up. What last thing we want is the water resources, the groundwater to be impacted throughout the US so that it always has to be treated with these expensive methodologies. The other thing you have to remember is that groundwater impact surface water, So all the streams, all

the lakes, they are all in communication with groundwater. And when PFAST is in the groundwater leaking from a military base or an airport or an industrial facility into the groundwater, it's migrating under people's homes, through past their domestic wells, and then into streams where it makes foam and it impacts the fish, the wildlife. It's toxic and impacts them as well. So it's insidious and it has a large

natural resource damages liability with it. With the impacting of groundwater with PFAST, not to mention third party liability from people that are swimming in lakes and streams that are being impacted by pfast generated from a nearby airport or military base. So it's not just drinking water, it's the natural resource itself that's being impacted.

and soil. They're going to have to treat the source of the contamination on their site, and if it's going off site, they're probably going to have to treat the groundwater that's migrated off site. And that's you know, as the example I gave you the twenty million dollars for

the refinery. That's the cost of putting in a pumping system if you know, somewhere are going to be somewhere between three million and twenty million dollars just for the installation, So it could be at it's a huge liability.

and that's the firefighting home sites. I'm trying to get an idea of how much remediation and a single a triple left site could cost.

dollars a year to operate something like that. I mean that's eight hundred to a million dollars operated per year. So that's a you know, that's sort of the worst case with our technology that we've developed.

so three five to three. So so we've taken a twenty million dollar installed down a three million with no operation of maintenance. So over time that could be one tenth the cost of a typical pumping system. So what we've done is instead of taking the water out of the ground and putting it through filtration apparatus to try to filter it out, which is which is the traditional way to treat things, and then having to dispose of that material once you've once you've pulled it out of

the ground, which is a whole nother liability. You know, if you filter these chemicals out and put it onto carbon or onto iron exchange resident and then dispose of that, now you own part of the landfill under CIRCLA. Because anytime you dispose of things, it's joint in several liability under CIRCLEA if so, so it's a continuing liability for the responsible party. What we've done is we've taken activated carbon, the charcoal material, and we mill it to the size

of a red blood cell. We get it down to the size of one micron, and we wrap that with negatively charged polymers so that it stays in suspension at the one micron size, so it looks like water. It looks like black ink with the consistency of water. We actually then pour that down into the aquifer down wells and pour it right into the aquifer where it paints the all of the sand and soil and rock cracks are filled with water on the subsurface, it paints it black.

In other words, the surface has become coated with this carbon permanently. So we make the subsurface into which you could think of as a huge Brita filter. So we convert the contaminated aquifer into a huge purifying filter and it strips all the p fasts out. So when you get down gradient on the other side of the the area that we've treated, the water is coming out pure

without any without any p fascenter. And so you know, we've been doing this for years with other with other contaminants, treating the subsurface of the contaminants, and in the past say five years now, people have begun to use our technology. We call it plume Stop. A plume is a is a body of contamination within an aquifer. So we call it plume stop because it just binds up all the p fasts stops the plume from migrating. The water continues

to migrate in the subsurface. The groundwater moves, but it's now purified and cleaned as it moves through the air through the area. So the plume stop technology requires no op and maintenance. So once you put it in the ground, you're done for. And if you treat the source up gradient, if you you know, the fire training pit or whatever, you know, one application of plume stop could last forever.

If for some reason you can't treat the incoming concentration of p FAST into the area that you've treated, you can simply reinject it in fifty years and it'll give you another fifty one hundred years of treatment. So it's a it's a way that you can actually limit the liability by eliminating any risk to anyone down gradient. So you know, remember that risk environmental risk is equal to hazard times exposure. And while the PFAST has a hazard

because it can't be degraded, doesn't degrade. Well, that's why it's called forever chemical. The hazard that is not a risk if you can eliminate the exposure to it. So by buying it up in the subsurface, you know, fifty sixty feet down, it's at no risk to anybody and it's not migrating, so there's no risk downgrading. So that's what we're able to do with plume stop.

that that will be uh, when they'll be promulgated. However, it you know it it is forced this for it's mostly relating to drinking water and whether those m c ls will be enforced for cleanup levels under CIRCLA has yet to be determined. That there's some questions about how they will try to implement those levels. Uh. But but uh, once once that's finalized, it certainly is going to change the complexion of of the environmental remediation requirements for pfacts.

It will drive demand for remediation, and uh, it will drive liability for industries that are using these compounds and potentially for the the original manufacturers will have to see.