By Kate Ferrera, Fall 2021.

In the 1980s, Jim Tennant, a factory worker in West Virginia, sold land to the DuPont chemical manufacturing company for use as a non-hazardous waste landfill.[1] This was standard practice and would have been completely unremarkable except that Tennant’s brother, Wilbur, owned a cattle ranch adjacent to the landfill. With time, he noticed his cows were getting sick and dying after drinking from a creek immediately downstream of the landfill.  The creek water was black, smelly, sometimes with a layer of foam on top—not fit for human or animal consumption.[2] Tennant sued DuPont, suspecting their landfill was to blame, and brought to light thousands of pages of internal company documents on “C8”, a chemical now called PFOA.[2] Scientists and policy experts now recognize substances like PFOA as a major environmental concern due to their long lifespans and widespread usage.  

Perfluorooctanoic acid, PFOA for short, is one of the most famous members of a class of over 5000 synthetic compounds known as PFAS, or per- and poly-fluoroalkyl substances.[3]  PFAS consist of a chain of carbon, fluorine, and sometimes hydrogen atoms with a functional group head, usually an acid. PFOA, for example, contains a chain of eight carbon atoms, each bonded to a fluorine, with a carboxylic acid head.[3] The bonds between the carbon and fluorine atoms are incredibly strong, resulting in very stable compounds that rarely react with others.  First synthesized in the 1930s, PFAS became widely used after the end of WW2. Because of their chemical stability, they’re used to manufacture stain-, grease-, and water-resistant textiles, household items, and food packaging, including GORE-TEX clothing and Teflon kitchenware. In addition to their repellent properties, PFAS are chemically and thermally resistant and can be used as insulators and cables in electronic materials and paints and surface treatments for building materials.[4] They are also present in many fire-fighting foams, particularly those used by the US military, in low but still hazardous concentrations.[5]  PFAS can even be found in cosmetics and personal care products like dental floss and nail polish.[4]  

Aside from fire suppression activities that directly discharge foam containing PFAS onto soil and surface water, the most common sources of PFAS in the environment are industrial facilities, landfills, and wastewater treatment plants.[6] They can also be directly released into air through industrial emissions, though this is thought to be less common. Most PFAS are water-soluble, so they dissolve when exposed to rain or a body of water and become very mobile. Since they are highly unreactive, they don’t degrade in the environment or within living organisms. This persistence, which gave them the nickname “forever chemicals,” renders most conventional remediation technologies ineffective. Full-scale treatment of contaminated media is currently limited to sequestration techniques that bind or remove PFAS but do not destroy them, although research is being done into potential destructive technologies such as bioremediation or thermal treatment.[7]

DuPont’s plant in Washington, West Virginia, the source of the landfill that killed Tennant’s cattle, first began using PFOA in 1951 for the manufacture of Teflon products.[8] Instead of incinerating PFOA waste or sending it to special facilities, DuPont released waste PFOA powder straight into the Ohio River and disposed of contaminated sludge in unlined digestion ponds where it leached into nearby surface water, soil, and groundwater.[1] Tennant’s cattle eventually consumed the contaminated water, resulting in horrific symptoms like hair loss, diarrhea, lesions, and discolored organs. 

While Tennant had reason to be shocked by the mysterious sickness afflicting his cattle, DuPont did not. Decades of internal company research had already demonstrated numerous adverse effects of animal and human exposure to PFAS, including birth defects and multiple forms of cancer.[8] Tennant’s lawyer later filed a class-action lawsuit on behalf of the entire Washington community, resulting in a decade-long epidemiological study of the health effects of PFOA exposure called the C8 Health Project.[8] After surveying almost 30,000 people for over a decade, the study determined that PFOA was  likely linked to kidney and testicular cancer, high cholesterol and blood pressure, ulcerative colitis, and thyroid disease.  

To date, the C8 Health Project remains one of the most comprehensive epidemiological assessments of any PFAS. Observational human studies are difficult to conduct because PFAS are often found intermixed with other substances within blood serum, making it difficult to untangle the effects of specific compounds.  Despite this limitation, multiple studies associate PFAS with immunosuppression, particularly in children, and increased cholesterol levels.[9] PFAS may also affect liver and kidney function, increase risk of high blood pressure and pre-eclampsia in pregnant women, and result in lower infant birth weight.[10][11] Recent advances in machine learning may speed up the assessment process by identifying patterns in the chemical structure of particularly harmful PFAS, allowing toxicologists to better prioritize research.[12]

In 2016, the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) published non-enforceable lifetime health advisories of 70 parts per trillion for PFOA and PFOS. To this day there are still no federally enforceable standards, leaving it up to states to fill in the gaps where they see fit.[13]  Twenty-two states have set their own guidelines for PFAS, but the various policies have little agreement on which specific compounds and environmental media should be monitored or regulated.[13]

In October 2021, the EPA unveiled a strategic roadmap to address PFAS with a three-pronged approach: research, restrict, remediate. As part of this plan, the Office of Water will include tests for PFAS in the next round of national drinking water sampling and is expected to propose an enforceable limit for PFOA and PFOS in drinking water by Fall 2022.[14] The Office of Land and Emergency Management is likely to designate some PFAS as hazardous substances, which will require firms to report releases and provide funding to restore contaminated sites.[14] There is still a long way to go before we fully understand the human and environmental effects of all 5000 PFAS, but with increased federal investment and attention, the next few years could see significant advances.   

1. Rich, Nathaniel.  2016.  “The Lawyer Who Became DuPont’s Worst Nightmare.”  New York Times, January 6, 2016.  https://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/10/magazine/the-lawyer-who-became-duponts-worst-nightmare.html
2. Kelly, Sharon.  2016.  “Teflon’s Toxic Legacy.”  Earth Island Journal, Winter 2016.  https://www.earthisland.org/journal/index.php/magazine/entry/teflons_toxic_legacy/ 
3. Interstate Technology Regulatory Council.  “Chemistry, Terminology, and Acronyms.”  Accessed November 20, 2021.  https://pfas-1.itrcweb.org/2-2-chemistry-terminology-and-acronyms/
4. Interstate Technology Regulatory Council.  “PFAS Uses.”  Accessed November 20, 2021.  https://pfas-1.itrcweb.org/2-5-pfas-uses/
5. Michigan Department of Environment, Great Lakes, and Energy.  “Firefighting Foam and PFAS.”  Accessed November 20, 2021.  https://www.michigan.gov/pfasresponse/0,9038,7-365-86514-496805–,00.html 
6. Interstate Technology Regulatory Council.  “PFAS Releases to the Environment.”  Accessed November 20, 2021.  https://pfas-1.itrcweb.org/2-6-pfas-releases-to-the-environment/
7. Interstate Technology Regulatory Council.  “Treatment Technologies.”  Accessed November 20, 2021.  https://pfas-1.itrcweb.org/12-treatment-technologies/
8. PFAS Project Lab.  “Parkersburg, West Virginia.”  Accessed November 20, 2021.  https://pfasproject.com/parkersburg-west-virginia 
9. Sunderland, Elsie M., Clifton Dassuncao, Andrea K. Tokranov, Charlotte C. Wagner, Joseph G. Allen.  “A Review of the Pathways of Human Exposure to Poly- and Perfluoroalkyl Substances (PFASs) and Present Understanding of Health Effects.”  Journal of Exposure Science and Environmental Epidemiology 29: 131-147.  DOI: 10.1038/s41370-018-0094-1
10. Agency For Toxic Substances and Disease Registry.  “.Per- and Polyfluoroalkyl Substances (PFAS) and Your Health”  Accessed November 20, 2021.  https://www.atsdr.cdc.gov/pfas/health-effects/index.html
11. Kirk, Martyn, Kayla Smurthwaite, Jennifer Braunig, Susan Trevenar, Catherine D’Este, Robyn Lucas, Aparna Lal, Rosemary Korda, Archie Clements, Jochen Mueller, Bruce Armstrong.  2018.  “The PFAS Health Study: Systematic Literature Review.”  Australian National University.  https://openresearch-repository.anu.edu.au/handle/1885/241032
12. Feinstein, Jeremy, Ganesh Sivaraman, Kurt Picel, Brian Peters, Alvaro Vazquez-Mayagoitia, Arvind Ramanathan, Margaret MacDonell, Ian Foster, Eugene Yan.  2021.  ChemRxiv Preprint.  DOI: 10.26434/chemrxiv.14397140.v1
13. Longsworth, Sarah Grace.  2021.  “Processes and Considerations for Setting State PFAS Standards.”  Environmental Council of the States, April 29, 2021.  https://www.ecos.org/pfas/#:~:text=At%20this%20time%2C%20the%20U.S.,soil%2C%20or%20other%20environmental%20media.
14. US Environmental Protection Agency.  “PFAS Strategic Roadmap: EPA’s Commitments to Action 2021-2024.”  Accessed November 20, 2021.  https://www.epa.gov/pfas/pfas-strategic-roadmap-epas-commitments-action-2021-2024