Hodge will oversee The Intercept’s newsroom operations in both New York and Washington.

“Betsy Reed has made The Intercept into one of the world’s premier investigative newsrooms, and it has been my great privilege to work alongside her for the last seven years,” said Hodge. “There’s no replacing her, but the upside is that we still have a kick-ass team of journalists.”

Since joining The Intercept in 2015 as national editor, Hodge has overseen numerous major investigations. He was promoted to deputy editor in 2017 and has since led the organization’s criminal justice, environmental, climate, and toxics reporting. More recently, he has spearheaded The Intercept’s technology and Covid origins coverage. Hodge’s work has been critical to The Intercept’s most ambitious and impactful reporting series, including The Drone Papers, The Teflon Toxin, Bad Chemistry, Code of Silence, and The Iran Cables.

Formerly, Hodge was editor-in-chief of the Oxford American and Harper’s Magazine. His writings have appeared in many publications, including Texas Monthly, the London Review of Books, the New Republic, Popular Science, and Harper’s Magazine. Hodge is also the author of two books, “Texas Blood” and “The Mendacity of Hope.”

Nausicaa Renner has been The Intercept’s Washington editor since March 2021. She was previously senior politics editor at The Intercept, the digital editor at Columbia Journalism Review and the Tow Center for Digital Journalism, and a senior editor at n+1.

Betsy Reed joined The Intercept as editor-in-chief in January 2015. She and her team shaped The Intercept into a leading investigative journalism organization responsible for breaking some of the most consequential stories in all of its areas of coverage, while launching a membership program that has since grown into one of the largest in U.S. independent media.

Under Reed’s leadership, The Intercept grew into an award-winning news organization dedicated to holding the powerful accountable through adversarial journalism and in-depth investigations on politics, war, surveillance, corruption, the environment, technology, criminal justice, the media, and more. Among the accolades The Intercept has received over the last few years are the George Polk Award, multiple National Magazine Awards and nominations, a Hillman Prize, the Innocence Network Journalism Award, and an Edward R. Murrow Award. The Intercept was a Pulitzer Prize finalist last year for the podcast “Somebody,” and the animated short “A Message From the Future With Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez” received an Emmy nomination.

“Saying goodbye to my Intercept colleagues is hard, but knowing that I am leaving the newsroom in such good hands, so full of talent and potential, makes it a little easier,” Reed said. “The Intercept plays a very special role in our media ecosystem, and I’m sure it will reach new heights under Roger and Nausicaa’s leadership.”

The post Roger Hodge Named Acting Editor-in-Chief of The Intercept appeared first on The Intercept.

While PFOA has already been tied to kidney and testicular cancer, among other diseases, recent research linking PFOA exposure to pancreatic cancer is the basis for the lower number cited by Birnbaum. The research was done by the National Toxicology Program, which is a division of the NIEHS.

“If you look at the data, pancreatic tumors are present at very, very low concentrations from PFOA,” Birnbaum told the audience at the conference. “If you use the pancreatic tumors in the rats in the NTP study to calculate what would really be a virtually safe dose, you’re getting down at about .1 ppt. Well, that’s really low. And that’s only for one PFAS.” Birnbaum suggested that regulators might ultimately issue one drinking water standard for the entire class, which contains thousands of compounds.

About the EPA’s current water standard, Birnbaum said, “Many of us would think that is not health protective.”

According to a summary of the experiment, male rats exposed to PFOA developed both cancerous and noncancerous tumors of the pancreas. At the lowest of three doses given in the experiment, 20 out of 50 rats developed the tumors. At the higher doses, more than half of the exposed rats developed the tumors.

The summary also shows that PFOA increased the numbers of cancerous and noncancerous liver tumors in the two-year rat study. At the conference, Birnbaum mentioned that the recent experiments also showed that PFAS exposure affected breast development. “There were clearly impacts on the growth of the mammary gland and problems with lactation,” she said.

Both the NIEHS, which conducts scientific research on the effects of the environment on health, and the EPA, which is responsible for environmental regulation, have said they are prioritizing PFAS, industrial compounds used in firefighting foam, nonstick coatings, and other products that persist indefinitely in the environment and accumulate in people. But the new information about their health effects has been emerging very slowly.

The Japan National Institute of Health Sciences first asked the NTP to study the perfluorinated compounds in 1990, noting that in rats the chemicals induced the presence of a biomarker of DNA damage thought to be related to cancer. In 2003, the EPA also nominated the compounds for further study, citing their “presumed widespread human exposure” and the known toxicity of certain compounds in the class.

The rats in this two-year study were given their first dose of PFOA almost 10 years ago, in July 2009. And the NTP released a statistical analysis of the tumor study in June 2018. Yet more than a year later, the NIEHS has not published reports of the studies, which regulators typically need to fully understand the science when setting safety levels.

Asked in March about the delay in releasing the reports, Robin Arnette, of the NIEHS’s office of communications and public liaison, wrote in an email to The Intercept that “NTP routinely releases data tables for completed studies while formal reports are in preparation” and that reports that go along with the toxicology research on PFAS “are currently undergoing external peer review. We anticipate their publication on the NTP website later in 2019.”

A technical report based on the research “is in preparation and external peer review will take place later in 2019; the date is not yet set,” according to Arnette’s email, which also said, “Timelines and prioritization are dynamic. We are actively managing our usual processes to enable efficient delivery of information for those agents of growing public concern.”

Although the reports have yet to be released, some state regulators are already considering the NTP data as they set safety thresholds for PFAS. The Minnesota Department of Health cited the NTP tables in its April health-based guideline for PFHxS. And in March, California regulators set interim safety levels of 14 and 13 ppt for PFOA and PFOS, while citing “new cancer data recently released by the National Toxicology Program” and noting that safety levels “and the health effects on which they are based may change.”

The amount of these chemicals deemed safe to ingest in drinking water has been dropping quickly over the past several years, as is often the case as scientists learn more about how chemicals affect health. Between 2009 and 2016, the EPA’s official safety threshold for PFOA was 400 ppt. In 2016, the agency lowered the number to 70 ppt. Several states have since calculated lower limits. Vermont set drinking water health advisory limits of 20 ppt for PFOA. And, in April, New Jersey proposed drinking water standards of 14 ppt for PFOA and 13 ppt for the closely related chemical PFOS.

Update: June 20, 2019

After publication, the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences provided the following statement from Linda Birnbaum:

The NIEHS has undertaken an extensive PFAS research program, which involves many studies, hundreds of chemicals, and partnerships across federal government. There are almost 5,000 PFAS chemicals in use today. Right now, we don’t know enough about the uses and potential hazards of exposure to PFAS, but if our research results for PFAS are similar to what we’ve seen with other biologically active chemicals such as lead, arsenic, and asbestos, I would not be surprised if the safe level of PFAS for humans is as low as 1.0-0.1 PPT. That’s why this research is so important, and necessary for protecting public health. 

The post Teflon Toxin Safety Level Should Be 700 Times Lower Than Current EPA Guideline appeared first on The Intercept.

DuPont introduced GenX in 2009 to replace PFOA, a compound it used to manufacture Teflon and coatings for stain-resistant carpeting, waterproof clothing, and many other consumer products. PFOA, also known as C8, was phased out after DuPont was hit with a class-action suit over health and environmental concerns. Yet as The Intercept reported last year, GenX is associated with some of the same health problems as PFOA, including cancer and reproductive issues.

Levels of GenX in the drinking water of one North Carolina water utility, the Cape Fear Public Utility Authority, averaged 631 ppt (parts per trillion), according to a study published in Environmental Science & Technology Letters in 2016. Although researchers didn’t test the water of two other drinking water providers that also draw water from that area of the Cape Fear River, the entire watershed downstream of the Chemours discharge, which is a source of drinking water for some 250,000 people, is likely to be contaminated, according to Detlef Knappe, one of the authors of the study.

Research presented at a conference this week at Northeastern University detailed the presence of GenX in water in North Carolina and Ohio. In both cases, the chemical was found in water near plants that were owned by DuPont and since 2015 have been operated by DuPont’s spinoff company, Chemours. Both GenX and PFOA belong to a larger group of chemicals known as PFAS, which are structurally similar and believed to persist indefinitely in nature.

In Ohio, Jason Galloway, a university student who presented at the conference, measured the chemical in surface water as far as 20 miles from the Chemours plant, which is across the Ohio River in Parkersburg, West Virginia. After reading about the chemical in The Intercept, Galloway sampled water near the plant and tested it for GenX. Galloway found the chemical in various creeks and streams in the area at levels reaching more than 100 ppt. He explained that some of the chemical was likely deposited far from the plant by wind.

In North Carolina, GenX was present in water at even higher levels, with the most concentrated sample measuring 4,500 ppt. Although the EPA has not set legally binding regulations on any member of this class of chemicals, the agency last year set a drinking water standard for PFOA and the related chemical PFOS of 70 ppt. Several states have also set their own drinking levels for PFOA. Vermont has set the lowest so far at 20 ppt, and water experts in New Jersey have proposed an even lower level, 14 ppt, though it has not yet been finalized.

In response to an inquiry from the Intercept, the EPA provided a written response:

EPA is committed to protecting public health and supporting states and public water systems as the appropriate steps to address the presence of GenX in drinking water are determined. Under the Safe Drinking Water Act, EPA undertakes extensive evaluations of contaminants and uses the best available peer reviewed science to identify and regulate contaminants that present meaningful opportunities for health risk reduction. While EPA has not established a drinking water regulation, health advisory or health based benchmark for GenX in drinking water, the agency is working closely with the states and public water systems to determine the appropriate next steps to ensure public health protection.

In 2007, as it was phasing out the use of PFOA, DuPont applied to the West Virginia Department of Environmental Protection to update its emissions permit. A resulting 2011 consent order between the company and the state agency allowed the company to emit wastewater containing as much as 17,500 ppt of GenX into a receiving stream near the plant, an amount that is 250 times the EPA drinking water standard for PFOA and PFOS.

On stationery bearing the tagline “promoting a healthy environment,” the West Virginia document lays out the terms of the permit allowing DuPont to discharge its waste into the Ohio River and its tributaries. In the agreement, DuPont promised to implement a variety of “environmental control technologies that reduce environmental release and exposure.” A 2009 consent order between DuPont and the EPA, which The Intercept obtained through the Freedom of Information Act, shows that the company agreed to recover or destroy 99 percent of the GenX it produces.

It is unclear whether Chemours has kept DuPont’s promise to discharge just one percent of its GenX waste, in part because DuPont declared the amount it intended to produce confidential in the consent order. A spokesperson for DuPont referred questions to Chemours, saying “that whole thing has been transferred to them.” Chemours did not respond to inquiries for this article about how much GenX it produces and discharges into waters near its plants.

In an email, a spokesperson for the West Virginia Department of Environmental Protection, Jacob Glance, wrote that DuPont and Chemours have been submitting monitoring reports in accordance with their permit, but that the agency does not monitor the water for the presence of GenX.

In the West Virginia consent order, DuPont described GenX as having “a favorable toxicological profile” — a phrase Chemours has also used in its marketing materials. But DuPont’s own research calls that characterization into question. The company submitted 16 reports of adverse incidents related to GenX between 2006 and 2013, describing experiments in which lab animals exposed to the chemical developed cancers of the liver, pancreas, and testicles as well as benign tumors. The industry research also tied GenX to reproductive problems, including low-birth weight and shortened pregnancies in rats, and changes in immune responses.

On Monday, in response to local reporting about the presence of GenX in Wilmington’s drinking water, North Carolina public health officials issued a statement assuring that “the GenX levels detected in 2013-2014 would be expected to pose a low risk to human health.” The statement mentioned a European study that had a high threshold of safety — 70,909 ppt — but didn’t provide a citation for it. Meanwhile, a recent Dutch report found that the adverse effects of GenX are similar to those of PFOA. And a 2017 report from a respected group of researchers in Sweden found GenX to be more toxic than PFOA.

Both Chemours and DuPont have also emphasized that GenX exits the human body more quickly than PFOA. But at the recent conference, Linda Birnbaum, director of the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences, downplayed the significance of that difference. “Every PFAS that has been studied is causing problems,” said Birnbaum, whose agency funds scientific research into the chemicals. “Even if they have a shorter half-life, if it has a half-life of 30 days, it’s going to build up in your body.”

Given the conflicting information, Knappe, co-author of the study about drinking water in North Carolina, felt the state agency shouldn’t have suggested that extremely high levels of GenX are safe to ingest. “I really have heartburn over the 71,000 number,” said Knappe, a professor of environmental engineering at North Carolina State University. “It’s irresponsible to put that kind of number out and pretend that we can tell people that the water is safe at those levels.”

Many people in the area are also worried — and confused — about the contamination. Since she heard about the GenX in her drinking water, Deborah Buchanan has been wondering whether it might help explain why she developed thyroid cancer and thyroid disease in 2015. Although there is no research available on how GenX affects the human thyroid gland, a quick Google search showed Buchanan, who lives in Leland, North Carolina, that PFOA was linked with the disease. “I’m not sure that’s how I got sick,” said Buchanan, “but it does make me wonder.”

Parents in the area are particularly worried. As soon as the news was out, “all the cancer moms in our group started posting on Facebook,” said Amy Hermann, who organized local parents of children with cancer after her son developed leukemia in 2012. “My first thought was: what did we expose him to that might have started his cancer?” said Hermann. “My second thought was: We have three other kids. How do we protect them?”

Fifty families belong to Hermann’s group, the Wilmington Childhood Cancer Support Group, including families of several children with leukemia and three with a rare form of kidney cancer. PFOA has been linked to kidney cancer in humans, though there are no published studies on the links between GenX and kidney cancer in humans. Besides the industry studies, which were accessed on the EPA website using information that had originally been classified as “confidential business information,” there is very little research available on the health effects of GenX.

Even less is known about other chemicals the researchers found in the Cape Fear River. In addition to GenX, the scientists detected six other PFAS compounds in the river water, some at levels 100 times that of GenX. In all, experts estimate there may be between 3,000 and 6,000 different PFAS compounds.

“It just blows my mind to see the number and diversity of different compounds that are out there,” Andrew Lindstrom, a research scientist at EPA’s National Exposure Research Laboratory and co-author of the North Carolina study, told the audience at the conference. “You have to ask yourself: how good is the drinking water treatment plant that is downstream? And very often then answer is not very good.”

Indeed, even the advanced water processing system used by the Cape Fear Public Utility Authority, which provided the water in the North Carolina study, was unable to keep the chemicals out. “We’d expect that it’d be very effective with a wide range of contaminants,” said Knappe, “but these compounds zipped through the plant untouched.”

Because the chemicals aren’t regulated, states and water providers are under little or no legal obligation to test for or remove them. And frustrated residents of Hoosick Falls, New York, Warminster, Pennsylvania, Pease, New Hampshire, and Oscoda, Michigan, among other communities with PFAS-contaminated water, have been taking matters into their own hands, organizing local protests, calling legislators, and putting pressure on polluters. In Wilmington, several groups have already sprung up to fight GenX. And the law firm Levin Papantonio has announced it is filing suit over the chemical.

But the legal strategy holds only limited promise. Though the class action suit over PFOA yielded a historic $671 million settlement in February, it took more than a decade to litigate. By spinning off Chemours, DuPont, which Thursday was granted conditional approval to merge with Dow, has stanched its losses. And well before the case was decided DuPont had already begun using and emitting its replacement, GenX. EPA monitoring conducted from 2013 to 2016, which tested for just six of the thousands of PFAS compounds, showed that 15 million Americans in 27 states have contaminated drinking water. The government is not currently monitoring drinking water for these chemicals.

The lack of government oversight is what drove Jason Galloway, the student in Ohio, to do his own testing for GenX. Galloway isn’t a chemist. He doesn’t even know how to swim. Yet he took it upon himself to go out in a kayak to get samples of local water.

“I looked around and when I saw it hadn’t been done, I knew the agencies who should have been doing it were either complicit or underfunded,” said Galloway. “So I did it myself.”

This article was reported in partnership with The Investigative Fund at The Nation Institute.

The post New Teflon Toxin Found in North Carolina Drinking Water appeared first on The Intercept.

The lawsuits over PFOA exposed the chemical’s links to several diseases, including kidney and testicular cancer. Like PFOA, also known as C8, GenX is a perfluorinated compound and similarly, was the subject of internal DuPont research showing it poses many of the same health concerns as the original chemical. Also like PFOA, GenX persists indefinitely in the environment.

In the past two weeks, two citizens groups in North Carolina announced plans to sue Chemours, the DuPont spinoff company that now makes GenX, over its release of the chemical from its plant in Fayetteville, North Carolina. The Cape Fear Public Utility Authority issued a letter of intent to sue both Chemours and DuPont last week over violations of the Clean Water Act and the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act over release of GenX into the Cape Fear River, which is a source of drinking water for more than 250,000 people in the Wilmington area. A conservative group called Civitas also announced its intention to sue Chemours over GenX. Both groups must wait at least 60 days after sending the letters before filing a suit.

The legal activity adds to the pressure on Chemours over GenX in North Carolina. On July 22, the U.S. attorney in the Eastern District of North Carolina served the North Carolina Department of Environmental Quality with a criminal subpoena to appear before a grand jury on August 22 and supply all records pertaining to the release of GenX into the Cape Fear River.

In West Virginia, where GenX has been found in ground water — though not yet in drinking water — attorney Robert Bilott, who sued DuPont over PFOA contamination, on July 28 issued a stern letter to the West Virginia Department of Environmental Protection requesting information about what the state agency knew about GenX when it allowed DuPont to release the chemical into local waters near the company’s plant in Parkersburg.

Levels of GenX in the waste water released from the plant into local water have been recorded in concentrations as high as 278 parts per billion in some locations, thousands of times higher than the drinking water standards the EPA set for PFOA, which is structurally similar to GenX and expected to have similar biological effects. On several occasions in 2013 and 2014, the levels of GenX in water coming from the Parkersburg plant were also higher than those set by the WVDEP, according to reports DuPont submitted to the WVDEP.

Bilott’s letter, which asked the WVDEP to “take immediate action to protect community drinking water supplies from possible GenX contamination,” echoed another he sent 16 years earlier asking the EPA to regulate PFOA “on the grounds that it ‘may be hazardous to human health and the environment.’” Chasing GenX through the environment and the courts may take just as long. Both chemicals are considered emerging contaminants, meaning they are not regulated under federal statutes, which makes it difficult to force polluters to clean them up. The EPA’s drinking water advisories for PFOA are voluntary rather than mandatory.

And the chemical industry seems to remain several steps ahead of regulators. After spinning off its “performance chemicals” division, DuPont settled the class action suit over PFOA for $671 million in February. DuPont is poised to merge with Dow at the end of August.

While the EPA has been slowly turning its attention to the class of chemicals that includes GenX and PFOA, considering the safety and cleanup of individual toxins one by one, industry has quietly come up with hundreds of replacements, introducing them to the market before they’ve proven to be safe. Although it wasn’t officially introduced until 2009, GenX was being released into the Cape Fear as a byproduct as early as 1980.

In what appears to be an attempt to disrupt this cycle of regrettable substitutions — and speed up the pollutant-by-pollutant approach to tackling their harms — the lawsuit the Cape Fear Public Utility Authority is planning will target several chemicals. A recent study found six similar compounds in the Cape Fear River water, some at levels 100 times that of GenX. The water utility is planning to sue over the release of several of these “GenX pollutants,” as the Notice of Intent to Sue calls them.

Chemours did not respond to repeated requests for comment. A DuPont spokesperson declined to comment, saying that the company had “not been served with a complaint and therefore cannot comment on this matter.”

According to George House, one of the North Carolina utility’s lawyers, it’s the companies’ job to prove their products are safe — not the people’s responsibility to act as guinea pigs. “That’s putting the cart before the horse,” said House. “Why would someone think they can discharge whatever they want and then make the regulating body prove that it’s harmful to stop?”

The post Citizen Groups Will Sue DuPont and Chemours for Contaminating Drinking Water in North Carolina appeared first on The Intercept.

The Xiaoqing flows 134 miles through the major cities of Zibo, Binzhou, and Dongying in Shandong province. Tens of millions of people depend on it. In Jinan, which is close to the river’s origin, human and livestock waste and runoff from fertilizers and pesticides have caused the water to stink in recent years. But downstream from Jinan, waste from factories has compounded the river’s problems.

Directly translated from Chinese, the word “Xiaoqing” means “clean and clear.” But here in Cuijia, the water is neither. From the bridge, you can see debris and garbage swirling atop the forceful rush of brown. Occasionally, bits of plastic and something that looks like Styrofoam float by. But what may be most dangerous in the Xiaoqing River isn’t visible: perfluorooctanoic acid, or PFOA, long used by DuPont in the production of Teflon, among other products, and linked to cancer and other diseases. Because Cuijia lies downstream from a factory that emits more PFOA than any other industrial facility in the world, levels of the chemical at various points near here are among the highest ever reported, reaching more than 500 times the safety level the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency recently set for drinking water. The plant, operated by a company called Dongyue Group, is the world’s biggest producer of Teflon and emits 350 pounds of PFOA every day, an amount that totals 63 tons in a single year, according to a recent estimate.

DuPont and seven other companies agreed to phase out the use and production of PFOA in the United States by 2015, after lawsuits and protracted negotiations with the EPA. Keeping toxic chemicals at bay in countries that have relatively strong environmental regulations is a Herculean task that, in the case of PFOA and perfluorooctane sulfonate, or PFOS, is still underway. Though this effort can consume the energies of Western environmentalists, the story doesn’t end when they push a toxic chemical beyond their borders. In China, that’s often when a chemical’s life begins in earnest.

As we stood next to the river, Wu looked out across the landscape. He wore blue plastic sandals and baggy gray pants. A shovel, from which two empty plastic buckets hung, lay across his shoulders, and as he listened to translations of my questions he nodded slightly. He had never heard of PFOA, he said, and didn’t know the exact causes of his village’s problems. There may be many. The Dongyue plant isn’t the only factory that disposes of its waste in the water. Wu said a paper mill upstream also puts waste into the river. And Dongyue itself makes many chemicals in addition to PFOA.

But Wu understands well that something has profoundly changed the river he has relied on his whole life. For more than a decade, the people of Cuijia have watched as their crops have stopped thriving. The corn does better than the wheat, he said, but both have become harder to cultivate. Recently, his wheat crop failed altogether, imperiling his family’s meager income.

Then there’s the sickness. More and more people in Cuijia have been falling ill and dying, he said, often with cancer and at a young age. When I asked whether any of them got medical help or reimbursement for their doctors’ bills when they became sick, Wu guffawed theatrically, putting one hand over his belly and turning his face to the side, as if some invisible presence would appreciate the absurdity of my idea. After his laughter subsided, he explained that some of the villagers had recently reported the increase in pollution and cancer to the local government, but had received no response.

Around the world — from Hoosick Falls, New York, to Buck’s County, Pennsylvania, Holland, Sweden, and several parts of Australia — communities have begun to understand not only that the chemicals have been in their water for years but also that the contamination continued after industry scientists knew PFOA and PFOS persisted indefinitely in the environment, accumulated in human bodies, and affected health.

Yet by the time that information made its way to the public, the contamination was too great to be completely cleaned up, and PFCs were already in the vast majority of human bodies. A 2007 study by researchers at the Centers for Disease Control found that 99.7 percent of Americans over 12 had trace amounts of PFOA in their blood, while 99.9 percent had PFOS. The contamination begins even before birth, according to a 2006 study, which detected PFOA in 99.3 percent of umbilical cord blood.

This mounting knowledge has translated into action in many places — if slowly and, some argue, inadequately. The European Union officially deemed PFOA a “substance of very high concern” in 2013, a designation reserved for chemicals that have “serious and often irreversible effects on human health and the environment.” Production and use of both chemicals has subsequently ceased throughout most of Europe, Japan, and Canada. And in response to outrage over contamination, one Australian state recently banned firefighting foam that contains PFOS.

In the U.S., an agreement between the chemical industry and the EPA brought all production and use of PFOA and PFOS to an end last year. And in May, in part because of concern in communities that had discovered PFOA and PFOS in their water supplies, the EPA came up with voluntary standards limiting the amount of both chemicals in drinking water to .07 parts per billion (ppb). This week, New Jersey’s Drinking Water Quality Institute recommended a much lower standard, .014 ppb, one-fifth that of the federal EPA. The U.S. Air Force just announced that it would replace its PFOS-containing firefighting foam with a safer substitute, and people exposed to the chemicals in their water have sued both the U.S. Navy and private companies.

Yet while most of the world was phasing out PFOA and PFOS and beginning to address the problems they had caused, the chemicals emerged in countries with fewer restrictions. There is some evidence that India and Russia have recently used PFOA to make Teflon and that Russia may also be manufacturing the chemical. But it’s in China that the business has truly boomed, keeping global output of PFOA and PFOS steady even as the industry ground to a virtual halt everywhere else.

So while Teflon began as a quintessentially American brand, China now manufactures most of the world’s supply of the slippery substance, which is used in dental floss, textile fibers, wire and cable insulation, and hundreds of other products, including nonstick cookware. The Dongyue plant in Shandong used PFOA to make more than 49,000 tons of Teflon in 2013 as well as four other products, including PVDF, a compound used in the semiconductor, medical, and defense industries.

Though they’re toxic, persistent, and accumulate in human bodies, PFOA and PFOS are by no means the only contaminants China has to worry about — or the most dangerous. Heavy metals such as lead, mercury, arsenic, and cadmium, which cause cancer, lung problems, and brain damage, have made one-fifth of the country’s farmland too polluted for growing food. Air pollution, which has reached hazardous levels in at least 83 cities — and in some places, as much as 20 times recommended levels — is perhaps the country’s most visible problem and is contributing to soaring lung cancer rates.

The nation’s water crisis is just as dire. More than 80 percent of China’s underground water supply is unfit for human consumption and almost two-thirds is unfit for any human contact, according to a government report released earlier this year. Some 300 million people —almost equivalent to the entire U.S. population — lack access to clean drinking water, and an estimated 190 million have become sick from drinking water polluted with everything from pesticides to heavy metals, toxic waste, and oil spills.

PFOA and PFOS are just the latest in a steady stream of chemicals to make the journey to China after being cast off by countries that have deemed them unacceptably hazardous. Production of short-chain chlorinated paraffins, which are used as lubricants and coolants in metal cutting, shot up 30-fold in China as these chemicals were coming under EPA scrutiny. Similarly, China is now the world’s biggest producer of HBCD, a flame retardant the EPA recently targeted for action. And the aniline dye industry migrated from the U.S. to China after it was well established that the chemicals involved are carcinogenic.

“I call it the leftovers problem,” said Joe DiGangi, who works for IPEN, a network of organizations in 116 countries devoted to protecting health and the environment from toxic chemicals. “Often a chemical comes under public or regulatory pressure in the EU or the U.S. and then shortly thereafter, Chinese companies begin producing it,” said DiGangi. China and the other developing countries that inherit it, he said, “often don’t have the adequate infrastructure to regulate, monitor, and deal with it safely.”

DuPont, which made Teflon a household name, also built a plant here in 2008 at a cost of $80 million. In July 2015, it passed the facility on to a new company called Chemours, when it spun off its performance chemical division. In July 2016, Chemours announced it would invest $15 million to expand its Changshu Works plant to augment the company’s “already considerable presence in China” and increase Teflon output. (Chemours did not respond to multiple requests for comment.)

With its own fire station and heat, water, power, sewage, and postal systems, the Changshu industrial center is like a small self-contained city. A giant modern sculpture and the flags of more than a dozen nations adorn its entrance, and manicured shrubbery lines its freshly paved roads. Changshu’s website lays out grand plans for the park, predicting that it “will become a paradise for technological development, a powerful treasure land and an ecologically harmonious auspicious land.”

But after more than a decade of operations, residents of a nearby village called Haiyu have planted corn between and around the neatly spaced buildings. Although the crop appears to be fed at least in part with wastewater, one of the villagers told me that people in Haiyu eat the corn as they always have, cooking it on the cob and grinding up whatever’s left to make dough for noodles.

A ship worker descends into a storage container to clean up chloroform after a shipment.

A short drive from DuPont Bridge, a man wearing a Paddington T-shirt bearing a picture of the bear eating a sandwich was fishing in another canal. He sat under a thatch of trees across from a factory, dangling a wooden rod into the water below as brown waves lapped at the mouth of a pipe that opened onto the stone-lined canal. The man told me he worked at one of the factories. This was a Sunday, and though he didn’t have to work, he had ridden 40 minutes on his motorbike to try his luck fishing. He’s spent most of his days off this way over the past four years. And in that short time he had noticed the number and quality of the fish in the canals worsen. That morning, it had taken several hours just to catch the six small fish in the plastic bucket beside him.

Scientists might have predicted the size and yield of his catch, since PFOA has been shown to harm fish exposed to it. The chemical causes male fish to develop female reproductive cells and the ovaries of female fish to degrade. Contaminated food may account for as much as 90 percent of human exposure to PFOA and PFOS.

There are plenty of both chemicals in this water. In fact, in 2013 the scientists measured some of the highest concentrations of PFCs ever reported in China right here in this industrial park. But the man in the Paddington shirt said he wasn’t terribly concerned. He’s careful to switch fishing spots if the water begins to smell bad or turns an odd color. He had just recently stopped fishing at a nearby canal when its water turned an electric blue. He said the fish he caught at other spots sometimes tasted bad, but these were delicious, especially when stewed with soy sauce and spices over a small fire.

Ni Jiahui, director of the Changshu park, wrote in an email that wastewater in the park was pre-treated at factories and then sent to the park’s wastewater treatment plant and that factories’ exhaust systems have to pass an environmental assessment. Ni also acknowledged in his email that boats are present in the park and that people farm and fish amid the factories. “I think having people fishing and farming in the industrial park are indications that our chemicals production has not caused any problem to the environment,” he wrote. “Otherwise no one would fish here.”

You can also find the molecules in dust and air, as one study recently did, documenting a 12-mile plume of PFOA-contaminated air that surrounds the Dongyue plant in Shandong. The level of PFOA in the nearby Zhulong River was recently measured at 10,379 ppb, more than 148,000 times what the U.S. had deemed safe.

Yet other than guards who discouraged passing cars from slowing, nothing seemed particularly menacing about the Dongyue plant. The factory entrance was plastered with colorful billboards with reassuring English messages, such as “Safety and environmental protection are the first value of the Dongyue group,” and “Taking good care of yourself is the best love to your mother.”

Just over 5 miles away, in a small farming village called Bozhadian, the residents seemed well aware of the river’s problems. An elderly man who was ushering his herd of goats across a bridge over the Zhulong said that no one fishes in the river anymore. And the proprietor of the local corner store said simply, “The water’s not good there.”

Low labor costs and a lack of environmental regulation helped draw American and European chemical companies to China. Since the late 1970s, when Deng Xiaoping opened the country’s economy to the world, the chemical industry has been at the heart of its dazzling growth. In the past four decades, the Chinese chemical sector has grown faster than that of almost any other country. From 2000 to 2010, production of chemicals nearly tripled. By 2010, industry sales totaled more than $754 billion a year.

Yet knowledge of the environmental hazards of industrial chemicals — and how to address them — has not always made the trip.

Since 2006, when it first negotiated the phaseout of both PFOA and PFOS in the U.S., the EPA has also required companies to drastically reduce their emissions of the chemicals. And each of the eight companies that participated readily began recycling and incinerating PFOA after using it. Companies in Japan and Western Europe also instituted recycling.

Yet in China, these straightforward techniques of disposing of PFOA appear to be the rare exception. Scientists I contacted agreed that releasing the chemical waste directly into waterways and the air seemed to be the norm. “The best available treatment technique is not used in China despite that this would be a very cost-efficient and easy way to drastically reduce emissions of PFOA,” Robin Vestegren, an environmental researcher at Stockholm University, wrote in an email.

The Dongyue Group declined a request to be interviewed for this story, but a spokesperson wrote in an email that the company denies researchers’ claims that its emissions contribute to water pollution in the Xiaoqing River. The email also said that the Chinese government has installed a 24-hour monitoring system in its factory, and that its emissions comply with government regulations. “Dongyue values environmental protection above all things,” the company spokesperson added.

But Vestegren and his colleagues in China recently calculated how much PFOA the plant would emit based on its Teflon production, and found that the number was very close to the actual amount they measured in the Xiaoqing River. (A small amount of the chemical is also emitted through the air.) Vestegren wrote that he was confident the plant “has not installed any treatment technology.”

You can even see the differences in practice between plants belonging to the same company. In the U.S., DuPont greatly reduced its emissions of PFOA after coming under scrutiny. Workers’ blood levels dropped, too. The amount of PFOA in workers at its New Jersey plant was down to an average of 1,644 ppb by 2007 and had dropped to 1,110 by 2009. But in China, the levels of PFOA in workers’ blood reached an average of 2,250 ppb within the first year of operation of the Changshu plant.

DuPont’s international messaging team was quick to fill in the blanks. Shortly after the news broke, two senior staff members from DuPont’s Beijing office took part in a talk show on sina.com, one of the largest Chinese-language websites, offering assurances that there was no link between PFOA and health hazards and noting that “administrative reporting requirements in the U.S.” had led to a “misunderstanding about the quality of the products.” On its Chinese website, DuPont proclaimed that the company had used the chemical “safely” for 50 years and, according to the story, that “there is no PFOA in Teflon product.”

Neither statement was true — there were trace amounts of PFOA in Teflon, and DuPont had known for years about the health effects of PFOA on its workers and lab animals. But the effort seems to have quelled any nascent controversy in China over the chemical.

In an emailed statement, a DuPont spokesperson wrote that the company “always acted responsibly based on the health and environmental information that was available to the industry and regulators about PFOA at the time of its usage.”

Small organizations like Guo’s, which has only four full-time staff members, often rely on volunteers. More than 100 have come forward to help Green Qilu. For now, most pitch in by participating in the “black and smelly river project,” which involves visiting local waterways and reporting on whether they reek or have an odd color. The project, which is sponsored by the central government’s Ministry of Environmental Protection, has already yielded an alarming picture of the extent of water contamination nationwide. But going further — figuring out which particular contaminants are causing the changes or taking steps to remove them — is a trickier business.

Part of the problem is financial. It’s expensive to train volunteers and test water for individual chemicals. The Chinese government made a huge step in 2013 by requiring factories not only to perform certain tests on their wastewater but also to make the water itself available for independent testing. Environmentalists around the country, including Guo, have begun to collect samples. But, while more than 40,000 types of chemical products are made in China, Guo can usually only afford to test for one or two and sometimes opts for tests that simply characterize the water as good, fair, or poor.

An even bigger challenge is a fear of reprisal that hovers over environmental work in China. Businesses often don’t take kindly to citizen oversight. And if protestors are perceived as undermining the government, the consequences can be dire. Guo said Green Qilu’s volunteers wouldn’t be comfortable investigating industrial water contamination because “they’re hesitant that the factories will do something to them or their families.” And even though he is careful to file all the appropriate papers and follow all government regulations, he sometimes worries that the work will somehow cause problems for his own family.

Simply documenting levels of various substances in air, soil, and water can be a risky pursuit. Several of the Chinese researchers I spoke with who track the presence of PFOA said they didn’t want to be mentioned by name. And one environmentalist, Mao Da, told me of his difficulties finding epidemiologists to work on a survey of people living near waste incinerators. “The university professors didn’t want to do it because they didn’t want to have trouble,” Da said, adding that “data collection can be very hard because the local government may try to stop you.”

The country’s new environmental protection law, which went into effect last year, may be the best evidence of the seriousness with which the Chinese government is now approaching the crisis. The law lifted what had been a low ceiling on fines that government officials could impose on polluters and for the first time authorized environmental organizations to sue over pollution. The first successful verdict came in June.

The youth of the environmental movement and the severity of the mess it has sprung up to address make this an odd — and, in some ways, hopeful — moment for China. “It’s like the late ’60s in America,” said Ma Jun, director of the Beijing-based organization the Institute of Public and Environmental Affairs. “The issue is so bad and so obvious,” it’s become virtually impossible to ignore. “We feel quite lucky. It’s one of the few areas where we have so much social consensus.”

Ma has been thinking about China’s pollution problem for a long time, first as a journalist, and for the past 10 years, as head of the venture that came up with perhaps the cleverest way to fix it. To Ma, the most vexing aspect of China’s situation was the lack of transparency. Large companies throughout the world had outsourced their dirty chemical work to China, but few were keeping track of what these companies were doing with their waste. The big foreign companies sometimes didn’t even know which companies were supplying their chemicals, let alone what their environmental practices were. “The supply chain was a black box,” said Ma.

IPE has managed to shine light into that box by harnessing both the Chinese government’s amped up commitment to tracking pollution and the internet’s power for public shaming. The organization created a database that allows multinational and local brands to see whether their Chinese suppliers comply with the law, using data that factories are now obligated to report about their waste. It also synthesized information on companies such as Adidas, H&M, Zara, and Dell — whether they screen their suppliers or even attempt to identify pollution problems, for instance — into handy online charts available in English.

Unfortunately, IPE’s online tool has very little information on PFOA or PFOS, since reporting on the use of these chemicals is still voluntary. But you can get a sense of some of the companies that still use these chemicals from the EPA’s website.

In some cases, the rationale for requesting an exemption seemed to be based on the unique qualities of PFCs. (PFOA gives ski racers an inimitable glide, for instance.) But for many manufacturers, the challenge appeared to be logistical. A letter from the Association of Global Automakers described the average car as “a complex web of systems and networks, containing more than 30,000 unique components sourced from thousands of suppliers around the world.” Thus, it concluded, removing the chemicals would pose “significant challenges to the automotive sector.”

But even with the backing of 179 countries, including China, the Stockholm Convention has made slow progress. The convention added PFOS to the list of substances to be restricted in 2009. Implementation of the order didn’t begin until 2014. Even then, industries petitioned for exemptions, and loopholes were carved out for the use of PFOS in firefighting foam, liquid crystal displays, color printers, and decorative plating. A precursor of PFOS can still be used to control red fire ants, and China ships between 30 and 50 tons of it each year to Brazil, which has used and then dumped much of the stuff.

When I visited the office responsible for implementing the Stockholm Convention in China, on the outskirts of Beijing, the staff had recently finished hosting a delegation from North Korea. To put the enormity of their burden in some perspective, they had been coaching the North Koreans on how to eliminate PCBs, chemicals the rest of the world stopped making decades ago. In addition to overseeing the Stockholm Convention project throughout the Pacific region, which includes many countries that are much further behind in terms of eliminating the chemicals than China, the office is also responsible for administering the Basel Convention, a separate treaty governing the transnational movement of hazardous waste.

All of which helps explain why their efforts to reduce PFOS in China through the convention are just getting underway. “We’re just in the beginning to investigate how much of the chemical occurs,” one staff member told me. “China is a very big country. We have a lot of industry. We need some time.”

In the coming weeks, a committee is expected to take the first steps toward adding PFOA to the convention’s list. Though participating governments probably won’t make a final decision until at least 2019, it seems likely that at some point not too far in the future, that chemical, too, will start inching closer to elimination.

“The country may get a few years out of it,” IPEN’s DiGangi said of PFOS, which itself was a substitution for another chemical, Halon, that was produced in China and phased out in the 1980s because it was depleting the ozone layer. For the PFCs, foreign companies have already taken the next step, replacing PFOA and PFOS with similar molecules that are based on shorter-carbon chains. DuPont, for instance, swapped out PFOA for a chemical it calls GenX.

Indeed, Ni Jiahui, the director of the Changshu industrial park, said that because of safety concerns, both PFOS and PFOA have now been replaced with shorter-chain PFCs. The most recent testing, done in 2012, showed both these replacement molecules and PFOA were present in the water around the park.

While new testing could help clarify that the park has since exclusively switched to shorter-chain replacements such as GenX, it’s difficult to confirm whether companies have phased out chemicals. For instance, one group of German scientists led by Franziska Heydebreck recently measured extremely high levels of 8- and 10-carbon chain compounds inside a Chinese textile manufacturing plant that supposedly had switched to shorter-chain replacement PFCs.

Because many of the shorter-chain PFCs do not appear to be much safer than PFOA and PFOS, even if companies do switch to these molecules, they will likely wind up having to swap out these replacements as they are targeted for global elimination.

The justification for adopting these cast-off chemicals is financial, of course. Yet, many of the leftovers that were big moneymakers in their earlier years aren’t as lucrative in the last stage of their lives. As China has become the main producer of Teflon in recent years, its price has dropped.

Whether because of this or the broader economic forces that have squeezed the Chinese chemical industry, business was slow for the family living on the boat under DuPont Bridge. In the past month, the woman said, she had ferried only a single load of chemicals over the canals of the Changshu industrial park and was worried about how her family would survive.

A few miles away, in a hotpot restaurant in the small city of Fushan, two men also pondered the business of making a living at the chemical park. The name “Fushan” translates to “Fortune Mountain.” But given its proximity to the factories that make PFCs, some locals have darkly joked that the town ought to be called “Fluorochemical Mountain,” which sounds very similar in Chinese.

The argument briefly grew heated, as the two men raised their voices and put down their chopsticks. But the factory worker put an end to it with an analogy: “It’s like walking down the road,” he said, as they returned to their meal. “There’s always a chance you might get hit by a bus, but still you walk.”

The analogy doesn’t hold up. China faces far more than the possibility that these toxic chemicals will spread throughout the country. They already have, exposing Chinese people to PFCs without their knowledge or consent. It’s much the same predicament Americans were in 15 years ago, except that this time scientists have a far greater understanding of the dangers posed by the molecules being released into water and soil. And even as international experts prepare to hammer out which chemicals to tackle next and the Chinese government slowly brings its immense power to bear on the pollution problem, they continue to accumulate.

Back in Cuijia, the situation is already urgent. According to Wu, young people in the village decided their best shot — the only one in their power, really — was to leave. Most have. Not long ago, Wu’s own son set off to become an itinerant worker, a life he hopes will be safer than relying on the polluted Xiaoqing River.

This article was reported in partnership with The Investigative Fund at The Nation Institute and ChinaFile. 

Research: Coco Liu

The post The Teflon Toxin Goes to China appeared first on The Intercept.

As in the U.S., PFOA has leached into the water near factories in Dordrecht, Holland, and Shimizu, Japan, both of which were built and operated for many years by DuPont. Last year, the Shimizu facility and part of the Dordrecht plant became the property of DuPont’s spinoff company, Chemours. Just as it did in both New Jersey and West Virginia, DuPont tracked the PFOA levels in its workers’ blood in Holland and Japan for years, according to EPA filings and internal company documents. Many of the blood levels were high, some extremely so. In one case, in Shimizu in 2008, a worker had a blood level of 8,370 parts per billion (ppb). In Dordrecht in 2005, another worker was recorded with 11,387 ppb. The national average in the U.S., in 2004, was about 5 ppb.

Water contamination was also a problem in both locations. In Shimizu, PFOA was detected in 10 wells at the site, with the highest level of contamination measuring 1,540 ppb. Groundwater in Dordrecht, which is about an hour south of Amsterdam, was also contaminated, with 1,374 ppb of PFOA at one spot near the factory in 2014.

But there has been little discussion of the problems at these two sites, at least until recently, when the PFOA contamination became news in Holland. In March, the Dutch National Institute for Public Health and the Environment released a report finding that levels of PFOA in water were elevated at least until 2002 and that residents of Dordrecht had been exposed to airborne PFOA for years.

In early April, a contingent from Keep Your Promises DuPont, an activist group representing residents of West Virginia and Ohio, traveled to the Netherlands and met with local politicians, scientists, Dordrecht residents, and the union representing workers at the plant.

“They’re pissed off,” said Paul Brooks, a physician from West Virginia who went to Holland and told people about the research that enabled epidemiologists to link PFOA to preeclampsia, ulcerative colitis, and two types of cancer, among other conditions. “They knew absolutely nothing about the links to disease, nothing,” said Brooks.

But the Dutch are learning quickly. On April 7, the Dutch newspaper Algemeen Dagblad announced the results of blood tests of two Dordrecht residents who had high blood levels of PFOA. One former DuPont worker had 28.3 ppb in his blood, while his wife, who didn’t work at the plant, had 83.6 ppb. In contrast, the blood level of Carla Bartlett, an Ohio resident who was awarded $1.6 million in the first of 3,500 cases against DuPont, was just 19 ppb in 2005.

Now at least 1,000 Dordrecht residents have requested testing, according to Ingrid de Groot, an investigative journalist for Algemeen Dagblad. De Groot said residents of Sliedrecht, a small town across the river from the Dordrecht, are also worried about airborne C8 contamination “because the wind 90 percent of the time blew in their direction from the Teflon plant.”

DuPont referred questions about its Dordrecht and Shimizu sites to Chemours, the company that has inherited its perfluorinated chemical (PFC) business, which now uses shorter-chain molecules. Chemours offered a statement saying that the area around the Shimizu site, which “was created decades ago” by DuPont and the Japanese company Mitsui, is “highly industrialized and the groundwater is brackish, and not a source of drinking water.” The statement also noted that PFOA has been used by a number of companies in Japan and that “Chemours has never used PFOA.”

Regarding Dordrecht, Chemours wrote that “there is no increased exposure of surrounding residents to PFOA via drinking water for the area surrounding the Dordrecht plant” and that the company “is confident that DuPont acted reasonably and responsibly during the years it used PFOA at Dordrecht, placing high priority on the health of its employees and the community. We believe DuPont went beyond what was required, and what other companies did, to manage PFOA in order to protect the health and safety of its workers and neighbors.” The statement also noted that by 2010, DuPont had reduced its PFOA emissions at the Dordrecht site by more than 90 percent of their level in 2000, and by 2012 the company had phased out the chemical entirely.

Examples of PFC contamination drawn from scientific studies and public documents.

ENVIRONMENTALISTS HAVE BEEN pushing to tamp down on the worldwide use of PFOA and PFOS, both of which have been detected all over the world, including in Germany, Canada, Greenland, Spain, Italy, Norway, Sweden, Denmark’s Faroe Islands, France, Vietnam, South Africa, India, England, and Australia, where a governmental inquiry is underway. In 2014, PFOS was listed as one of the persistent organic pollutants to be phased out under the Stockholm Convention, the international treaty ratified by 179 countries (though not the U.S.). Last year, the EU proposed adding PFOA to the agreement.

But as some countries phase out the production of PFOS and PFOA, others are ramping it up. Perhaps the best example is China, where at least 56 companies produce PFCs, according to data collected by the Stockholm Convention. Without drinking water standards for PFOA and PFOS, or restrictions on their use, contamination is spiking there. A comparison of Chinese and European rivers published last year found that concentration of PFCs in the Xiaoqing River was more than 6,000 times higher than in the Scheur River, near DuPont’s Dordrecht plant. In a recent study, scientists tested the blood of fishery workers at Tangxun Lake in China’s Wuhan region. One employee was found to have the highest level of PFOS ever detected in human blood: 31,400 ppb.

The post Teflon Toxin Contamination Has Spread Throughout the World appeared first on The Intercept.

The new federal standards may unify what has been an inconsistent official response to the presence of these perfluorinated chemicals, or PFCs, in drinking water. They will also instantaneously create official water contamination crises in dozens of cities and towns across the country.

According to the EPA’s most recent data on unregulated drinking water contaminants, released in January, 14 drinking water systems around the country reported levels of PFOA that exceed the new federal threshold, while 40 reported PFOS above the new cutoff. In all, water systems in 18 states, as well as in Guam, are contaminated.

Some of these water systems have already begun to quietly address the problem. In Suffolk County, New York, where public drinking water wells show PFOS levels of .33 and .53 ppb, the contaminated water “has either been blended with other wells to reduce the level of the compound to non-detection or their use has been limited to the greatest extent possible,” according to Kevin Durk, director of water quality and laboratory services for the Suffolk County Water Authority. Though he does not know the level of PFOS in the water that comes out of local taps, Durk wrote in an email that “it is a virtual certainty that levels of any detected chemical would have been reduced.”

Similarly, the Security Water and Sanitation District in Colorado Springs has been struggling to clean up its contaminated water since 142 tests detected PFCs. The district has shut down seven out of 26 wells and is blending water to lower levels, according to Roy Heald, the district’s general manager.

But other water company operators have yet to lower their PFC levels. Steve Anderson, owner of the Oatman Water Company in Scottsdale, Arizona, where PFOS measured .2 and .23 in the most recent EPA testing, learned that the chemical was in his water only recently, after he received a call from the Arizona Department of Environmental Quality. Anderson, who suspects the PFOS originated from firefighting foam used by the nearby Oatman Fire Department, said he is “trying to come up with a solution.”

Until today, there was a wide range of official opinion on the level of contamination that presented a health danger. The military, which is in the throes of a massive cleanup of 664 contaminated fire- and crash-training sites, has been using the EPA’s older standards for PFOA and PFOS to guide its efforts and help determine who receives clean drinking water and remediation of contaminated private wells. (The Department of Defense did not responded to inquiries about how the new advisory levels would alter its cleanup plan.)

Others have set more stringent standards. On January 28, the EPA advised residents of Hoosick Falls, New York, not to use water with PFOA levels above .1 ppb. And a panel of scientists who spent years researching some 70,000 people whose water contained PFOA levels of at least .05 ppb, found probable links between that level of exposure and testicular cancer, kidney cancer, thyroid disease, preeclampsia, ulcerative colitis and high cholesterol. In 2010, New Jersey’s Drinking Water Quality Institute calculated a safety limit of .04 for PFOA. Vermont currently has the lowest state drinking water limit for PFOA, .02 ppb.

The EPA report noted that in humans “the developing fetus and newborn is particularly sensitive to PFOA-induced toxicity.”

The levels released today are based on numerous studies connecting the chemicals with health effects. For PFOS, the report notes, studies of lab animals exposed to the chemical reported “developmental effects (decreased body weight, survival, and increased serum glucose levels and insulin resistance in adult offspring), reproductive (mating behavior), liver toxicity (liver weight co-occurring with decreased cholesterol, hepatic steatosis), developmental neurotoxicity (altered spatial learning and memory), immune effects, and cancer (thyroid and liver).”

The report also acknowledged research on human populations that has found associations between PFOS and immune suppression, thyroid disease, high cholesterol, and reduced fertility. It also acknowledged a possible connection between PFOS and bladder, colon, and prostate cancer.

For PFOA, the research included studies on monkeys, rats, and mice showing “developmental effects (survival, body weight changes, reduced ossification, delays in eye opening, altered puberty, and retarded mammary gland development), liver toxicity (hypertrophy, necrosis, and effects on the metabolism and deposition of dietary lipids), kidney toxicity (weight), immune effects, and cancer (liver, testicular, and pancreatic).”

The new health advisory for PFOA was also based on human studies, which showed “associations between PFOA exposure and high cholesterol, increased liver enzymes, decreased vaccination response, thyroid disorders, pregnancy-induced hypertension and preeclampsia, and cancer (testicular and kidney).” The EPA report noted that in humans “the developing fetus and newborn is particularly sensitive to PFOA-induced toxicity.”

“Taken together,” the report notes, “the weight of evidence for human studies supports the conclusion that PFOA exposure is a human health hazard.” The exact phrasing was used in the PFOS report as well.

While calling the new level “a very long-overdue step in the right direction,” Robert Bilott, an attorney overseeing a class-action suit over PFOA contamination near a DuPont plant in West Virginia, cautioned that “the new guideline is still too high, as exposures at even the new guideline level would allow PFOA to continue to build up to ever-increasing, unacceptable levels in human blood.”

Bilott also noted that the new levels are informal guidelines, as opposed to enforceable regulatory limits. “If it was enforceable,” he said, “the EPA could issue unilateral orders requiring the responsible party to clean it up.”

Updated May 19, 2016:

After this piece was published a spokesperson for the Department of Defense wrote in an email that “DoD will use the EPA’s new Health Advisory levels to determine risk to human health from past contamination. DoD’s approach is comprehensive and designed to identify where we have had releases of PFOA or PFOS and to determine if the release has impacted drinking water above the Environmental Protection Agency’s Health Advisory level.  Where that has happened DoD will work closely with the regulatory agencies and the local community to provide alternative drinking water supplies.”

Related:

• New Teflon Toxin Causes Cancer in Lab Animals
• DuPont and the Chemistry of Deception
• The Case Against DuPont
• How DuPont Slipped Past the EPA
• Poisoning the Well: Toxic Firefighting Foam Has Contaminated U.S. Drinking Water

The post With New EPA Advisory, Dozens of Communities Suddenly Have Dangerous Drinking Water appeared first on The Intercept.

C8 was originally manufactured by 3M, then by DuPont, and was phased out after a massive class-action lawsuit revealed evidence of its health hazards. The new chemical, sold under the name GenX, is used to make Teflon and many other products. While touting GenX as having a “more favorable toxicological profile” than C8, DuPont filed 16 reports of “substantial risk of injury to health or the environment” about its new chemical. The reports, discovered in the course of an investigation by The Intercept, were filed under Section 8 (e) of the Toxic Substances Control Act (TSCA) and submitted to the EPA between April 2006 and January 2013. They cite numerous health effects in animals, including changes in the size and weight of animals’ livers and kidneys, alterations to their immune responses and cholesterol levels, weight gain, reproductive problems, and cancer.

“It’s the same constellation of effects you see with PFOA,” said Deborah Rice, a retired toxicologist who served as a senior risk assessor in the National Center for Environmental Assessment at the EPA. “There’s no way you can call this a safe substitute.”

Cancerous Tumors, Kidney Disease, and Uterine Polyps

In one experiment, rats given various amounts of GenX over two years developed cancerous tumors in the liver, pancreas, and testicles, according to a report DuPont submitted in January 2013. In addition to the cancers, some of the GenX-exposed rats in that experiment also developed benign tumors, as well as well as kidney disease, liver degeneration, and uterine polyps.

Satheesh Anand, a DuPont senior research toxicologist who signed the report, concluded that “these tumor findings are not considered relevant for human risk assessment.” Anand dismissed the significance of the results in part by emphasizing that the mechanism associated with the tumor formation in rats might not be the same in humans. DuPont scientists have long made the very same claim about C8 (as in this study from 2004), which caused testicular tumors in DuPont experiments on lab animals before it was linked to testicular cancer in exposed people.

Alan Ducatman, a physician who studies the health effects of perfluorinated chemicals such as C8 and GenX, characterized Anand’s claim as “a partial argument that could be interesting only to those who are not strongly following the literature.” Ducatman, who teaches environmental health sciences at the West Virginia University School of Public Health, is one of several researchers familiar with the health effects of C8 who reviewed the documents for The Intercept. He summarized DuPont’s interpretation of its own data as “cherry picking,” highlighting “species differences only when arguing that a problematic study finding is not relevant.”

DuPont’s reporting on the hazards of GenX “all has an eerie echo,” Ducatman wrote in an email to The Intercept. He noted that the reports show the chemical has the same trio of biological effects — on the liver, immunity, and the processing of fats — seen with similar chemicals, including C8. “This reminds me a lot of a path we have recently traveled. That journey is not ending well.”

Despite the fact that Section 8(e) reports are required only when companies have evidence that their product presents a substantial risk, the summaries of the experiments written by DuPont employees downplay most of their findings.

“There’s a lot of hand-waving sentences, ‘Yeah, this happened, but we don’t think it’s relevant,’” said Rice, the former EPA toxicologist. In one study conducted on rats and mice, for instance, male rats given any dose of GenX had changes in their cholesterol levels, and some also had changes in levels of two blood proteins. But the report, which like many of the others was labeled “Company Sanitized,” simply concluded that “these changes were of uncertain relationship to treatment and considered non-adverse.” It’s impossible for independent reviewers to evaluate these claims because the reports don’t include the data on which they’re based.

As The Intercept reported in August, DuPont scientists in the 1970s chose not to report abnormal liver test results in workers exposed to C8. In a 2004 deposition, the company’s medical director said that the company had not reported the findings because the liver changes weren’t proven to be problematic health effects related to the chemical. In its filings on GenX, DuPont scientists did report increases in the weights of kidneys and livers, and other changes in liver cells, in rats exposed to the chemical, but they again downplayed the results, saying that these changes were “not considered adverse,” according to a July 2010 letter signed by A. Michael Kaplan, DuPont’s former director of regulatory affairs.

Rice took issue with the judgment that such changes won’t cause problems in humans. “These are well-nourished, homogenous animals,” Rice said of the lab rats. “The human population isn’t like that. When you push these things around, you’re going to push some people into disease states.”

Reproductive Effects

GenX also affected reproduction in lab animals, according to the reports. Rats exposed to higher amounts of the chemical were more likely to give birth early and have babies that weighed less. Another study showed that female rats exposed to GenX reached puberty later than the unexposed animals.

While the company also dismissed the significance of many of these effects in the summaries of its experiments, the findings are “suggestive of a reproductive effect,” said Laura Vandenberg, a reproductive biologist at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. Vandenberg said that the tests described in the reports can’t fully show the extent of the chemical’s reproductive activity because they only look at the effects of very high doses of GenX.

“That might make sense if what we were worried about was whether this chemical maims or kills you outright,” said Vandenberg. “But that’s not what we’re seeing. People don’t cook on Teflon and drop dead. These are chemicals that interfere with normal biological functions at low doses and contribute to disease.” Because hormones act at low doses, “you have to study them at low doses.”

The DuPont studies estimated the lethal dose of GenX in rats as 7500 mg/kg. At such doses or higher, the animals “died within approximately 3 hours of dosing and exhibited discomfort, gasping and/or tonic convulsions prior to death,” according to one report submitted in 2006.

While all the scientists The Intercept asked to review the reports agreed that the issues they raised demanded multiple additional investigations, the EPA did not require any further testing of GenX.

Some of the reports reference a consent order for GenX, a document the EPA issued in 2009, which The Intercept obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request. That document lays out the agency’s many concerns about DuPont’s C8 replacement, including evidence that the chemical and its salt are toxic to lab animals and cause mutations in mammalian and human cells. The document also lays out concerns that the molecules “will persist in the environment, could bioaccumulate, and be toxic to people, wild mammals, and birds”; that “there is high concern for possible environmental effects over the long-term”; and that “EPA has human health concerns.”

Such orders are issued when the EPA requires more information in order to evaluate a new chemical’s safety. Although the DuPont studies show many significant findings and clearly raise questions about the health and developmental effects of GenX, the lack of a strong regulatory response to them isn’t unusual, according to one EPA official.

“A lot of them do just get filed away,” Vincent Cogliano, director of the Integrated Risk Information System at the EPA, acknowledged of studies industry submits to the agency.

The EPA has a number of options once it has evidence that a chemical is hazardous. The agency could use its statutory authority to regulate the chemical, setting limits on its use or even banning it and requiring companies to clean up contaminated areas. While the EPA has yet to take any of those actions on C8, which has been shown to be hazardous over the past decade, it has added that chemical to the list of substances regularly monitored in drinking water.

The EPA could also add GenX to that list, but such efforts are often met with resistance from industry. “Companies fight them,” Cogliano said, “and bring in other scientists who debunk the studies that show there are health hazards.”

For now, GenX is neither regulated nor tracked, even as Chemours (the chemical company spun off by DuPont in July 2015) produces the chemical and releases it into the environment in undisclosed amounts. Chemours declined to reveal production quantities for GenX, but said that emissions are 1 percent or less of the quantities used. Yet according to one of the hazard reports DuPont sent the EPA in March 2010, “The biodegradation of the test substance was 0%.” So GenX, like C8, is likely to be with us forever.

In response to inquiries from The Intercept, DuPont declined to comment, noting that GenX is now a product of Chemours.

Chemours responded with the following statement:

Chemours was created in July 2015 through the spin-off of the DuPont Performance Chemicals unit, which included the fluoropolymers business. Before this, in 2013, DuPont stopped making or using PFOA, replacing it with a new polymerization aid for use in the manufacture of fluoropolymers.

Extensive health safety testing was conducted on the new polymerization aid, and the data has been shared with regulatory agencies around the world as well as published in peer-reviewed scientific publications. The full body of testing data indicates that the polymerization aid can be used safely in the manufacture of fluoropolymers. It is rapidly eliminated from the body with low bioaccumulation potential. It has low acute toxicity in mammalian and aquatic testing, low repeated-dose toxicity in mammalian testing, and is not a skin sensitizer. Data suggests that it is not a developmental, reproductive, or genetic toxicant, or a human carcinogen. In addition, the new chemistry is used in conjunction with environmental exposure control technologies that reduce potential for environmental release and exposure.

Studies to evaluate chemical safety are designed to find health effects through the use of very high doses, in order to establish acceptable exposure limits with appropriate margins of safety. Therefore, finding such effects is important in effectively managing chemical safety. The level of potential worker or public exposure to this chemical is orders of magnitude below the levels at which any effects have been seen in our testing.

Regulatory authorities in the U.S., Europe, China, Japan and Taiwan have reviewed the testing data on our new polymerization aid and have given permission for its manufacture and use.

The post New Teflon Toxin Causes Cancer in Lab Animals appeared first on The Intercept.

Perfluorooctanoic acid, commonly known as PFOA or C8, is a “perfluorinated” chemical, which means that its base includes carbon chains attached to fluorine atoms. Because the fluorine-carbon bond is one of the strongest in chemistry, these compounds are incredibly stable, which makes them useful in industry. But that stability also makes them endure in the environment. Indeed, C8, which has recently been detected in upstate New York, in Vermont, and in Michigan’s Flint River, among other places, is expected to remain on the earth long after humans are extinct. And evidence suggests that many of its replacements are just as persistent.

The potential permanence of the problem was only one reason the EPA team was mucking around on the banks of the Cape Fear River. There were short-term dangers, too. Strynar and Lindstrom knew well that the Cape Fear is a source of drinking water and that if perfluorinated chemicals — known as PFCs — had contaminated the river, they would soon make their way into human bodies. Strynar had spent eight years documenting the presence of these molecules in fish, food, air, house dust, and humans. Lindstrom, an expert on measuring PFCs in the environment who has worked for the EPA for more than two decades, had also been documenting the steady proliferation of the chemicals. Both knew that the potential for contamination around the plant was great, because C8 had spread into the water around many of the facilities that made and used it, including plants in West Virginia, Minnesota, New Jersey, Alabama, Germany, and Japan. According to data from the Centers for Disease Control, 99.7 percent of Americans already had C8 in their blood.

What Lindstrom and Strynar didn’t know was exactly what DuPont had used to replace C8 and whether it was escaping the plant. The river water was their key to finding out. By comparing the samples from above and below the plant’s outflow, they could determine which chemicals may have entered the river at that point.

Strategic sampling was the easy part. Figuring out the exact chemical structure of those molecules would require more ingenuity. Ultimately, it would take a team of 10 scientists from five different institutions more than a year to figure out the structure of the PFCs they found in the river — using a mass spectrometer, which produced spiky graphs depicting the exact weight and features of each molecule, software that uses the masses of compounds to generate likely chemical formulas, and painstaking searches of chemical databases and public records for descriptions of new PFCs to compare against their findings. Altogether, the scientists found 12 new PFCs, including one discovered in the files of the West Virginia Department of Environmental Protection, which in 2011 approved DuPont’s use of a C8 replacement at its Washington Works factory in Parkersburg. That was the same facility that had caused massive C8 contamination of drinking water linked to severe health problems among the local population.

After analyzing the molecules, Strynar and Lindstrom concluded that “a new generation of replacement compounds is now out in the environment,” they wrote in response to questions from The Intercept. These new chemicals likely had “the same chemical performance properties” as the older generation of PFCs, like C8. “This would also suggest,” they wrote, “that their toxicity and environmental persistence are likely to be similar as well.”

17,585 Secret Chemicals

When companies want to begin making and selling a new chemical, they are required to file a written notice with the EPA. But current regulations do not mandate that any particular health or safety studies be performed, and according to a 2007 report from the EPA, only 15 percent of new chemical notices contain any information about the materials’ impact on health. Moreover, chemical manufacturers are permitted to claim that various parts of the information they give the EPA are “confidential business information,” or CBI. About 95 percent of new chemical notifications, according to a 2005 Government Accountability Office report, include information that is protected as a trade secret, a figure the EPA confirmed as still “generally accurate.”

Even the very name and structure of a chemical, which are essential to tracking its presence in food, water, and the rest of the environment and determining how it affects humans, can be claimed as CBI. The 12 chemicals Strynar and Lindstrom’s team painstakingly identified are just the tip of a mysterious and dangerous iceberg. Manufacturers have used the CBI shield to withhold the names and identities of 17,585 of the chemicals now registered with the EPA.

The allowance for certain confidentiality claims, which is written into the law, is based on the idea that if companies are forced to reveal the exact nature of a chemical, other companies will be able to duplicate it, depriving the original manufacturer of the opportunity to profit from its research and development investment. In response to past criticism of CBI claims, the American Chemistry Council has said that “balanced confidentiality laws help protect the trade secrets that foster innovation and create jobs.”

“CBI hinders our ability to capture emerging pollutants and make sure the public is safe,” said David Andrews, senior scientist at the Environmental Working Group, whose 2009 report publicly raised the problems posed by the growing list of secret chemicals. “Scientists can’t search for contaminants if they don’t know what they’re looking for.”

The secrecy surrounding DuPont’s C8 replacement, which is sold under the commercial name GenX, left Strynar and Lindstrom in a bizarre situation. Although they work for the EPA’s National Exposure Research Lab, they didn’t have access to all the information they needed to determine whether people were being exposed to the chemical and, if so, whether that exposure posed an environmental risk. They might have applied for CBI clearance, but because those privy to such business secrets are by law forbidden from sharing them, they wouldn’t have been able to reveal what they learned. Compounding the absurdity of their situation, a recent records search has revealed that although the chemical identity of the replacement was initially shielded as CBI, DuPont had declassified it by 2011. As a result, its generic identification number was switched to a traceable number, and information about the chemical was theoretically public. But because there had been no announcement of the declassification and no publication of the traceable number until after Strynar and Lindstrom began their research, no one — including the two EPA scientists — was able to access information about it. And so they had to spend many months and many taxpayer dollars sleuthing out information that was readily available to some of their colleagues within the EPA.

As it turned out, GenX was present in the river.

Sanitized Documents

After a manufacturer tells the EPA about a new chemical it would like to introduce, the agency has 90 days to respond. While it most often simply accepts these new creations and rarely forbids companies from bringing them to market, in about 10 percent of new chemical applications since 1979 and about 40 percent of the notices submitted last year, the agency gave its version of a yellow light, requiring some sort of testing or restrictions on the production of the substance. These requests often take the form of consent orders. Publicly available versions of these documents are often riddled with redactions meant to protect confidential trade secrets.

For instance, a consent order for three PFCs issued in 2006, after the phase-out of C8 was announced, bears the stamp, “EPA SANITIZED,” and notes that critical details such as “company identity, specific chemical identities, production volumes, manufacturing process, processing and use information, and other information” have been scrubbed from it on the grounds of CBI.

The absence of this information makes what does come to light in the rest of the document particularly disturbing. The consent order for the three chemicals acknowledges that the EPA is concerned they “could cause lung effects” and notes that they may degrade into substances that “will persist in the environment, could bioaccumulate or biomagnify, and could be toxic (“PBT”) to people, wild mammals and birds.” These factors taken together, the consent order concludes, “raise concerns for potential adverse chronic effects in humans and wildlife.”

Despite these concerns, the EPA allowed the three replacement chemicals to enter the market in 2006 with the provision that the company perform reproductive, toxicity, and carcinogenicity tests of the chemicals’ effects on rats. Because the testing was required only if the company made or imported more than a certain amount of the chemicals — and because that “trigger amount” was withheld as CBI — it’s unclear if the company ever reached that limit or if the testing was ever done.

When asked about this document, the EPA provided the following response: “Based on concerns raised during the review of three alternative chemicals, a consent order was put in place (and later modified) that requires certain fate testing (i.e., hydrolysis, photolysis and biodegradation studies) to be completed in 2016 and 2017. The data will allow us to better understand the degradation rate of the chemicals.”

Regrettable Substitutions

Several dangerous chemicals have been replaced by what environmentalists call “regrettable substitutions,” molecules that are often just slightly tweaked versions of the originals and pose similar problems. After PCBs were associated with health problems, including lowered immune response and developmental issues, the chemicals that replaced them also proved to be toxic. And in perhaps the most notorious recent example, bisphenol S (BPS), an additive to plastic used for water bottles and sippy cups, turned out to have many of the same dangerous characteristics as the close chemical cousin it replaced, bisphenol A (BPA).

But while PCBs had only a handful of replacements, and BPA had one primary substitute, the phasing out of PFOA and other PFCs based on 8-carbon chains has led to the introduction of a much larger number of chemicals.

Between 2006 and 2011, after manufacturers agreed to phase out longer-chain PFCs, chemical companies notified the EPA of their intent to introduce some 150 chemicals to replace them, according to research conducted by the Environmental Defense Fund in 2012. At least 125 of those chemical names were claimed as confidential.

Over the past decade, the EPA has reviewed more than 300 proposed alternatives to C8, according to a written response the agency provided to questions from The Intercept. Of those applications, 0.9 percent were not accepted; 67.1 percent were subject to consent orders, which often require additional testing of the chemical; and 18.5 percent were withdrawn by the submitter, “often in the face of regulatory action.”

The manufacture of just one of these compounds can result in many byproducts, which themselves can be dangerous. Several of the 12 PFCs Strynar and Lindstrom found in the Cape Fear River may have been created through the process of making GenX.

While Strynar and Lindstrom were searching the river for signs of DuPont’s C8 replacement, a PhD student in Europe confirmed the chemical structure of GenX in a surprising place. Zhanyun Wang, whose dissertation focused on PFCs, was at a conference in Munich in 2012 when he met a DuPont employee who told him that the formula for GenX had been printed in a brochure.

The formula for GenX provided in a DuPont brochure.

When Wang, now an environmental scientist who spends much of his professional life tracking down and sharing hidden information about dangerous chemicals, got home from the conference, he easily found a copy of the brochure on the DuPont website. The formula of GenX — CF₃CF₂CF₂OCF(CF₃)COOH.NH₃ — was right there on Page 2. He told me he assumed that its publication was a mistake but went ahead and included the formula in a 2013 paper that included a roundup of replacements for long-chain PFCs.

Shortly after his paper came out, Wang ran into some colleagues who worked for DuPont. “They were not happy,” Wang recalled. “But then they found out it was from their documents so there was nothing they could do.”

Confidential A and B

Recently, CBI claims have hobbled the EPA’s efforts to move forward with the regulation of a group of flame retardants known as brominated phthalates clusters (BPCs). These chemicals were introduced to replace older flame retardants that accumulate in humans and the environment, and were banned in some states after being linked to developmental problems, hormone disruption, and cancer.

Like the older flame retardants, BPCs are present in furniture, electronics, and some baby items. Although researchers have only recently begun studying BPCs, they have already raised some of the same red flags, and have linked the newer flame retardants to DNA damage and hormone disruption. Chemtura, one of the companies that made the previous generation of flame retardants, is also producing at least two of these new chemicals and together with two other manufacturers made somewhere between 1 and 10 million pounds of one BPC in 2011, according to the Chemical Data Reporting Database.

In 2013, the EPA began to officially assess the risks posed by BPCs, but in August 2015 it published a document known as a “data needs assessment,” which concluded that the agency still needed more data. The report reveals how much information the flame retardant industry has withheld from the scientific community. Consider two of the chemicals, listed in the August report only as “Confidential A” and “Confidential B.”

The consent order for Confidential A sums up the problem well: As with other consent orders, this document is heavily redacted, with the name of the chemical, its manufacturer, intended uses, and production quantities all withheld as confidential business information. The few details that do emerge are alarming. For instance, the document notes that the chemical raises concerns about “liver and kidney toxicity” and carcinogenicity in humans, as well as toxicity to fish and aquatic life, while also acknowledging that Confidential A will be used in consumer goods and may be “persistent, bioaccumulative, and toxic.”

Nevertheless, the EPA allowed Confidential A to enter the market in 2009 with the provision that the unnamed company perform additional tests to determine whether the chemical affects reproduction and development in rats. These tests, too, were tied to a trigger level that was claimed as a secret. (According to EPA documents, as of August 2015 the trigger level had not been reached.) The consent order for Confidential A also warns the manufacturer against making “predictable or purposeful release” of the chemical into “the waters of the United States.” But, as we know from Strynar and Lindstrom’s experience, the ability to determine whether the chemical has in fact been released hinges on first figuring out what it is.

Perhaps more disturbing is what happened with Confidential B, a chemical that “sailed through the New Chemicals program,” according to comments on the report that the Environmental Defense Fund submitted to the EPA on January 20, 2016. Despite the fact that the unknown chemical is so worrisome that it made it onto a shortlist of chemicals the EPA is investigating, the agency apparently didn’t require its mysterious manufacturer to perform any health testing. In 2015, according to the EPA’s August data needs assessment, Confidential B was grouped among chemicals that were produced in volumes greater than 1 million pounds.

When asked for comment, the EPA noted that it hasn’t received any new test data on Confidential B “because the production volumes are too small” and pointed out that the agency now typically bans the manufacture and import of new BPCs “until up front testing can be conducted and reviewed.” Asked to resolve the inconsistency, the EPA insisted that “for Confidential B, the production value is not greater than 1 million pounds.”

We don’t know much more about the named BPCs. For instance, the production data entry for a chemical known as TBB, one of the seven flame retardants listed in a supplement to the EPA’s report, is essentially devoid of information. The name of the production site, the amount produced domestically, the amount exported, and, as with Confidential A, the amount produced overall, have all been claimed as CBI.

“By calling production volume data CBI, they’re obscuring the extent of how prevalent a chemical is — and how prevalent exposure is,” said Eve Gartner, a staff attorney at Earthjustice, who submitted comments about the BPC data needs assessment to the EPA on behalf of the Natural Resources Defense Council, the Washington Toxics Coalition, and Earthjustice in January. Without this data, said Gartner, the EPA can’t do its job.

“EPA had a legal obligation to find out more about the toxicity of these chemicals and it failed to do that,” said Gartner. “And now it can’t do a risk assessment that might lead to regulation. That means many more years in which people, children, firefighters — everyone — is being exposed to toxic chemicals.” Indeed, while the regulatory process has been stalled, the environmental concentration of two BPCs known as TBB and TBPH has been doubling every year in urban areas and every 1.6 years in rural areas, according to a 2012 article in Environmental Science Technology.

While Gartner admits that some confidentiality claims, including those for the production volume, may fall into a legal gray area, others are plainly violations of the law. The Toxic Substances Control Act (TSCA), which lays the groundwork for chemical regulation, makes it clear that health studies cannot be protected as CBI. Yet, in 2012, Chemtura submitted more than 12 health studies to the EPA that it claimed as CBI.

The EPA did not dispute that it allowed health studies to be submitted as confidential business information, but wrote in a response to questions from The Intercept that it made summaries of the studies public. The agency statement also noted that “EPA is currently following our established process to review these and other submissions and declassify unwarranted CBI claims.”

When asked for comment, Chemtura did not dispute that it claimed the studies as confidential, but said in a statement that “providing information as Confidential Business Information to protect proprietary technical information is in full legal compliance with what is allowed under Federal regulations.” Chemtura also wrote that it strongly disagrees “with the characterization that there is something wrong with confidentiality claims.”

The law allows us to make a claim of confidentiality in order to protect our investments. Companies invest a lot of money in the development and manufacture of its products. This investment comes in many forms: research, physical testing, construction of manufacturing plants, product registrations, toxicology testing, marketing and advertising are among the many investments a company can make. These investments form proprietary information which is a barrier to entry for other companies. Giving away your investments to competitors is an unsustainable business practice for companies who seek to be successful. In the case of toxicology data, competitors have and do use public information they obtain to register competing “copycat” products against the data originators. Technical data is a valuable asset, and care should be taken in how companies distribute that intellectual property.

Gartner worries that the agency’s acceptance of Chemtura’s inappropriate CBI claim — and apparent failure to notice that the EPA itself was violating the law — signals a much bigger problem. “Nobody blinked an eye at EPA,” said Gartner. “It raises a lot of questions. How many other health and safety studies have been submitted to the agency and claimed as CBI?”

It’s impossible to answer Gartner’s question, since the information needed to determine whether a CBI claim is justified is itself often confidential.

Flame Retardant Dust

Part of the problem is the weakness of the law. TSCA indicates that companies should have to prove that disclosure of the information they’re claiming as CBI would likely “cause substantial harm to the business’s competitive position.” But while the EPA can face hefty fines if it violates a company’s confidentiality, TSCA offers no way to penalize companies that make false confidentiality claims. The EPA has helped companies declassify documents and encourages them to review their confidentiality claims through “the CBI Voluntary Challenge” and, in 11 cases, has disallowed CBI claims, according to an agency spokesperson. But it has never punished a company for a false claim.

Environmental researchers need to be resourceful — and lucky — to penetrate the obscurity created by CBI. Heather Stapleton, a scientist at Duke University who studies household dust, was able to show that two of the BPC flame retardants were widespread in the environment only because one of her colleagues happened to suggest that a new chemical she noticed in a dust sample might be a component of Firemaster 550, a flame retardant made by Chemtura. Luckily for Stapleton, the colleague happened to have — and share with her — a sample of the product, which isn’t readily available to scientists. Stapleton was able to match the molecules in it to those in the product sample.

Stapleton’s discovery might have ended there. But after giving a talk about her research, a furniture manufacturer who was in the audience gave her a letter from Chemtura saying that the company’s prenatal development studies of its product had found “some effects.” The letter went on to assure the manufacturers that the risk was “negligible,” despite the findings, since the product didn’t leak into the environment.

But Stapleton’s work proved otherwise. The chemical was clearly making its way into the environment if it was showing up in dust samples. Alarmed, she asked Chemtura for its health studies of Firemaster 550. Stapleton said the company declined to supply them (Chemtura told me that it has no record of Stapleton requesting the studies), and so she asked the EPA for any data it had on the product. “They mailed me a CD that had 800 pages and 90 percent was blocked out for CBI,” Stapleton told me recently. “I couldn’t make heads or tails of that document.”

According to a statement from the EPA, the agency declassified the company name, chemical names, and individual ingredients of Firemaster 550 in 2010, and this information is now available in the public docket.

So Stapleton decided to use some of her remaining Firemaster 550 sample to study the product’s health effects, exposing pregnant rats to varying doses of the substance and observing the health of their offspring. She found that exposure could have clear effects on the rats’ babies, which were more likely to become obese and show signs of anxiety. Female rats whose mothers were exposed to Firemaster 550 were more likely to experience early onset of puberty, and males whose mothers were exposed at levels lower than the company deemed safe had an increased rate of heart defects. Stapleton also concluded that Firemaster 550 is an endocrine disruptor.

Substantial Risk Reports

Independent research on the health effects of the replacements for C8 and longer-chain perfluorinated compounds has only recently begun in earnest. But several studies already indicate problems similar to those linked to C8, which include immune disorders, reproductive problems, and two kinds of cancer.

The most worrisome health information comes from industry itself. Chemical manufacturers are required by Section 8 (e) of the Toxic Substances Control Act to report any information to the EPA that “reasonably supports the conclusion that” a substance they make or use “presents a substantial risk of injury to health or the environment.” But the critical information in these 8 (e) reports can also be claimed as confidential. Last year, the Environmental Working Group reviewed more than 100 Section 8 (e) reports that had been submitted for perfluorinated chemicals between 2007 and 2015 and found that, among the 85 percent in which the chemical’s name was withheld, “reported health effects of exposure included death; maternal and developmental toxicity; degeneration and necrosis of the kidneys; chromosome aberrations; changes to the weight of the heart, kidney, liver, thymus, spleen, prostate, ovaries and adrenal glands; lethargy; and irregular breathing.”

The EPA has possessed evidence of the health effects of DuPont’s C8 replacement, GenX, since at least April 2006, when DuPont filed the first of 16 Section 8 (e) reports about the chemical. Some of those reports reference a 2009 consent order, which The Intercept obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request. That document — in which the specific identity of the replacement chemical and a closely related salt molecule, their production volume, manufacturing process and sites, processing, use, and other information have been withheld as CBI — lays out the agency’s many concerns about DuPont’s C8 replacement. It notes, for instance, that it has evidence that the chemical and its salt are toxic to lab animals and cause mutations in mammalian and human cells. The document also lays out concerns that the molecules “will persist in the environment, could bioaccumulate, and be toxic (“PBT”) to people, wild mammals, and birds”; that “there is high concern for possible environmental effects over the long-term”; and that “EPA has human health concerns for the PMN substances.”

An analysis of the 8 (e) reports, which are based on DuPont’s experiments on lab animals, shows that GenX presents some of the very same health problems that C8 does, including changes in the size and weight of animals’ livers and kidneys, alterations to their immune responses and cholesterol levels, weight gain, reproductive problems, and cancer.

In response to inquiries from The Intercept, DuPont declined to comment, noting that GenX is now a product of Chemours. Chemours responded that “extensive safety testing was conducted” on GenX. “Data suggests that it is not a developmental, reproductive, or genetic toxicant, or a human carcinogen.” (See “New Teflon Toxin Causes Cancer in Lab Animals” for the complete text of Chemours’ response.)

Due to CBI claims, it’s impossible to determine the amounts of the new PFCs that are being manufactured and used in the United States. Without this information and with little monitoring of their presence in the environment, exposure levels are similarly indeterminate. DuPont’s filings in Europe estimate production of GenX at between 10 and 100 tons each year. GenX, however, is only one of the company’s new PFCs. Chemours, the chemical company spun off by DuPont in July 2015, has many additional new formulations of surfactants and repellents for use in textiles, firefighting foam, and leather. Other chemical companies have developed their own substitutes. 3M, which supplied C8 to DuPont for many years, uses a product called ADONA. Solvay, Asahi, Dow Corning, and numerous companies in Japan and Europe have also come up with their own formulations. Zhanyun Wang estimates that tens of thousands of tons of fluorinated alternatives are now produced worldwide.

In May 2015, a group of scientists issued the Madrid Statement, which called for limiting production of all perfluorinated chemicals (regardless of the length of their molecules) based on their persistence and toxicity. The scientists noted that little information has been made public about how poisonous the replacement chemicals are to humans or animals, but that longer-chain PFCs have been shown to cause “liver toxicity, disruption of lipid metabolism, the immune and endocrine systems, adverse neurobehavioral effects, neonatal toxicity and death, and tumors in multiple organ systems” in lab animals and are associated with “testicular and kidney cancers, liver malfunction, hypothyroidism, high cholesterol, ulcerative colitis, lower birth weight and size, obesity, decreased immune response to vaccines, and reduced hormone levels and delayed puberty” in people. And a 2014 study in Environmental Research has already linked one of the C6 replacement molecules, PFHxA, with a health problem that does not seem to be linked to other PFCs — a liver disorder known as Gilbert Syndrome.

There is one way these “shorter-chain” variations seem to be better than the originals they’re replacing. Many of them, though not all, remain in the human body for less time. According to one 2011 document from the European Food Safety Authority, 3M reported that the half-life of its chemical ADONA was between 12 and 34 days in the bodies of three workers. In contrast, it takes humans about four years to clear half of the C8 from their bodies. Although it takes months for lab animals to rid themselves of C8, DuPont has claimed that with GenX, “virtually complete elimination from the body occurs in 12-24 hours.”

But as C8 replacements become increasingly ubiquitous, this improvement may be moot. “Even if it stays for just days,” said Wang, a chemical “still has possibility to cause damage.” Because the replacements are already so widespread, he said, “we’ll keep eating them and drinking them, so we’ll have continuous exposure. And if the environmental concentration in food and water keeps going higher because of increased use, then concentrations in our bodies will also go up.”

Asked for comment, 3M provided the following statement: “We believe that these shorter-chain compounds do not present health risks at the levels they are typically found in the environment.”

In terms of how long they’ll persist in the environment, the new chemicals are just as bad as the C8 they’re meant to replace. Like C8, GenX is extremely stable and will likely persist indefinitely. As A. Michael Kaplan, DuPont’s then-director of regulatory affairs, put it in one of the 8 (e) reports the company submitted to the EPA in 2010, “The biodegradation of the test substance was 0%.”

“It will take thousands of years to break down — or maybe longer,” Wang said of GenX. 3M’s ADONA, he said, will also endure indefinitely. “The company claims that this replacement degrades, but actually it doesn’t.” Indeed, most of the new replacement PFCs — or, in the case of the longer-chain molecules, the substances they degrade into — won’t ever break down. “We’re replacing a super-persistent chemical with super-persistent chemicals.”

Resetting the Clock

It took half a century from the introduction of C8 into commercial use for the public to catch on about its dangers. In part because the EPA has yet to issue binding regulation that could require polluters to be held financially responsible for their mess, most of the contamination from that chemical is still in our environment. The earlier flame retardants that BPCs are replacing — and the dangerous chemicals they degrade into — also remain with us.

Now, with the introduction of next-generation replacement chemicals, industry has reset the clock. In addition to the C8 and the phased-out flame retardants in our water, soil, and air, we are being exposed to hundreds of other chemicals, many of which could endure forever.

DuPont referred to C8 as an “essential processing aid.” Chemours, which has inherited DuPont’s PFC business, notes that its newer generation of fluoropolymer resins, manufactured using GenX, is “critically important.” The company website points out that its products are used to provide cable and internet service, more efficient cars, and “insulation for cabling that is essential for safety, security and performance in buildings, data centers, ships and aircraft.”

But while PFCs are used to make some very useful products, they’re also in many others that are not essential, including food packaging, clothing, make-up, workout gear, and outdoor equipment, such as hiking clothes and tents, which means that nature lovers may be unwittingly spreading the contamination to remote places when they travel. Clearly, many if not all of these products could be manufactured without using PFCs.

The American Chemistry Council insists that “flame retardants provide an important layer of fire protection and help save lives.” But as the Chicago Tribune has reported, the trade organization has used phony customer watchdog groups and bogus claims to make the case for the necessity of flame retardants. Not only do the chemicals provide no meaningful protection from fire, as the Tribune’s reporting made clear, they can actually increase smolder propensity, as California officials noted when the state was doing away with its requirement that furniture makers inject the flame retardants into cushions. Some scientists also insist there is no scientific justification for the current practice of putting flame retardants in electronics. The American Chemistry Council did not respond to our requests for comment.

Although it’s technically possible to rid the environment of some PFCs, the process of finding, extracting, and disposing of them is practically out of reach in most of the world. Most countries won’t be able to pay for it, and the few that can, including the U.S., are unlikely to undertake this incredibly difficult and expensive task.

Rewriting the Law on Toxins

This should be the ideal time to be grappling with the enduring impact of unsafe chemicals. Congress is in the midst of revisiting our lax national chemical safety law, the Toxic Substances Control Act, and reform bills have passed both the House and the Senate. But lawmakers have already missed the opportunity to close one gaping legal hole that allows unsafe chemicals to enter the market, since neither of the bills now being considered would require companies to submit specific safety data before new chemicals are approved for use.

Nor does either bill really fix the confidentiality problem. The Senate’s bill would make some improvements on CBI, requiring the EPA to review past and future confidentiality claims that mask a chemical’s identity, as well as at least a quarter of the CBI claims for other types of information. But the House bill does not mandate any CBI review or lay out penalties for companies that make false claims. And in one important respect, TSCA “reform” could be a step backward: The House bill would allow companies to claim chemical identity in health studies as CBI.

As Congress dickers over reconciling the two TSCA reform bills, the regrettable replacements are accumulating all around us. The researchers who have made it their business to chase after those chemicals meanwhile struggle to keep pace. Stapleton, the researcher at Duke, is raising money to conduct a larger version of her experiment with Firemaster 550, which was criticized for its small sample size. Stapleton’s lab at Duke also runs a public testing program so that people can send in foam samples from their furniture to determine whether it contains dangerous flame retardants.

Wang, for his part, has become increasingly frustrated with the lack of awareness of the irreversible PFC contamination. Time, he says, is running out. “We need to reduce the emissions as fast as possible and evaluate whether uses are essential.” To his great frustration, however, most of his colleagues who work with PFCs are still focused on C8.

Strynar and Lindstrom, the EPA researchers in North Carolina, are hoping their discoveries will spur medical researchers to investigate the health effects of the PFCs they discovered in the Cape Fear River. They themselves have begun to work on developing methods to measure the chemicals, and to test methods for removing them from drinking water. Their research will likely continue for years.

The post How DuPont Concealed the Dangers of the New Teflon Toxin appeared first on The Intercept.

The May 2015 report showed elevated levels of PFCs in the Flint River — including PFOA, also known as C8, the chemical that spread into drinking water around a DuPont plant in West Virginia and led to a landmark class-action lawsuit. In addition to C8 and PFOS, a similar molecule that’s also based on a chain of eight carbon atoms, scientists found 11 other PFCs in the Flint River ­— more than in any of the other water sources tested around the state.

In 2014, in an effort to save money, Flint switched the source of its drinking water from Lake Huron to the Flint River, a change that resulted in residents being exposed to lead levels high enough to cause irreversible brain damage in children.

The Michigan report was based on tests of surface water and fish for PFCs in 13 sites around the state. According to Jennifer Eisner, a public information officer for the Michigan Department of Health and Human Services, the report was not designed to evaluate drinking water. Eisner referred questions about the dangers the PFCs posed to people drinking water from the Flint River to the Department of Environmental Quality, which did not return our phone calls.

Michigan’s testing revealed PFOS in the Flint River at levels that exceeded the state’s limits for both non-drinking water and drinking water. The scientists found C8 in 12 of the 13 bodies of water tested, though at levels below the official cutoff for concern. Michigan has not set safety levels for the other 11 PFCs.

C8, which has been linked to numerous health problems, including immune suppression, thyroid disease, and two types of cancer, has been turning up at dangerous levels in drinking water around the country, including Hoosick Falls in upstate New York, as well as in New Jersey, Colorado, New Hampshire, and Pennsylvania. Repeated calls to regulate C8 have been dismissed. In fact, Susan Hedman, the EPA regional administrator who stepped down in the wake of the Flint lead crisis, has also offered hollow promises on C8.

PFOS, which has been linked to low birth weight in humans and causes a similar set of health problems as C8 does in lab animals, was also found above threshold safety levels for birds and mammals. The amount of PFOS in the Flint River more than tripled between 2001 and 2013, and high concentrations of the other PFCs were found in fish taken from the river.

The Michigan report noted that “a more thorough assessment may be warranted” to determine the impact of PFOS on wildlife in and near the river, and raised the possibility that the government “should assess whether fish consumption advisories” for PFOS are necessary. Surprisingly there is no mention of the impact of PFOS on the Flint residents who were drinking water from the river when the report was issued. The report acknowledged the presence of C8, but because levels were below the official safety cutoff, concluded that “human health is not being impacted.”

Still, the levels of PFOS and total PFCs in the Flint River were the second highest recorded in the state. The highest levels were in Clark’s Marsh, a wildlife preserve that borders Wurtsmith Air Force Base, which is home to one of hundreds of military fire- and crash-training sites contaminated with firefighting foam.

The Flint River finding should have sounded an alarm and, according to one historian familiar with the area, could have been anticipated. “The Flint River was lined with supply companies that were giving all the toxic materials that went into the modern car,” said David Rosner, author of Lead Wars: The Politics of Science and the Fate of America’s Children and a professor of public health at Columbia University. Rosner noted that General Motors, which also operated a plant on the Flint River, stopped using the river water because it was “too corrosive.”

“If it’s harming transmissions and basically the open sewer for factories, how could anyone ever think of that water as a source of drinking water?” said Rosner. “The idea that they’re finding lead and PFCs is not surprising. I’m sure that river has many other pollutants, too.”

For more on C8 and PFCs:

The Teflon Toxin
Part 1: DuPont and the Chemistry of Deception
Part 2: The Case Against DuPont
Part 3: How DuPont Slipped Past the EPA

Poisoning the Well
Toxic Firefighting Foam Has Contaminated U.S. Drinking Water

The post Flint Residents May Have Been Drinking PFCs in Addition to Lead appeared first on The Intercept.

As The Intercept reported in a three-part series last month, Bartlett’s is the first of some 3,500 personal injury and 37 wrongful death claims stemming from the 2005 settlement of a class-action suit filed on behalf of people who lived near the plant. Another trial over the chemical, which for decades was used in the production of Teflon and many other products, is scheduled for November. Together, the “bellwether” cases, six in all, are expected to give attorneys on both sides a sense of whether the rest of the claims will proceed or settle — and for how much.

Bartlett’s attorneys, including Robert Bilott, who has been working on C8 since taking the case of a West Virginia farmer named Wilbur Tennant in 1999, argue that DuPont is guilty of negligence, battery, and infliction of emotional harm for exposing Bartlett to C8 in her drinking water.

DuPont’s attorneys, who summarized their case in opening arguments and will present their witnesses later in the trial, insist that the company bears no responsibility for the kidney tumor for which Bartlett was treated in 1997. “Nobody at DuPont expected that there would be any harm from the extremely low levels of C8 that were reached in the community,” said DuPont’s attorney Damond Mace in his opening argument.

The company’s defense hinges on the contention that company employees did not realize C8 was dangerous at the time Bartlett was exposed — despite hundreds of internal documents detailing DuPont’s knowledge that the chemical posed risks to both animals and humans. When evidence of its harm did emerge, said Mace, it was too late: “Nothing that happened after 1997 would have allowed DuPont to go back and do things any differently than had already been done.”

The particular threats posed by the chemical were detailed by the findings of a panel of scientists, who in 2012 determined that C8 exposure at the level measured in six water districts — at least .05 parts per billion — was “more likely than not” linked with six illnesses: preeclampsia; ulcerative colitis; high cholesterol; thyroid disease; testicular cancer; and Bartlett’s disease, kidney cancer.

“Kidney cancer occurs every day all across this great country of ours.”

The 2005 class-action settlement requires DuPont to accept C8’s links to these diseases, and that agreement forces the company’s attorneys to walk a legal tightrope over causality. While they must admit that C8 can cause kidney cancer, they deny that it caused Bartlett’s particular cancer. As Mace told the jury: “Kidney cancer occurs every day all across this great country of ours.” He then pointed out that Bartlett, who weighs 230 pounds, displayed one of the “major risk factors” for the cancer: obesity.

DuPont also contends that C8 isn’t as toxic as the plaintiffs claim. As evidence, Mace cited a report produced by the West Virginia Department of Environmental Protection, with the help of an industry-funded group and several DuPont employees, that set a temporary standard for drinking water safety that was 150 parts per billion (ppb). Yet the company’s own internal standard for the chemical was 1 ppb.

The DuPont lawyer also told the jury about a study the company conducted that concluded Wilbur Tennant, the West Virginia farmer who sued DuPont over the death of his entire herd of cattle, was responsible for his own cows’ deaths. The report failed to disclose that the company had dumped 7,100 tons of C8-contaminated sludge into a landfill near the stream from which Tennant’s cows drank. Instead, the authors blamed Tennant’s “failure to provide the right supplements for the cattle” — a conclusion Mace repeated in court, adding, “They had pink eye and many other issues.”

Wilbur Tennant shot this video in the late 1990s on his property in West Virginia. He died of cancer in 2009; he was 67. This video contains graphic imagery.

If the chemical were really dangerous, DuPont attorneys contend, government agencies would have regulated it. The implication is that the company was within its rights to dump barrels of the stuff into the ocean, as it did in the 1960s. And that it was perfectly fine to emit more than 632,000 pounds of the toxic substance directly into the Ohio River, as DuPont did over the more than 50 years it used C8 in West Virginia. “They were allowed under the law,” Mace said of the plant’s river emissions. “There is a difference between emissions from a plant and what an individual is exposed to. There weren’t people there right at that pipe.”

We’ll soon know which argument a jury finds more persuasive. But even if they decide in Bartlett’s favor, or the company opts to settle the suits, the costs may not fall to DuPont. Facing years of litigation over the chemical and the possibility of federal regulation — and thus enormous cleanup liabilities — in July DuPont spun off its chemical division into a separate company called Chemours.

Settlement costs could force Chemours, whose stock price has fallen 57 percent since June, to the brink of bankruptcy — or beyond.

The post The Teflon Toxin Goes to Court appeared first on The Intercept.

“This is brilliant,” one of Bartlett’s attorneys, Mike Papantonio, said of the verdict. “It’s exactly what we wanted.” Papantonio emphasized that Bartlett’s case, the first of more than 3,500 personal injury and wrongful death suits filed on behalf of people in West Virginia and Ohio who were exposed to C8, had been chosen by DuPont as the first to be tried and involved less egregious injuries than many others yet to be heard.

“They picked this case with the idea that it was the most winnable. Strategically they never dreamed we’d win this case,” said Papantonio, who predicts that other C8 suits in the pipeline will result in punitive damages. “Really, it’s just a matter of time.”

In a statement, DuPont said it expected to appeal the verdict and emphasized that “safety and environmental stewardship are core values at DuPont.”

CARLA BARTLETT LIVED much of her life in Coolville, Ohio, a tiny town a few miles across the Ohio River from a DuPont plant in Parkersburg, West Virginia. After years of drinking water that had been contaminated with C8, Bartlett, who is now 51, was diagnosed with a tumor on her kidney in 1997 and underwent a painful surgery that involved removing part of one of her ribs along with the tumor.

Bartlett’s attorneys argued that while she and tens of thousands of people living near Parkersburg, West Virginia, were drinking water contaminated with C8, DuPont was actively working to ensure they didn’t “connect the dots” about the chemical. One DuPont PowerPoint presented by Papantonio described the company’s strategy of keeping sensitive information from government agencies, community organizations, and “disgruntled employees.”

DuPont’s lawyers, for their part, denied any responsibility for Bartlett’s illness. “Nobody at DuPont expected that Mrs. Bartlett or anyone else in the community would be hurt,” said Damond Mace, who emphasized that the company couldn’t have predicted that scientists would find a probable link between C8 and kidney cancer, as they did in 2012.

Bartlett’s attorneys responded with voluminous internal communications showing the company did in fact foresee the damage they would later inflict. In one DuPont document, a summary of a 1984 meeting about C8, a DuPont employee concluded that “we are already liable for the past 32 years of operation.”

The presentation of historical documents was designed to convince the jury that the company acted irresponsibly, even given the information that was available before Bartlett’s diagnosis. Bartlett’s lawyers laid out a clear timeline that began in the 1950s, when DuPont first learned of the chemical’s potential toxicity. By 1966, some DuPont employees realized that C8 was seeping into groundwater. By 1980, after the company instituted regular testing of its own employees, DuPont had evidence that C8 was present in workers’ blood — and within two more years there was evidence that the contamination persisted in human tissues. By 1984, according to testimony, DuPont’s own testing had established that C8 had leaked into local drinking water. In 1989, DuPont knew that C8 caused testicular tumors in rats — and even classified C8 as a possible carcinogen. But rather than reporting these developments, Mike Papantonio told the jury, “They hid this information from the public for at least 16 years.”

The company could have easily disposed of its C8 waste differently, Bartlett’s attorneys argued. As evidence, they produced a 1985 memo and a manufacturer’s information sheet from 3M, the company that sold C8 to DuPont until 2000, both of which clearly stated that the chemical should have been either incinerated or placed in a landfill designed for hazardous waste. Bartlett’s lawyers also revealed documents showing that DuPont did in fact follow 3M’s directive in its facilities in Japan, China, and the Netherlands, where it burned C8 waste.

In Parkersburg, however, DuPont chose to pump C8 through its smokestacks, bury it in unlined landfills, and dump up to 50,000 pounds a year directly into the Ohio River. The attorneys also presented evidence that switching to incineration would have cost the Parkersburg plant less than .2 percent of its annual operating costs. “The only reason they didn’t do it was because they wanted to save money,” Papantonio told the jury. Later, he added: “We wouldn’t be here today if it were incinerated.”

ARGUABLY THE MOST MOVING testimony came from Bartlett herself, a mother of two who described her daily routine of drinking iced tea that she unwittingly made with contaminated water, the physical pain of her ordeal, and her fear of a recurrence. Bartlett cried while on the stand and traced a huge line across her body where she has a scar from her surgery, saying, “It’s very big, and it’s very ugly.”

But it was testimony from two of DuPont’s own witnesses, who admitted to having high levels of C8 in their own bodies, that may have been even more damaging. Anthony Playtis, who was occupational health coordinator at the DuPont plant in Parkersburg, said that in 1994 C8 was measured in his blood at 400 parts per billion (ppb), a level that is roughly 100 times the national average. The retired DuPont worker went on to dismiss the notion that the measurement was cause for concern. “I knew there were a lot of other people who had much higher levels, and so I didn’t think mine was anything to worry about,” he said. Also, Playtis noted, “Everything is toxic.”

As part of a group of DuPont employees who measured C8 levels in local drinking water, Playtis took a sample from his home in 1988 that measured 2.2 ppb — more than double the safe level the company had set internally. But neither he nor anyone else at DuPont reported the elevated C8 readings to the public or to regulators until 1999. During those years, local children were splashing in backyard pools and community members were watering their vegetable gardens with the stuff.

Another former DuPont employee, Paul Bossert, who served as plant manager in Parkersburg from 2000 to 2005, made a point of mentioning that he drank the plant’s water, which had elevated levels of C8, and acknowledged that the chemical had been measured in his own blood at 85 ppb. Upon cross-examination, however, Bossert admitted that he had high cholesterol and a potentially cancerous “spot” on his kidney. Both conditions are among the six approved by a panel of scientists as grounds for personal injury cases such as Bartlett’s.

The jury didn’t have to make a decision about whether Bossert’s health conditions were caused by C8, but they did have to try to determine if the chemical caused Bartlett’s cancer, and they were given specific instructions about how to do so. According to the terms of a 2005 class-action settlement over the contamination that spawned these cases, they had to accept as fact that drinking C8 for at least a year at the level of .05 ppb or above, as Bartlett did, can cause cancer.

Although DuPont’s attorneys were not permitted to dispute the fact that C8 can cause cancer, they did question whether it had caused Carla Bartlett’s particular illness. “Just because C-8 is capable of causing cancer does not mean that it did cause Mrs. Bartlett’s kidney cancer,” DuPont attorney Damond Mace said. Instead, he argued that Bartlett’s cancer that was caused by her obesity.

The $1.6 million verdict is only one of several problems now facing DuPont. Since March the company’s stock is down more than 30 percent, and on Monday CEO Ellen Kullman announced she was stepping down, leaving DuPont without a succession plan.

Some observers who are familiar with the company’s long history in Parkersburg believe Kullman’s departure is tied to C8. Jeffrey Dugas, campaign manager of Keep Your Promises DuPont, a local nonprofit devoted to holding the company accountable, said the company’s mishandling of the chemical — the contamination, the cover-up, and now the bruising legal fight that just concluded in Columbus — hasn’t served anyone well.

“This whole process of trying to wiggle out of its responsibilities has hurt everyone involved,” said Dugas. “The latest victim is Ellen Kullman. But mid-Ohio residents have been suffering for over a decade.”

As the first of six bellwether cases, Bartlett’s verdict is seen as an important predictor of the thousands of C8 claims that may yet come to trial. The next case, in which the plaintiff has ulcerative colitis, is scheduled to be heard in Columbus in late November. The future of Chemours, the chemical company that was recently spun off from DuPont, may also hinge on the outcome of these trials.

With C8 present in water far beyond the Ohio Valley, where Bartlett and other plaintiffs in the current crop of plaintiffs were contaminated, the implications of the Bartlett case may be far wider. Papantonio, who tried some of the first asbestos cases, sees that litigation, which has cost industry more than $50 billion to date, as a possible model.

“This is starting out just like those cases,” said Papantonio. “If I was in charge of this company, I’d be worried.”

The post DuPont Found Liable in Teflon Toxin Trial appeared first on The Intercept.