3M’s PFAS Crisis Has Come to Europe

https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2022-3m-pfas-toxic-forever-chemicals-europe

by michieldotv • 4 years ago

180 94 4 years ago

bloomberg.com

cr1895• 4 years ago

Can someone provide the text of this article please?

pdw• 4 years ago

https://archive.ph/eSqP4

mdp2021• 4 years ago

It seems like a "payfence" (instead of a full "paywall"). You may like to check the served content.

jhugo• 4 years ago

Yup. E.g. reader mode works fine.

jessaustin• 4 years ago

Turn off javascript for this domain.

superkuh2• 4 years ago

PFOS—perfluorooctanesulfonic acid—is referred to as a forever chemical, because it accumulates in soil, rivers, and drinking water and is almost impossible to get rid of. She had about 300 micrograms of it per liter in her blood, more than 60 times the level recommended as safe today by the European Union.

Almost impossible, but not impossible. It has been found that giving blood (and then throwing that blood away) significant reduces PFOS levels. Not that I'm defending 3M or any of this. My favorite rivers where I fish turned out to be full of PFOS due to a leaking 3M waste dump and this was only announced in 2021. So I spent some time looking for solutions.

https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle...

https://www.aabb.org/news-resources/news/article/2022/04/26/...

RobertRoberts4• 4 years ago

Are you recommending bloodletting as a cure for some of the nastiest pollution ever created by humans?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloodletting

WrtCdEvrydy• 4 years ago

To be honest, I've been given similar advice for high levels of iron once from a doctor. Let go of a few gallons over a year and my iron has never been that high before.

Beltiras• 4 years ago

I think it spoke to the desperation of the situation, not that it was a solution worthy of being called "a cure".

fmajid• 4 years ago

It's either that or pumping for breast milk. Since we have no idea what gender "superkuh" is, the latter may not be an option, despite their username...

collegeburner2• 4 years ago

Just because it doesn't cure everything doesn't make it useless, bodybuilders do it as well to control blood pressure. Kinda like how those bubonic plague masks don't make covid masks useless.

colechristensen2• 4 years ago

Yes, I would recommend bloodletting.

There are a collection of things which are difficult for your body to eliminate, regularly extracting blood is a mechanism for getting rid of some of them.

kube-system• 4 years ago

Bloodletting as a psuedoscience is bad. Therapeutic phlebotomy is a modern medical procedure.

DoingIsLearning6• 4 years ago

where did you find information on affected rivers?

superkuh2• 4 years ago

https://www.pca.state.mn.us/water/pfos-impairments

https://www.mprnews.org/story/2021/11/08/minn-lakes-with-for...

Cerium• 4 years ago

I read this to mean "almost impossible to get rid of out of soil, rivers, and drinking water". Which to my understanding is true.

MrBuddyCasino• 4 years ago

Nothing will change until there are prison sentences, and the very deliberate system of shielding managers and corporations from responsibility is changed.

It was known for decades that Asbestos and cigarettes causes lung cancer, that adding lead to gasoline is a terrible idea, that burning oil warms the atmosphere. The truth was suppressed through intimidation, lawsuits and bribes. Regulatory agencies are corrupted by the revolving door system. You cannot trust these organisations.

DoingIsLearning6• 4 years ago

I mean NO2 from diesel exhaust is provably reducing longevity i.e. killing people sooner, still no prison sentences happened for any of the heads in VW. [0]

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volkswagen_emissions_scandal

londons_explore2• 4 years ago

I support no prison sentences for VW... The engineers were meeting the letter but not the spirit of the rules, just as so many other companies do.

You probably have done the same when you did revision just before a geography test at school - you probably only learnt the syllabus rather than going to the library and learning everything in the geography section.

The VW engineers made a car that had only 'revised' enough to do well in the test, not to do well in the real world. Here is another example of engineers doing the same in a different industry[1].

[1] http://omattos.com/2021/11/11/appliancegate-the-energy-effic...

goodpoint4• 4 years ago

Serious question: why people obsess over Volkswagen? Other companies are even worst offenders. See chart:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diesel_emissions_scandal

KennyBlanken2• 4 years ago

I wish people would stop acting like this was just VW. Every major manufacturer in Europe was found to have either emissions-cheating code, or to have emissions levels wildly higher than what the manufacturer claimed, because the EU regulators just trusted manufacturers to test and report CO2 and NOx figures. Shockingly, they all lied.

And if you live in America, diesel pickups have to meet a far less stringent set of emissions standards.

On top of that, many people who own duramaxes, powerstrokes, and cummins diesels strip out the emissions control equipment and run modded firmware on their ECUs to not throw a code...spewing far more pollution than these "dirty" diesels.

londons_explore2• 4 years ago

There are lots of countries with lots of governance models, yet none as far as I know would have proactively banned any of those things early on.

I suspect that means there is a flip side we aren't seeing. It means there is a huge disadvantage to banning some probably harmful chemical. For example, if you were a small island and you banned imports of everything containing any PFAS, you'd end up in the technological stone age - there are no PFAS-free iPhones, food, paper, or shoes. So, unless you have your own shoe factory, your people will have to go barefoot...

DoingIsLearning6• 4 years ago

Huge logic sleight of hand.

It is a very different piece of legislation to apply a cautionary principle to any substance in cookware, food containers, or in contact with human skin, versus a full out ban on iphones because some processor inside it used a PFAS lubricant at some point in the supply chain.

pitaj• 4 years ago

The huge disadvantage is many people dying because, in the long process of vetting a new chemical or drug, it was not available for use.

goodpoint4• 4 years ago

That's a false dichotomy. There are many other alternatives other than toxic materials VS stone age.

Also we are way way beyond "probably harmful".

IYasha2• 4 years ago

I totally agree with you, but it should be noted that not all kinds of asbestos are harmful. One safe type is used today in apartment building with no measurable consequences.

coryrc• 4 years ago

There's no use for asbestos in residential without a safer substitute.

goodpoint4• 4 years ago

Add to that the toxicity of DDT, many car companies using emission test defeat devices, and thousands more examples.

What's worse is that for demanding accountability for such crimes you get called "environmental extremist" or something similar.

heartbeats2• 4 years ago

What they really need is a system that puts the fear of God into them. Simply prohibiting chemicals after we've found them to be dangerous is unhelpful, and regulating them before we've found them dangerous is impossible.

Why not have a serious system based on punishment instead, after the fact? For example-

"If a company is found to be responsible for a material environmental disaster, whoever was employed by that company during the relevant period shall be sentenced to life in prison and a fine of 100% of their net worth. No liability should apply for occupations which can be conclusively demonstrated to be unrelated to the activities of the firm, such as janitors or security guards.

The statute of limitations shall equal the duration of life of the concerned natural persons or the victims, whichever is longer."

This would cause people to self-regulate, based on whatever informal information they hear ("3M is doing really dodgy stuff, I wouldn't work there if I were you"), rather than having to wait for regulation. It would be much better suited, and would allow for the government to scrap other bothersome regulation.

NullPrefix• 4 years ago

The statute of limitations shall equal the duration of life of the concerned natural persons or the victims, whichever is longer."

A strong incentive to finish off the victims

elil177• 4 years ago

After reading the series "A Chemical Hunger" by the blog Slime Mold Time Mold, I'm pretty convinced that chemical contamination is a global-warming level threat to humanity. The authors talk about the evidence that chemicals released into the environment by human activity (such as PFAS) are causing obesity, and they present compelling evidence that this is plausible. They are also working on research to confirm this hypothesis.

But regardless of whether obesity is caused primarily by environmental contamination, chemical contamination is a huge risk for a few reasons:

-Once in the environment, chemical contaminants can react in unforeseen ways, creating new chemicals that we will have no idea how to monitor for.

-Health data prior to industrialization is not good and is confounded by poor medical practices, so we may think we've "solved" chemical contamination when in fact we haven't (e.g. maybe heart disease would go away if it weren't for some chemical that we started using in 1910 but we can't tell because everyone was dying of dysentery).

-The solution, in some most cases, may mean giving up significant technological advances, especially polymers and heavy metals extracted from the ground.

https://slimemoldtimemold.com/2021/07/07/a-chemical-hunger-p...

mensetmanusman9• 4 years ago

When my mother moved in and we went on daily walks, she lost a pound a week for a year. Her entirely sedentary lifestyle (and that of most Americans I know) is a major factor for her obesity. Standing is now considered exercise it has gotten so bad.

But people will blame anything instead of taking action, so…

hansword• 4 years ago

Just because a sedentary lifestyle is bad for your health, doesn't mean smoking is harmless.

Do you know anything about these chemical? If so, please share. If not, well, ....

xxpor• 4 years ago

What if the chemicals aren't making you fat directly, but messing with your neurotransmitters and sapping your motivation?

Doesn't seem completely out of the realm of possibility.

PuppyTailWags• 4 years ago

I'm pretty sure daily walks (no heart rate elevation, not HIIT, no muscle being built, etc.) didn't contribute significantly to your mother's weight loss. Moving around is not a significant contributor to weight loss[1]. Diet is the most significant contributing factor to gaining or losing weight. Moving in with someone new, new environment, new dietary changes, etc. might've done significantly more.

1. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3925973/, from the abstract, "Based on the present literature, unless the overall volume of aerobic ET is very high, clinically significant weight loss is unlikely to occur. "

elil177• 4 years ago

While a sedentary lifestyle causing obesity may be true on an individual basis (and exercise is really really good for you regardless of your weight), it fails to explain why people who do manual labor tend to be as fat or fatter than people who have office jobs and why sedentary people of the past were not that fat compared to people today. There are a lot of reasons detailed in the series about why personal choice cannot adequately explain how it is we are getting fatter as a society. I think there are many good arguments for a non-chemical cause, like more and more appetizing highly processed foods.

But to say "people will blame anything instead of taking action" makes no sense. We have had decades of action trying to get people to eat healthy and exercise. It hasn't done anything. We have to accept that just telling people to lose weight doesn't work and start pursuing other options.

And there are so many good options! In Spain, for example, "staple foods" such as vegetables, meat, and bread are taxed at a lower rate while highly processed foods are taxed at the normal rate. In most developed countries, universal healthcare helps people prevent and manage the worst diseases associated with obesity such as heart disease and diabetes. And yes, we should investigate alternate explanations outside of the exercise/diet nexus such as chemical contamination! It may not be the reason but it is a testable hypothesis that would be "big if true."

MomoXenosaga• 4 years ago

People hate exercise so much they prefer expensive diets.

If you don't burn the calories you eat, no matter how few they may be, you will never lose weight.

colechristensen2• 4 years ago

There is a whole lot of mild panic going on.

Here’s the deal, you’re going to die. It’s going to happen for one reason or another, and if you eliminate one reason, there will be another one lined up not so long after.

If your purpose in life is to maximize the number of days you live, I guess you do you, but it doesn’t seem like a very high quality life to me.

We take risks, we accept them, there’s middle ground between ignoring risks and obsessing over them. The toll from worrying about things can be much worse than the things you’re trying to avoid.

You know what causes obesity? Availability of food. You didn’t evolve in an environment where calories are essentially free so your motivations and feedback behaviors aren’t tuned to make good decisions when it comes to food. Sure there are probably secondary effects from all sorts of things, but it comes down to food not being scarce like it evolved to expect.

Paying attention to environmental risks makes sense, but only to a certain extent. You’re probably still going to live a long life, and the secret to a good one probably isn’t going to be found in avoiding the next scary chemical of the day.

cromka• 4 years ago

Here’s the deal, you’re going to die. It’s going to happen for one reason or another, and if you eliminate one reason, there will be another one lined up not so long after.

This comes off as a very ignorant take. The problem is not "if" we're going to die and "how", but "how soon" and with "how much suffering", along with "how much effort/money does it increasingly require to stay healthy".

dylan6042• 4 years ago

Here’s the deal, you’re going to die.

The level of arrogance or just compelete lack of understanding is mind boggling here.

If I get cancer and that cancer kills me, that cancer will not kill anyone else.

If I die because of some man-made chemical, the source that I got that chemical from is still there and will affect others as well.

Not all sources of death are the same. Some are much more nasty. Man-made things like PFAS chemicals have been known to be nasty for a long time by their makers. Those makers have chosen to hide it. Any attempt at "we're all going to die" in order to lessen the guilt of these companies is just shameful on all who spread it, and you should be ashamed.

hdjjhhvvhga• 4 years ago

If your purpose in life is to maximize the number of days you live, I guess you do you, but it doesn’t seem like a very high quality life to me.

People have a tendency to go to the extreme. There is a lot of middle ground between not caring at all and having a panic attack. This middle ground can be constructively used to make the lives of future generations easier, just like many of the people of the past have done for us.[0]

[0] Having spent a few months off-grid, I'm extremely grateful for things like electricity, tap water, sewage, central heating, a roof above my head, walls around me thicker than my tent, medicines, and many, many other things I used to take for granted.

nscalf• 4 years ago

Well this is just wrong. First off, there is no evidence that it will be impossible for medical science to eventually solve most aging related illness, and mitigate most diseases. There is no practical reason to assume that trying to increase lifespan is a fools errand. Medical advancements look like big breakthroughs followed by decades of incremental improvements. Right now, it's starting to look like AI can increase the rate of breakthroughs and tighten the incremental improvement periods, so an extra 5 years of life may end up being enough to benefit from substantial medical progress.

Second, obesity isn't caused by the availability of food. Most well developed countries have an essentially infinite amount of food for any given individual, and most individuals do not stop eating because they lack the resources to access more food. So why isn't every individual in these society with these resources massively obese? Because there are a number of psychological, chemical, and biological reasons for obesity. Largely, the cause for obesity comes in the form of appetite suppression vs satiation. There are many chemicals like PFAS which decreases satiety, increasing the calories you intake.

Just like how removing heavy metals from drinking water and increases in food availability increased the general quality of life for all affected people, decreasing the amount of chemicals affecting satiety in the general environment could have massive impacts for societies that are impacted.

In short, if your baseline hunger is lower, you won't get fat.

zarzavat• 4 years ago

Clearly there exist risks we should invest time in avoiding. It takes time to look both ways when crossing the road, but that is time well spent given the large risk of death when crossing without looking.

Likewise there are risks that are better ignored. There is risk in flying on an airplane, but it’s not risky enough to forego the good that comes of it.

Only with quantification comes the ability to rationally decide whether to take a risk or not.

The issue with these chemicals is that we do not know how to even quantify their risk. So we have to estimate and people’s gut estimates vary wildly. Your gut estimate is that there is a low risk, others estimate a high risk.

Only time will tell who is correct, such is the uncertainty of life.

elil177• 4 years ago

You know what causes obesity? Availability of food.

As discussed in the article, this fails to explain why there have been societies with almost no obesity and almost unlimited access to food (e.g. the Mbuti people of the Congo who get 80% of their calories from a copious supply of honey but have no documented cases of obesity, or rich people in developed countries prior to about 1980).

Death is only one part of the equation. I want to be healthy while I live.

The toll from worrying can be much worse than what you're trying to avoid.

Absolutely. I don't do any of the things the series lists as their recommended ways to lose weight (even though I am overweight). I haven't tried the all-potato diet and I haven't moved to the top of a mountain. I just keep exercising and limiting my sugar intake. And what has happened is exactly what the series said would happen: I lost about 15 pounds and then leveled out. Which I'm fine with - all the evidence points to the fact that just losing 15 pounds does quite a bit for your health, and that's enough for me! I'm happy to focus the rest of my energy on living life and enjoying it.

But I think someone should be doing the research. Why are dollars going to weight loss PSA campaigns and studies showing that this or that diet might help people lose weight? These approaches haven't worked for decades and we could be funding research into some theories like chemical-mediated hunger.

ravel-bar-foo• 4 years ago

If the chemical contamination hypothesis were true, one would expect obesity to correlate with/lag industrial activity/contamination. I'm not sure that this is true. Obesity in Europe didn't start going up until the early 2000s, when Europe was transitioning to a more service-based economy. In Korea it has become a problem in the last 5 years (again, as the country deindustrializes), and in China it seems to be mostly a problem of the wealthy rather than a problem of the poor factory worker (and the factory worker is presumably exposed to more industrial contaminants).

That said, I have not yet read the SMTM piece, or looked at SMTM's data.

staffanj• 4 years ago

We had some scandals here in Sweden also - mostly around military airports (perhaps normal airports also) that practice with putting out burning airplanes.

Spooky23• 4 years ago

Yeah, never buy a house near a military base, especially one active during WW2 or later. If you do, don’t consume groundwater.

The military’s approach to dealing with waste in that era was essentially “dump it over there” or “burn it with fire”. Airbases are particularlye bad as the crap they spray on the wings for de-icing and the firefighting foam. Is everywhere and often is nasty stuff.

mensetmanusman9• 4 years ago

It would be an interesting future historical study to see what caused more harm:

-Manufacturing the best firefighting chemistry (e.g. military purchases for missile warehouses, resorts, apartments, etc.) -Using the chemistry to actually fight fires

It might be a case where sometimes second best should have been the way to go, but it’s hard to know beforehand I imagine, especially in safety scenarios where people are laser focused on optimizing for that.

dmos62• 4 years ago

Here's an instance of the phenomenon.

In fact, in the case of the V-2, more than twice as many Allied prisoners died outfitting the factory and producing it than did Allied civilians and soldiers hit by it in rocket attacks.

https://airandspace.si.edu/stories/editorial/wonder-weapons-...

mensetmanusman9• 4 years ago

That is amazing, thanks for the link!

dylan6042• 4 years ago

At this point, we have an over abundance [edit: of evidence] that when we as humans do new science in pursuit of good, we tend to overlook the negative aspects. Chemical companies spend a fortune on development of the new chemical and rush it to market to recoup investments. We never spend enough time looking at the down side of these new chemicals even though we have all of the information we currently have that shows these chemicals tend to not do so well in the environment. We also have abundance of examples where these companies knew the dangers and hid them in order to make their money. Yet with all of this information, nothing is done to prevent the release of these chemicals without 3rd party testing.

The citizens being affected have very little recourse.

mensetmanusman9• 4 years ago

Great point.

It seems like we need everyone working together because it’s such a complicated game theory problem.

Is humanity’s goal to march forward with scientific discovery at the risk of inventing risky things?

Or is the goal to make people comfortable? (was going to say healthy, but I think that ship has sailed in the west where we are approaching 50% obesity with no foreseeable counter measure).

[insert other goals from key stakeholders]

E.g. if the civilian government said “we need the best X” but it also can’t by Y,Z,Q, etc. and the more qualifiers you add the less likely that there will ever be something new in the arena (which is good for corporations that rely regulatory capture).

pmarreck• 4 years ago

Any way to get a kit to test yourself? Or can any doctor do this? (Asking from NY in the US)

carapace3• 4 years ago

*Stands on soapbox*

I've been kicking around an idea I've been tentatively calling "techno-conservatism". The tl;dr: "Like Amish, not Luddites." It's becoming more and more clear that each of our technologies has trade-offs, and the uncritical acceptance of those trade-offs has lead us to poison ourselves and the world in several fairly significant ways. This would seem to me to make a more considered and conservative relationship with our technology imperative.

There are movements like the "Slow Food" movement, and of course the Amish are famously conservative in their acceptance and use of modern technology.

The general idea is to start with a simple and ecologically harmonious low-tech (but sophisticated!) lifestyle and then add essential technology (in a kind of "progressive enhancement", eh?) to increase QoL (Quality of Life) without, y'know, poisoning anything.

IYasha2• 4 years ago

As long as tech owners openly state that humanity should be reduced in quantity, it is pretty clear that they don't care, at best, if not contrary (create harmful tech on purpose).

carapace3• 4 years ago

Well, to hell with the tech owners then, eh? If they are committed to being "Dr. Evil" villains then I don't see why the rest of us should take them seriously?

doitLP• 4 years ago

I like that idea. But because of the way these chemicals get everywhere, we need pretty much everyone on board. That won’t change unless we change incentives and negative externalities are felt by the actors that decide to use the chemicals. How do we do that? Same question for nuclear war, fossil fuels, and any other tragedy of the commons type situation.

carapace3• 4 years ago

My hope is that this "techno-conservatism" would reflect and facilitate a mass movement which could then generate enough of a political and economic mandate to leverage us out of destructive applications of technology using existing systems of government. I feel like a lot of people, especially young people, are kind of already leaning this way. But I'm fairly apolitical myself, I don't want to start a revolution, y'know? If I run this up the flag pole and no one salutes, so be it.

"Techno-conservatism" isn't a political stance. Ecological harmony isn't a political goal, it's a prerequisite of any durable regime at all. The thing is living in harmony with nature is fun and economical so I would hope it's very popular once you've experienced it. (E.g. we have some hydrogen-powered buses here and the exhaust they put out is not smelly poison, it's actually refreshing! It has a delightful not-quite-aroma, it's moist and oxygenated. You only have to stand upwind of one once to realize that ICE vehicles are inferior.)

In the short-term, and on the personal scale, I'm imagining something like a neighborhood or small town as a kind of experimental zone or context. ( Check out Village Homes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Village_Homes ) You're right that this wouldn't mitigate truly global issues like "forever chemicals" or global warming, but it's an improvement on what we're doing now. I think once there's a kind of "theme park" you can visit that shows what it's like to live well without messing up the environment it would really convince people to do it.

synu• 4 years ago

3M PFAS has poisoned the Westerschelde estuary here in the Netherlands and Belgium to the point where you can no longer eat fish from there, and the only thing 3M has done about it is complain to anyone who will listen that they unfairly haven’t been allowed to reopen their plant.

https://www.dutchnews.nl/news/2022/05/health-body-says-avoid...

timst4• 4 years ago

Interactive PFAS contamination map: https://www.ewg.org/interactive-maps/pfas_contamination/map/

forgotmypw17• 4 years ago

If there's ever been a case for building a parallel agency, it's environmental investigations.

zxspectrum1982• 4 years ago

Dark Waters is an entertaining movie about PFAS and PFAO https://www.imdb.com/title/tt9071322/

fomine3• 4 years ago

It also causes shortage of 3M fluorinert that is needed by semiconductor manufacturer https://www.barrons.com/articles/chip-production-plant-shutd... https://www.thelec.net/news/articleView.html?idxno=4082

3M’s PFAS Crisis Has Come to Europe

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