The water you drink has been poisoned. The same goes for the air you breathe, the soil where your vegetables grow, and the lakes where you fish. In fact, there’s likely a good amount of the poison in your body right now, making its way through your system, and the damage of which you might not see for many years.
You weren’t supposed to know about this either. And the only reason we know about it now is because of a lawyer named Robert Billot. In 1999, he began to take legal action against chemical manufacturer DuPont for the harm and destruction of communities near one of the company’s factories that produced per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, or PFAS. These are also known as “forever chemicals” due to their inability to break down quickly and naturally, and can linger around in the environment for thousands of years.
Over the course of multiple lawsuits, Billot gained access to a treasure trove of internal documents from DuPont and other chemical manufacturers such as 3M that revealed the companies were well aware of the dangers posed by their products to their workers, customers, environment, and public at large. Not only that, but there was also a concerted effort to cover up their severity of PFAS in order to hide the potential for harm their products posed to the world.
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“We now know that PFAS are toxic, and they're also contaminating everybody,” Tracey Woodruff, professor and director of the University of California, San Francisco Program on Reproductive Health and the Environment and a former senior scientist at the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), told The Daily Beast. “There’s a measure of PFAS in pretty much everybody in the United States. It’s in the drinking water.”
Woodruff is the senior author of a paper published on Thursday in the journal Annals of Global Health that examined internal documents from DuPont and 3M, the two largest makers of PFAS, and found that the companies used tactics similar to the tobacco industry in order to suppress, obfuscate, and delay public knowledge of the chemical’s toxicity. This happened over the course of decades—starting as early as 1961, and has lasted into the 2000s.
These companies’ actions not only resulted in increased cancer rates amongst its employees, but might have also caused birth defects in at least two pregnant factory workers. The new findings underscore the need for greater regulation amongst the chemical industry—as well as the dangers posed by PFAS.
“What we want to do is understand the chemical industry's role and what are the strategies that they use to cover up the science about the harms of the chemicals,” Woodruff said. “So this is the first time that scientists have taken an academic analysis look at internal industry documents.”
The PFAS developed by DuPont and 3M can be found in a wide range of everyday items including kitchen appliances, food products, and even clothing. For example, the primary chemical behind the Teflon on your non-stick pans falls under the PFAS category. The chemicals are useful, very resistant to breaking down, and happen to be incredibly toxic.
They’ve been linked to increased rates of kidney, liver, and thyroid cancer; liver disease; immune suppression, and pregnancy complications such as lowered birth weight and birth defects. Studies of PFAS and its effects on laboratory animals show that high exposures to the chemicals can negatively impact the health and well-being of the subjects over time—and even showed an increase in tumors on the organs of animals exposed to high doses of PFAS.
Despite knowing the dangers of these chemicals for decades, PFAS manufacturers suppressed knowledge of the harmful effects—directly leading to the contamination of millions of Americans over the years.
“DuPont had evidence of PFAS toxicity from internal animal and occupational studies that they did not publish in the scientific literature and failed to report their findings to EPA,” the study’s authors wrote. “These documents were all marked as ‘confidential,’ and in some cases, industry executives are explicit that they ‘wanted this memo destroyed.’”
The paper outlined several strategies that the manufacturers used to hide their knowledge. This included deciding what and how they would study the impact of their products, suppressing unfavorable research and findings into how their products were causing increased rates of cancer amongst their workers, and distorting public messaging behind their chemicals.
“They had internal communications where they said they were going to tell employees that [a PFAS product] is about as toxic as table salt,” Woodruff said. “They had a number of different documents talking about how they were going to distort what people were saying about it.”
According to the paper, the documents detail an extensive timeline of more than 50 years that show that PFAS manufacturers were well aware of the potential for harm that their products can cause—despite their public messaging stating otherwise. This included a 1961 report from Teflon’s chief of toxicology that found that the company’s materials had “the ability to increase the size of liver in rats” and warned that the chemicals should avoid contact with the skin. There was also a memo that revealed that C8, a PFAS product, was found to be “highly toxic when inhaled.”
DuPont and 3M also discovered in 1980 that two of eight pregnant employees who worked in C8 manufacturing gave birth to babies with defects. However, they chose not to tell employees about the discovery, saying in a 1981 internal memo, “We know of no evidence of birth defects caused by C8 at DuPont.”
The manufacturers continued to downplay the dangers of their chemicals despite being well aware of the adverse effects. In a 1991 press release, the company said that “C8 has no known toxic or ill health effects in humans at concentration levels detected.”
The companies have since been sued and have settled for hundreds of millions of dollars due to the harm their chemicals have caused the surrounding communities and employees. In 2004, DuPont was fined $16.45 million by the EPA for not disclosing their findings on the chemicals.
When reached for comment, a DuPont spokesperson told The Daily Beast that the current version of the organization was “established as a new multi-industrial specialty products company” in 2019 after spinning off from its original parent company. “DuPont de Nemours has never manufactured PFOA or PFOS.”
A 3M spokesperson told The Daily Beast that the company has "previously addressed many of the mischaracterizations of these documents in previous reporting."
The study’s authors now hope that their paper continues to shed light on the harms caused by these manufacturers and embolden policy makers to take a hardline stance in regulating the processes.
“Accountability is really important,” Woodruff said. “These industries should know that they are going to be held accountable if they lie about the health harms of their products before they're being released.”
In the end, the study’s authors note that this is largely a failure of industry self-regulation—something we’ve seen happen time and again with industries ranging from tobacco to even Big Tech. “Public agencies in fact relied on DuPont to certify that exposures to the chemicals did not pose a human health risk because so little was known publicly about the chemicals,” the study reads.
So, if nothing else, the paper further highlights the perennial problem of lawmakers failing to regulate harmful industries before it’s too late. Hopefully, those problems don’t last forever—unlike some of our chemicals.
