PFAS were never intended for use in regular people’s homes.
This group of chemicals, nicknamed “forever chemicals” because of their ability to resist deterioration even in the most extreme environments, were first used by Manhattan Project scientists who needed a material that could withstand the caustic substances used in uranium enrichment.
That material was Teflon.
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Investigative journalist Mariah Blake’s new book, “They Poisoned the World: Life and Death in the Age of Forever Chemicals,” traces the history of PFAS and how these chemicals grew to be so ubiquitous that they are now believed to be in the bodies of every human on earth.
Blake spoke with WPR’s “Wisconsin Today” about her book and what she learned from nearly a decade of following people in some of the first places to bring the issue of PFAS to the broader public.
The following has been edited for brevity and clarity.
Rob Ferrett: It turns out, the Manhattan Project [is how PFAS were invented], developing atomic weapons.
Mariah Blake: It was clear from the outset that these were dangerous chemicals. At the plants where they were manufacturing them, fires and explosions were commonplace. Workers were constantly being hospitalized with chemical burns and breathing problems, or worse. But it wasn’t just the workers who were affected. Farmers downwind of these plants quickly began to complain that their peach crops were burning up, that their cows were so crippled they couldn’t stand; they had to graze by crawling on their bellies. And in some cases, farm workers who ate the produce they picked also fell ill.
RF: Some the first years of use of [PFAS], we were seeing environmental and health impacts?
MB: Yes. The farmers’ complaints alarmed Manhattan Project officials, so they actually began researching the health effects of these chemicals in the 1940s as part of this broader program to research the health effects of special Manhattan Project materials, including uranium and plutonium.
And as early as 1947, Manhattan Project scientists had determined that these chemicals were toxic and that they were accumulating in human blood, and this is one of the things that makes these chemicals so dangerous. Government scientists had an indication that this was the case as early as 1947.
RF: Take us from the Manhattan Project to this explosion in the number of products being made with various PFAS chemicals. How did we get from nuclear weapons research to super common use of these chemicals?
MB: After the war a company called 3M, which is based in Minneapolis, acquired patents for technology to produce PFAS and also hired Manhattan Project chemists to help turn them into products that could be sold to manufacturers or marketed to the general public. This led to innovations like Scotchgard [and] Teflon, and eventually these chemicals found their way into thousands of everyday products. Some examples include contact lenses, baby clothes, diapers, dental floss, kitty litter, furniture, carpeting. The list is basically endless. So these exotic chemicals that were developed for the purpose of enriching nuclear fuels eventually became ubiquitous in our homes and lives.
RF: One of the threads in the book is how the industry reacted to these findings about PFAS in communities, and how they knew their products were dangerous, and how they approached that publicly.
MB: The two main manufacturers of these chemicals [DuPont and 3M] have known since the 1960s that they were toxic. They knew as early as the 1970s that they were accumulating in the blood of people all across the country. 3M tested thousands of [blood] samples from people in countries all across the globe, including remote rural China, and they looked at archived medical studies dating back to the 1930s and ’40s. The only blood they could find that didn’t contain these chemicals was collected from Korean war vets before 1952 — so basically before these chemicals went into mass production. This set off some alarm inside the industry, and they started intensively researching these chemicals. And they quickly discovered that PFAs did not break down in the environment [and] that they were extremely dangerous to lab animals.
DuPont launched what it called a ‘pregnancy outcome study.’ And as part of this program, it monitored the pregnancies of workers in its Teflon division. As it turned out, two of seven pregnant women who gave birth during the course of the study gave birth to children with facial deformities. But rather than inform regulators or the public, DuPont simply canceled the study.
RF: This is an issue here in Wisconsin in places like French Island in the western part of the state, Marinette and Peshtigo in northeastern Wisconsin. Based on what you’ve seen from communities that responded and took action, if people are out there listening saying, “I’m worried about this in my community,” what would you suggest to them on starting to push back and dig into this issue?
MB: The people that I’ve been following, they did whatever they could think of. They spoke out in the media, they organized protests, they organized boycotts, they filed lawsuits, they demanded change from legislators — and they have made a remarkable difference.
So individuals can really make a difference, especially on the state level. And I would just encourage people in Wisconsin, who are concerned about this issue, to act to encourage the state to be more aggressive in regulating these chemicals. Because so far, the state has not acted as aggressively as some other states.
