In 2016, the manufacturing company Saint-Gobain told New Hampshire officials it found PFAS – also called forever chemicals – in the public water supply near its Merrimack facility. The company responded by providing some residents with safe drinking water indefinitely. Now Saint-Gobain is leaving the state and it’s unclear what future clean up efforts might look like.
A new investigative book reveals what companies like Saint-Gobain knew about the PFAS they were emitting. NHPR’s Morning Edition host Rick Ganley spoke with Mariah Blake, the author of “They Poisoned the World: Life and Death in the Age of Forever Chemicals.”
Saint-Gobain declined to answer specific questions for Blake’s book, but it sent a statement saying, “Saint-Gobain is, and has always been, committed to acting as a responsible environmental steward in the communities in which we live and operate, which includes complying with regulatory requirements…
Any PFOA that has been used in our production originates from raw materials purchased from our suppliers, whom we rely on to follow industry laws and regulations, with the suppliers’ conformity in this regard reviewed as a component of our product stewardship process.”
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Transcript
Can you explain what these forever chemicals are and where they've been found?
They're a large family of chemicals that are extremely useful because they're extremely resistant to heat, stains, water, grease and electrical currents. They stand up to caustic chemicals that burn through just about every other material, and this has made them extremely useful. These chemicals have enabled things like high-speed computing and space travel. They've also transformed thousands of everyday items, everything from furniture and clothing to dental floss.
On the other hand, they are probably one of the most insidious pollutants in human history. As some of your listeners likely know, they stay in the environment for hundreds or even thousands of years. Those that have been studied are highly toxic, even at very low doses, and they are literally polluting the entire planet, including the bodies of human beings and ecosystems in the remotest parts of the globe.
And how do they affect our health when we ingest them?
So this is a class of 9,000 chemicals, and only a handful of them have been studied. But those have been linked to a long list of health problems, including cancer, diabetes, high cholesterol, life-threatening pregnancy complications, problems with neurological development in children, and the list goes on and on.
Saint-Gobain has been in the town of Merrimack since the early 2000s. According to your investigation, do you know how long Saint-Gobain has known that plants like this one were dangerous to the environment or the people around them?
It really got the first indications around the time it started operating in Merrimack. So in the early 2000s, DuPont, which is the company that manufactures Teflon, started coming under very intense scrutiny from the EPA because it had been suppressing data about the health effects of a chemical known as PFOA, a forever chemical.
In 2003, they commissioned a study to figure out how much PFOA their Teflon coating operations around the country were emitting. And they discovered that these plants were emitting huge quantities of PFOA. And crucially, the worst offenders were plants like the one in Merrimack that made Teflon coated fabric. So this study determined that more than half of the PFOA used at these sites, and we're talking thousands and thousands of pounds, escaped through the smokestacks and settled in the surrounding soil and water.
Around the same time, Saint-Gobain also had a plant at the time in North Bennington, Vermont. The company started getting complaints from residents near that plant, who complained of fumes that smelled like burning hair. They were getting migraines and nosebleeds. And eventually one of those residents sent away for the plant's permits, and they discovered that the plant was operating without a scrubber, in violation of Vermont law. And that information was shared with the state environmental agency.
The state then began putting pressure on Saint-Gobain to install emission controls at that plant, and instead what Saint-Gobain did in 2002 was shut down the North Bennington plant and moved all of the fabric coating equipment to the plant in Merrimack. So by this point, Saint-Gobain already knew that PFOA was toxic. They had a sense that its plants were spreading large quantities of this chemical. But rather than install emissions controls, which it could have easily done, it concentrated all of the manufacturing of this Teflon coated fabric in Merrimack, New Hampshire.
Well, there's research that shows Merrimack residents have had a much higher risk of some cancers than the national average. Has Saint-Gobain or any of the companies that created these chemicals, like DuPont, publicly acknowledged or taken any responsibility for those health issues?
No, they haven't, but I think the science speaks for itself. In addition to these smaller studies and individual communities like Merrimack, there have been huge studies that have associated PFOA, specifically, with serious diseases. And the science is very clear. These chemicals are harmful to human health, and they can be harmful at very low doses.
With these forever chemicals seemingly everywhere, it feels a little overwhelming. Where do you find hope in all this?
I find quite a bit of hope in the fact that citizen activists in places like Merrimack– you've had ordinary citizens who have become very active in promoting restrictions on these chemicals on a state and a federal level. And they have actually been incredibly effective.
So right now, more than 30 states have passed more than 150 laws restricting forever chemicals or PFAS. And this includes more than 14 full or partial bans on these chemicals in consumer goods. Manufacturers have been hit with more than 15,000 lawsuits at this point. And as a result of the lawsuits and the state-level legislation, as well as a ban that's in the works in the European Union, you have huge swaths of the economy voluntarily moving away from PFAS at this point. So 3M, which is the world's largest manufacturer of these chemicals, is going to phase out its production of them by the end of this year.
What I've witnessed over the eight years that I've been reporting this book is that ordinary citizens have taken on large corporations against long odds and at great personal expense, and they've actually made considerable progress towards turning off the tap on these chemicals. And I think at this particular political moment, that gives me a lot of hope.
