PFAS “Forever Chemicals” and Nordic Ski Wax

https://www.outsideonline.com/2408206/nordic-skiing-fluorinated-wax-swix

by dtagames • 6 years ago

136 59 6 years ago

This shit is everywhere and I've lately observed that the big outdoor brands aren't even close to doing what they can to stop using them. It's even in childrens clothes, all in the name of keeping us dry.

I actually recently tried Greenland wax on a cotton canvas anorak, and so far it's working out great. Perhaps it's not as effective as Gore-Tex. I think we should try to remember that people somehow survived outside before these materials were introduced.

Angostura• 6 years ago

I suspect many of the buyers of Gortex clothing are quite environmentally aware. This could be bad for them if the news spreads. I was completely unaware of the link between Gortex and PFAS

ImprovedSilence• 6 years ago

Maybe I'm not looking as much, but I don't see things branded as GoreTex at all anymore. I attributed to something like the patent running out on it. Either way, I see almost no jackets or boots including the GoreTex logo. I assumed everyone moved on to cheaper DWR type stuff, which is probably just as much if not more harmful & full of PFAS.

tesseract• 6 years ago

The Goretex membrane itself is PTFE, which as long as you don't overheat/burn it, is a long chain polymer that does not seem to be anywhere near as much of a concern as small-molecule PFAS are. The bigger issue is likely the water repellent treatment of the shell fabric, which at least in the existing technology is necessary for breathability -- the garment can't breathe if the outer fabric layer is waterlogged.

forgotmypw• 6 years ago

One of the many reasons I've stopped buying new things, going for used instead. The off-gassing decreases with time.

nate_meurer11• 6 years ago

PFCs don't offgas. There are practically non-volatile at normal temperatures. They steadily rub off on everything that touches them.

ErikAugust• 6 years ago

This stuff is in drinking water which seems bad, but what are the dangers of Teflon and Gore-Tex clothing?

jfim• 6 years ago

The company manufacturing Teflon has been disposing of chemicals used during the manufacture of Teflon in such a way that those chemicals end up in the drinking water supply of communities surrounding factories.

toomuchtodo3• 6 years ago

Relevant comment/thread from a few days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22117840

Huffington Post article: https://highline.huffingtonpost.com/articles/en/welcome-to-b...

Dark Waters film on the topic: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt9071322/

DuPont was the entity responsible for the pollution and coverup.

humaniania• 6 years ago

Other companies are doing the same thing: https://www.mlive.com/news/2019/11/wolverine-shoes-still-coa...

nate_meurer11• 6 years ago

Also, the U.S. military deliberately dumps tons of this shit right on the ground every year. They use it in firefighting foam, and spray it freely in regular fire fighting exercises at dozens of military bases around the country.

https://theintercept.com/2018/02/10/firefighting-foam-afff-p...

swiley• 6 years ago

You probably shouldn’t be exposing yourself to a lot of Teflon (although IMO you probably shouldn’t be exposing yourself to a lot of PS either heh)

kube-system2• 6 years ago

PTFE is non-toxic. Health concerns are about production byproducts and thermal decomposition.

nate_meurer11• 6 years ago

Teflon is entirely different from the PFAS chemicals that the article is talking about. There is no evidence that fluoropolymers like PTFE are a health risk. PTFE and PVDF in particular have been widely used for over 50 years in applications that bring us into intimate contact with them on a daily basis, like cookware and medical implants. They have been heavily studied, and have never been shown to be a risk to human health in any way, so long as they aren't burned.

Alex3917• 6 years ago

It’s in almost all chain lubes for bikes also. There is one brand I found called Green Oil that doesn’t use it, but it takes a week or so to ship from the UK and they only make a wet lube. Not thrilled with using a wet lube year round, but still much better than having Teflon dust in my apartment.

hinkley2• 6 years ago

A million years ago Phil Wood's Tenacious Oil was the go-to for the all-weather bikers I knew. They are still in business.

https://cdn.shopify.com/s/files/1/0378/1413/files/SDS-PHIL_T...

(Is everyone publishing these now? Is that a California law?)

unicornporn2• 6 years ago

There is one brand I found called Green Oil that doesn’t use it, but it takes a week or so to ship from the UK and they only make a wet lube.

It's on one of my bikes now. Not super winter friendly (wax style), but works. Their grease is just as good as the hazardous crap out there.

There's another eco brand that sells lube too, can't find their name. Muc-Off wet and drylubes says "biodegradable".

nate_meurer11• 6 years ago

No, lubricants such as Krytox and the various spray and wet machine lubes used for bikes and such contain only polymerized fluoropolymers such as PTFE (trade name Teflon). PTFE has a long established safety record, and is completely different from the unpolymerized PFCs that are showing up in ground water and in people's blood.

Green Oil is fear mongering. Their website calls PTFE "carcinogenic". This is a lie. The manufacture of PTFE is nasty business, no doubt, but the finished product is safe. Safe enough that it has been widely used in medical implants for the past 50 years.

serf• 6 years ago

PTFE has a long established safety record, and is completely different from the unpolymerized PFCs that are showing up in ground water and in people's blood.

Teflon is mentioned in the article as a PFAS based chemical that has had legal trouble due to health hazards in the past..

"A just-released film, Dark Waters, stars Mark Ruffalo as an intrepid lawyer battling DuPont in the early 2000s after the chemical giant began making a PFAS-based product, Teflon, at its factory in Parkersburg, West Virginia, where chronic illness and untimely deaths spiked among nearby residents. Several states, New York and Ohio among them, have filed lawsuits that seek compensation for health problems caused by drinking water polluted by PFAS. DuPont and 3M are frequently defendants in these suits."

ip26• 6 years ago

My God, I had no idea it was in so many places.

arcticgeek• 6 years ago

So is the regular Swix CH7 hydrocarbon wax a C6 or a C8? Should I still be handling these with gloves?

notatoad2• 6 years ago

the "CH" line of waxes (CH4/6/7/8/10) are not fluorinated. The waxes that start with LF or HF (low-fluoro and high-fluoro, respectively) are the fluorinated products.

you probably don't need to worry about handling LF or HF with gloves, it's not that toxic. but if you're waxing with them you should be wearing a respirator.

lsllc• 6 years ago

Yeah ... about that. The CH wax dust isn't good respiratory-wise either. As an avid Alpine skier I used to hot wax, scrape then use the drill mounted rotary brushes pretty much every weekend until I discovered wax "dust" in my coffee! (early morning tuning!). I'd usually tune late at night I guess I never noticed the wax in my beer can/bottle! That was the last time I used them.

Now I use the Pro-Glide from SkiMD, rather than hot-waxing, scraping and brushing, you crayon the wax on cold then use it as a friction device to "melt" the wax in with some very light brushing. Much much quicker, uses far less wax and produces very little dust, highly recommended:

https://skimd.com/pro-glide

I never really used Fluro-based waxes because it doesn't last long and the guidance was that you needed to "get it out of your base" after racing as it supposedly did long term damage to the ski.

CDRdude• 6 years ago

I didn’t think CH waxes had fluorocarbons at all. Their LF (Low Fluoro) and HF (High Fluoro) lines certainly do.

TimD12• 6 years ago

CH doesn't have fluoro, but the correlation between C6/C8 and LF/HF is unclear to me. Does LF use C6 and HF uses C8, or can both wax types be made with C6/C8, but in different concentrations?

kyleblarson2• 6 years ago

Toko has a much better range, stick to that.

notatoad2• 6 years ago

Seems like kind of weird timing for this article - FIS has banned fluoros, and their grip over the nordic ski racing world is pretty much absolute. by next season, any waxes with fluoros will not be viable consumer products.

They call out the american birkie for not having banned fluoros yet - that's because the FIS ban hasn't gone into effect yet. American Birkie is a FIS worldloppet race and subject to FIS rules.

TimD12• 6 years ago

As someone who has waxed with HF wax several dozen times in the past (collegiate nordic ski racer) with no face mask and mediocre room ventilation, how worried should I be about long-term side effects?

randycupertino• 6 years ago

Try not to let it get to you- No use worrying over something that already happened which you can't change.

Also, it's in our drinking water currently anyways, so if you want to stress out about PFAS might as well do it over something we can change going forward: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-water-foreverchemical...

hanniabu• 6 years ago

From the article:

In 2018 a draft report from an office of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services said the risk level for exposure to the chemicals should be up to 10 times lower than the 70 PPT threshold the EPA recommends. The White House and the EPA had tried to stop the report from being published.

topspin• 6 years ago

The average US citizen has a large load of PFAS in their blood[1] from clothing, carpet, water and other sources. The levels have dropped a great deal in the last 20 years but it's unlikely you've increased your levels much beyond what you already had from other sources.

[1] https://www.atsdr.cdc.gov/pfas/pfas-blood-testing.html

The blood serum levels reported by CDC are staggering. As an example, I have a well and it's in a contamination plume of PFOS and PFOA. The EPA certified laboratory measured level two years ago was 11 ppt (parts per trillion.) The CDC measured 2.1 ug/L of PFOA (only) in the blood of over 2000 people in 2014. That's 2,100,000 ppt; 5 orders of magnitude higher than my 'contaminated' water.

steve_g• 6 years ago

I think 2.1 ug/l is 2100 parts per trillion (where "trillion" means 10E+12)

A ug is 10E-6 grams, a liter is about 10E+3 grams.

refurb• 6 years ago

You are exposed to multiple toxic and carcinogenic compounds in daily life. There is no way you can eliminate them completely.

nate_meurer11• 6 years ago

If it makes you feel any better, we're all in the same boat with you. Like really, all of us. We're all swimining in the stuff. Almost all water-repellent outdoor clothing, and all clothing, furniture, and carpeting that's marketed as "stain repellent" is coated with PFAS's. Those of us grew up in the 70's, 80's, or 90's crawled, played and slept on rugs and carpets that were coated with the original formula of ScotchGard, which was pretty much straight PFOS.

hinkley2• 6 years ago

The fungi Phanerochaete chrysosporium and Aspergillus niger apparently can degrade PFAS chemicals. Though I'm not sure how you concentrate them enough to for bioremediation, especially in tap water, unless you can do it at the point sources.

https://escholarship.org/uc/item/2x47296b

Scotchguard got banned years ago, sounds like ski wax is next, but it sounds like it'll still be used in factories for the foreseeable future.

ratsmack• 6 years ago

For everyone concerned about the damage this crap is doing to the environment and humans should watch "The Devil We Know"[1]. This film covers a time frame, starting in the 50's up to the current day.

[1] https://youtu.be/gwZSXdjAqSk

kyleblarson2• 6 years ago

I am a childless person living in the biggest nordic skiing area in North America. I wax with LF/HF every morning. I don't think my impact on the environment is that big.

LargoLasskhyfv• 6 years ago

Meanwhile in Aspen, CO https://www.aspentimes.com/news/aspen-skiing-co-among-those-... & https://www.dpsskis.com/phantom-glide

Should pollute less because it lasts longer?

PFAS “Forever Chemicals” and Nordic Ski Wax

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