by Sandra Steingraber, SEHN senior scientist and writer-in-residence

1.

What’s the opposite of Gone but not forgotten?

It must be Still here but nobody remembers.

2.

Per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) are slick molecules that like to repel things: water, oil, stains, dirt, heat, friction. They are seemingly everywhere, and they are found in ordinary, undangerous-sounding places.

Dental floss. Saucepans. Umbrellas. Shampoo. Recycled paper towels. Your couch.

Also, firefighting foam and fracking fluid, which are, okay, not undangerous sounding.

First synthesized in the 1940s, their production proliferated in the 1990s even after one of its leading manufacturers—3M, maker of Scotchgard and Scotchbrand—undertook a series of secretive tests that found perfluorooctanesulfonic acid in the blood of both the workers in their factories and members of the general public.

Other secret tests, conducted by industry in the 1970s, had already shown that this substance was toxic to lab animals.

Their collective acronym isn’t easy to say, so PFAS are mostly known as forever chemicals because once fluorine atoms swap places with hydrogen atoms on a hydrocarbon platform (derived from, let’s say, coal tar), they simply don’t let go, and no living organism has subcellular tools to break carbon-fluorine bonds apart.

Hence, for all intents and purposes, PFAS molecules are immortal.

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) estimates that, as a chemical family, PFAS represents a group of about 15,000 different synthetic substances. Forever chemicals don’t suffer from lack of diversity.

3.

Before there were PFAS, there were polychlorinated biphenyls, the OGs of forever chemicals.

Their acronym, PCBs, trips off the tongue easily, so we just call them by their chemical initials.

First synthesized in 1929 and banned a half century later in 1979, PCBs are oily molecules that are, amazingly, not flammable. So, they were added to lots of ordinary things where lubrication or insulation was needed but bursting into flames would be bad.

Electrical transformers. Electronic parts. Pesticides. Hydraulic pumps. Carbonless copy paper. Microscope immersion oil.

PCBs also began with a hydrocarbon platform. Take a fossil fuel byproduct, like coal tar, and shape its hydrocarbon backbone into two benzene rings. Weld them together. Pull off the hydrogens. Replace them with chlorine atoms. There are 209 ways to do this and therefore 209 different PCBs.

By 1976, researchers reported that women with breast cancer had significantly higher levels of PCBs in their tumors than in the surrounding healthy tissues of their breasts. This study was small but the finding provocative because PCBs were already linked to breast cancer in rodents.

By 2007, researchers reported that a gene involved in metabolizing hormones (CYP1A1) is influenced by exposure to PCBs. A picture began to emerge: Women who had inherited a particular variant of CYP1A1 and who had also amassed high body burdens of PCBs showed an elevated risk for breast cancer. Indeed, their rates of breast cancer were two to three times higher than that of women with lower levels and without this genetic trait.

4.

PCBs and PFAS are not found in the natural world. Both groups are fully synthetic petrochemicals.

Take a look at the periodic chart of elements, which is a grouping of boxes arranged into 18 columns. All the elements that share a column also share behaviors. These elements are like notes on a piano one octave apart from each other.

Column 17 is the second to the last pillar on the right, and it represents the halogens. Fluorine is on the top; chlorine is one box below it.

As any first-year chemistry student knows, this arrangement means that molecules created by bonding fluorine to carbon are almost certainly going to share major personality traits with molecules created by bonding chlorine to carbon.

By the 1970s, PCB exposure had already been linked to birth defects, brain damage, developmental delays, liver damage, and terrible skin lesions.

We also already understood that PCBs were essentially ungovernable.

Because nothing in nature can break them down—and yet they possess the uncanny ability to mimic hormones, tinker with genes, and alter enzymes—their poisonous capacity concentrates as it moves up the food chain, even as they become ubiquitously dispersed over the earth, traveling on wind currents and ocean waves, soaking into tree bark, sinking into sediments and soils and reseeding itself into the food chain. Passed from mother’s blood into breast milk, PCBs are an intergenerational poison.

These properties are why PCBs became one of very few classes of chemicals banned outright in 1979 under the Toxics Substance Control Act.

5.

So far, here’s what we know about the sprawling clan of PFAS chemicals, of which researchers have thoroughly tested only a few members: they impair the immune system, disable liver functioning, and are linked to diabetes and various cancers, especially thyroid and testicular cancer.

Like PCBs, PFAS damage liver functioning and can alter the timing of puberty. They also seem able to raise cholesterol and blood pressure.

A couple of PFAS chemicals have been phased out of production but most remain.

Mark Jones, an industrial chemist with Dow Chemical, recently expressed his astonishment that PFAS could be so harmful:

Forty years ago, when I first encountered fluorination in an organic chemistry class, it was talked about as an example of something that is fully synthetic … therefore, they’re going to be safe, because they will be non-interactive with biology.

Forty years ago was 1984. PCBs had already been banned for five years precisely because they are fully synthetic chemicals remarkably interactive with biology, world without end, amen.

So, I don’t believe him.

6.

PFAS are now found in the blood of 97 percent of U.S. residents, according to the Centers for Disease Control. And they are ubiquitous in breast milk and umbilical cord blood.

Reporter Sharon Lerner recently appeared on the Daily Show to describe the results of her year-long investigation into the cover-up at 3M and how the bodies of virtually every person and animal on the planet could have become contaminated with forever chemicals before anyone revealed the problem.

Biomonitoring studies of PCBs show similar results. But nobody remembers them anymore.

7.

When the Biden White House finalized last April the first national legally enforceable drinking water standard for PFAS, it sent EPA Administrator Michael Regan to the banks of the Cape Fear River in Fayetteville, North Carolina to make the announcement.

Cape Fear River, the drinking water source for 350,000 people, became heavily contaminated with PFAS from Dupont’s nearby Fayetteville Works plant, which freely dumped them into the river for four decades.

This problem went completely undetected until in 2017 when newspaper reporters working for the Wilmington StarNews launched an investigation. Local residents allege a cancer cluster.

8.

Between 1947 and 1977, General Electric dumped 1,300,00 pounds of PCBs into the Hudson River from two capacitor manufacturing plants just north of Albany, New York.

In 1973, when the Fort Edward Dam downstream of these plants was removed, hundreds of tons of PCBs that had sank into the sediments at its base were mobilized.

PCB levels in Hudson River fish and eels rose dramatically, and by 1975, New York’s environmental commissioner determined that the PCBs in one serving of Hudson River eel would contaminate an adult with 50 percent of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s lifetime limit.

In 1980, Congress passed the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act.

And that’s how the mighty Hudson became a 200-mile Superfund site. (For the fuller story, see Tom Lewis, The Hudson: A History (Yale University Press, 2005).)

9.

Two decades later in 2000—after twenty years of GE-sponsored stalling, denying, obfuscating, misrepresenting, plus slick television commercials declaring that the river was safe and remediation would only make things worse—the EPA issued its final ruling on PCBs in the Hudson River:

They needed to be removed. By dredging. GE would pay for it. And the toxic sediment would be hauled to an out-of-state landfill.

Lawsuits ensued.

Twenty more years passed.

Here’s where we are: Some dredging was done in the 40 miles of the upper Hudson River from Hudson Falls to Troy. And on July 15, 2024, the EPA announced that it needed another year of research “to determine how effective the cleanup of the Hudson had been.”

But a newly released batch of EPA data made clear that a lot of PCBs remain in the river. Indeed, PCB concentrations in sediments and in fish are not declining at all. They have plateaued. It’s almost like…they are there forever.

Meanwhile, an assessment of PCB contamination in the lower Hudson—from Troy to Manhattan—began just last year. It’s ongoing.

I live on the banks of the Hudson River in the town of Hudson, where many residents are New York City transplants who moved here during here during the pandemic and stayed on. Most of the neighbors I’ve spoken with about PCBs have never heard of them.

10.

On July 13, 2024, the Washington Post reported that a petite-sized forever chemical known as TFA, trifluoroacetic acid, is showing up in rainwater and drinking water. In fact, it appears ubiquitous in drinking water sources. It can’t be filtered, and it’s not covered by the EPA’s new drinking water regulations.

TFA is almost certainly accumulating in our bodies. If so, they will still be part of us 40 years from now, and mothers will pass them along to the generation via pregnancy and breastfeeding.

But will they be remembered?

(Our friends at Beyond Plastics are hosting a free webinar with reporter Sharon Lerner and former 3M scientist Kris Hansen on July 24 at 7 pm EDT on the PFAS cover-up and new findings. Register here.)

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RePercussion Section: Still Here. Nobody Remembers.