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from the ignorance-is-bliss-but-it-causes-cancer dept.
New federal rules require public systems to measure and mitigate certain harmful man-made chemicals:
Cordelia Saunders remembers 2021, the year she and her husband, Nathan, found out that they'd likely been drinking tainted water for more than 30 years. A neighbor's 20 peach trees had finally matured that summer, and perfect-looking peaches hung from their branches. Cordelia watched the fruit drop to the ground and rot: Her neighbor didn't dare eat it.
The Saunderses' home, in Fairfield, Maine, is in a quiet, secluded spot, 50 minutes from the drama of the rocky coast and an hour and 15 minutes from the best skiing around. It's also sitting atop a plume of poison.
For decades, sewage sludge was spread on the corn fields surrounding their house, and on hundreds of other fields across the state. That sludge is suspected to have been tainted with PFAS, a group of man-made compounds that cause a litany of ailments, including kidney and prostate cancers, fertility loss, and developmental disorders. The Saunderses' property is on one of the most contaminated roads in a state just waking up to the extent of an invisible crisis.
Onur Apul, an environmental engineer at the University of Maine and the head of its initiative to study PFAS solutions, told me that in his opinion, the United States has seen "nothing as overwhelming, and nothing as universal" as the PFAS crisis. Even the DDT crisis of the 1960s doesn't compare, he said: DDT was used only as an insecticide and could be banned by banning that single use. PFAS are used in hundreds of products across industries and consumer sectors. Their nearly 15,000 variations can help make pans nonstick, hiking clothes and plumber's tape waterproof, and dental floss slippery. They're in performance fabrics on couches, waterproof mascara, tennis rackets, ski wax. Destroying them demands massive inputs of energy: Their fluorine-carbon bond is the single most stable bond in organic chemistry.
"It's a reality for everyone; it's just a matter of whether they know about it," Apul said. As soon as any place in the U.S. does look squarely at PFAS, it will find the chemicals lurking in the blood of its constituents—in one report, 97 percent of Americans registered some level—and perhaps also in their water supply or farm soils. And more will have to look: Yesterday the Biden administration issued the first national PFAS drinking-water standards and gave public drinking-water systems three years to start monitoring them. The EPA expects thousands of those systems to have PFAS levels above the new standards, and to take actions to address the contamination. Maine is one step ahead in facing PFAS head-on—but also one step ahead in understanding just how hard that is.
Cordelia and Nathan both remember the dump trucks rumbling up the road. They'd stop right across the street every year and disgorge a black slurry—fertilizer, the Saunderses assumed at the time, that posed no particular bother. Now they know that the state approved spreading 32,900 cubic yards of sewage sludge—or more than 2,000 dump-truck loads—within a quarter mile of their house, and that the sludge came in large part from a local paper company. Now they wonder about that slurry.
Maine has a long, proud history as a papermaking state and a long, tortured history with the industry's toxic legacy, most notably from dioxin. In the 1960s, another group of compounds—per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, or PFAS—began to be used in the papermaking process. The chemicals were miracle workers: A small amount of PFAS could make paper plates and food containers both grease-proof and water-resistant.
Then, in the '80s, the state encouraged spreading sewage sludge on fields as fertilizer, a seemingly smart use of an otherwise cumbersome by-product of living, hard to manage in a landfill. In principle, human manure can sub in for animal manure without much compromise. But in reality, sludge often contains a cocktail of chemical residues. "We concentrate them in sludge and then spread them over where we grow food. The initial idea is not great," Apul told me. The Saunderses first found out that the sludge-spreading had contaminated their water after the state found high PFAS levels in milk from a dairy farm two miles away. Maine's limit for six kinds of PFAS was 20 parts per trillion; state toxicologists found so much in the Saunderses' well water that when Nathan worked out the average of all the tests taken in 2021, it came to 14,800 parts per trillion, he told me.
Nathan used to work as an engineer for Maine's drinking-water-safety program, and he quickly pieced together the story of their street's contamination and just how bad it was. After state researchers tested their blood, Nathan remembers, a doctor told him that his levels of one PFAS were so high, they had hit the maximum the test could reliably report—2,000 micrograms per liter. So far, he's healthy, but he feels like he's living on borrowed time. Diseases related to environmental exposures can take decades to emerge, and although studies show that PFAS may degrade health at a population level, why some individuals fall ill and others don't isn't always clear. Cordelia told me that the neighbor who wouldn't eat the peaches is now on three medications for high cholesterol (which has been linked to PFAS), and that other neighbors have bladder or brain cancer.
[...] Several labs across the country are trying to find a way to unmake these chemicals, using foam fractionation, soil washing, mineralization, electron-beam radiation. David Hanigan, an environmental engineer at the University of Nevada at Reno, is studying whether burning PFAS at ultrahigh temperatures can break the carbon-fluorine bond completely. He once thought that PFAS researchers were out of their minds to be testing such wildly expensive solutions, he told me. But he's realized that PFAS are just that tough, and as a scientist, he thinks the original manufacturers of PFAS must have understood that. "It's upsetting from an organic-chemistry standpoint," he told me. Any chemist would have known that these compounds would persist in the environment, he said. Indeed, an investigation by The Intercept found that DuPont, among the original manufacturers of the compounds, did know, and for decades tried to obscure the harms the chemicals posed, something the UN Human Rights Council also contends. DuPont has consistently denied wrongdoing, and recently settled a lawsuit for $1.18 billion, helping create a fund for public water districts to address PFAS contamination. (In a statement to The Atlantic, a spokesperson for DuPont described the current company's history of corporate reorganization, and wrote that "to implicate DuPont de Nemours in these past issues ignores this corporate evolution.")
(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday April 15, @02:05AM (6 children)
Ok, what they're dying of appears quite tragically normal to me. None of the diseases you mention are abnormal either. I can't imagine what you think is normal? Would we live forever, if it weren't for our occasional contact with plastics? Somehow I doubt it. That means a normal death would still be from old age diseases and infirmities just like the above.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Monday April 15, @02:59AM (5 children)
My great grandfathers died mostly in their 30s, mostly from heart disease, mostly from diet and a bit from lifestyle (working the family farm, having large numbers of children, etc.)
My grandfathers took the hint and backed off the bacon a bit, they lived into their 70s. That's a nice choice to be able to make.
In 2003 we moved from Miami to Houston due to economic pressures out of our control and after arriving there, we did a fairly normal "Florida engineering family moves to Houston" about-face outta there in 2.5 years... see, after living there you start to learn about the overall regional increased risk of cancers and other early-nasty ends, you start to feel the tar dust settle on your cars every night... I watched an otherwise healthy coworker in his mid-40s check out due to "one of those cancer things, they happen sometimes." Yeah, but they do happen statistically significantly more in and around Houston. So, we chose not to expose ourselves and our children to that risk any longer than necessary. Moved to a radiotherapy company, where a grad student of one of the founders passed away at 24 of a "really rare blood cancer" just after completing his thesis on dosimetry measurement, including a lot of practical work around ionizing radiation sources. "Just one of those unpredictable things, they happen sometimes." Yeah. Oh, and a job I didn't take with a medical radio-isotope supplier replacing one of the two founding engineers who also passed away from cancer in his early 50s... Then we can talk about the dude whose father "did hot laundry" for the Savannah River facility: "they took real good care of mama after daddy passed." Just one of those things... I'm glad none of us are compulsorily tasked with work exposure to ionizing radiation, it seems like a good thing to opt out of, just as I opted out of a Navy scholarship for grad school which required a tour on a submarine after graduation, as well as job offers from Savannah River and the NRC.
Those are choices that my grandfathers and me and my family were free to make. "Opting out" of PFAS, BPA and so many other exposures in the modern world isn't actually economically possible, even for top 10% wealthy westerners, at least not without taking elevated risks from moving out of range of decent medical care, basic disease protections, etc. into the few remaining wild places, and even there - you've got microplastics and all kinds of other crap.
Nobody lives forever (yet) and I don't want to. I do want a good quality of life for as much of the quantity of life I do get. If I get told that I need to back off the bacon or I might take 10 years off my life... that's going to be a tough call for me. Opting out of me, my descendants, and everyone we meet living in ubiquitous PFAS soup? That's an option I'd really like to be available.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday April 15, @04:31AM (4 children)
So what? You can't opt out of historical lead either. There's still detectable levels of lead in the environment from the era of the Roman empire. At some point, we have to get serious and prioritize this by harm. And that's the problem here. There's no demonstration of harm from these chemicals and microplastics. Merely being detectable in trace amounts is not harm.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Monday April 15, @11:23AM (3 children)
>So what? You can't opt out of historical lead either.
Actually, finally, we and the rest of the developed world did opt out of lead, asbestos, and many other ubiquitous environmental toxins that man-not-so-kind was spewing. No, we haven't completely undone the work of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Midgley_Jr. [wikipedia.org] and the men who decided they would profit as long as possible, right down to fighting tooth and nail in court to keep poisoning the population for profit.
Palm Beach County opted out of their Dutch technology waste incinerators when it became apparent that the Dutch population actually complies when instructed to not put mercury into the waste stream, apparently Palm Beach County does not because they were burning sufficient quantities of mercury to start killing the alligators in the everglades. That only took about 10 years to figure out and once demonstrated they did take appropriate action as quickly as practical, even if they had to pay a few dollars more and go back to landfilling their waste.
>There's no demonstration of harm from these chemicals and microplastics.
None that you accept, Perry Mason. I have a lower standard of proof when it comes to unknowns that may be killing people and wild animals.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday April 15, @09:33PM (2 children)
Not because those could be detected in the environment, but because there were actual health consequences at the typical dosages seen.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Tuesday April 16, @01:55AM (1 child)
>but because there were actual health consequences at the typical dosages seen.
Actually, no. Billions of people were being exposed to lead from gasoline and the argument went something along the lines of "we are not all dead yet, the low doses have no proven detrimental effects.". Very similar to your argument against PFAS removal above. And that argument kept lead in gasoline for 21 years after Clair Patterson made the very strong case against it.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 1, Disagree) by khallow on Tuesday April 16, @02:21AM
Actually yes. Where's the evidence that you're right? Repeating narratives that worked before doesn't mean they will work this time.