I’m kind of tired of writing about what crazy things companies put PFAS in, but their stupidity (or malevolence?) knows no bounds. So this week, let me highlight the new ways “forever chemicals” (so called because of their incredibly long lifespan and toxic nature) are being used to kill people and the planet.
Quick: think about the most sensitive skin on your body. Your gums (yup, and some dental floss includes PFAS, as I wrote about three years ago). What about your genitals? So where better to put PFAS than in condoms and personal lubricants! Why, oh, why would any sane product designer do that!?! But they did. A new report that tested condoms and lubricants for PFAS found several that had high levels—including well-known brands like Trojan condoms and KY Jelly. If you use these products, check out some of the non-toxic options that are listed in the report.1
Ok, so not everyone has sex, or flosses, though they should (I’ll leave it to you to decide which part of the sentence this prepositional phrase refers to). But everyone eats. So does it come as a surprise that new research found that pesticides include PFAS among their ingredients? Yup, a new journal article in Environmental Health Perspectives (co-authored by individuals at several leading environmental organizations) found that PFAS is being used in pesticides,2 sometimes without being listed (considered as an “inert ingredient” if you can believe that). As one co-author of the report, Kyla Bennett of the Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER), noted, “I can think of no better way to poison people and the environment than to spray PFAS-laden pesticides on our crops and in our homes,” (though direct application to the genitals might come close).
But the report gets even more disturbing. About 14% of all active ingredients in pesticides used in the U.S. are PFAS, and newer pesticides—those approved in the past 10 years—have grown to 30% PFAS. That’s three parts of PFAS to every ten! Worse, the research comes after the Environmental Protection Agency denied that PFAS was being used in pesticides, after an EPA research fellow shared his finding of a PFAS agent in pesticides. As this Guardian article noted, a Freedom of Information Act by PEER (which serves to protect whistleblowing public employees) discovered that EPA had found PFAS in pesticides but kept that information out of its study.3
Moving Beyond Forever Chemicals, Forever
The interesting thing is that PFAS is clearly a problem, and companies have been warned (even by investors) that they need to get in front of this issue before they are bombarded by lawsuits—which is already happening, as with California suing 3M, DuPont de Nemours, and other PFAS makers. Even states are preparing for lawsuits for being “passive receivers” of PFAS, e.g. passing it on to people through public water systems.4
But considering it takes between $50 and $1,000 to buy a pound of PFAS and costs between $2.7 and $18 million to remove and destroy that amount from wastewater, and that “more than 30,000 companies…are discharging PFAS into the air and water right now,” companies are gonna get sued.
I’ve heard of a few that are phasing it out of their products (slowly), like REI getting rid of it from their cookware and textile products by this fall (though not expedition-level apparel until 2026). But when it’s literally in stuff being sprayed directly into the soil (and 30% of it at that!!), textile phase-outs aren’t going to cut it.
Investors, regulators, lawyers,5 and civil society are going to need to get much more aggressive if we’re going to really ban PFAS, bombarding corporate producers and users until they simply cannot deal with so many overlapping pending laws, shareholder resolutions, lawsuits, protests, and the like. The good news is that, unlike biodiversity loss, or ocean acidification, this is directly tangible to most folks as all of us are absorbing this toxin day-in and day-out. And with media hooks like PFAS in condoms, driving attention to this issue shouldn’t be too hard.6
I can even visualize a strategy to mobilize student activists: What about setting up give-away tables around college campuses, offering free lip balm, dental floss, and condoms? Students are bombarded by product giveaways all the time—but what if the twist is that it’s a give-away for PFAS! “Get your free forever chemicals!” shout the students. That’d get students thinking—and hopefully organize them to plug into bigger corporate campaigns to get companies to commit to phasing out PFAS from their products, legal campaigns to sue for action, and legislative campaigns to pressure state and national governments to pass laws to phase out the production of all PFAS chemicals and hold producers and users liable for their cleanup.
Ultimately, to truly solve the PFAS problem, regulators around the world will need to ban these substances—period. Perhaps that sounds like a naïve statement, like ‘we need to move beyond fossil fuels,’ when the entire global economy runs on them.7 But considering that pesticides, dental floss, condoms, and clothes at one point didn’t have PFAS in them, I don’t think it’s a stretch to return to those designs. However, to get back to those good ol’ days is going to take more than just some creative organizing but a serious and prolonged fight.
Endnotes
1) This report is one of several from Mamavation. Other focal points of their analyses include soft contact lenses (PFAS in your eyes!); sanitary pads and tampons; and lip balm.
2) And not just agricultural pesticides, but pesticides to kill mosquitoes (for those who have yards or play in parks) and to kill fleas (for pet owners).
3) To be fair, while covering up the extent of the problem, the EPA has been trying to address PFAS, as this list of actions over the past few years demonstrates. But not in the comprehensive way necessary to solve the growing PFAS crisis.
4) Though in others, like North Carolina, where 3.4 million residents are exposed to PFAS in the water, pressure by the North Carolina Chamber of Commerce has delayed PFAS rules.
5) Speaking of lawsuits, PEER filed a new lawsuit last week to get EPA to halt the manufacture and distribution of tens of millions of plastic containers with dangerous levels of a PFAS (PFOA) to make them more durable.
6) Speaking of media, I thought immediately how great it’d be if Jon Oliver grappled with the topic of PFAS, but he already did, back in 2021 on Last Week Tonight! It’s definitely worth the watch.
7) Offering a tad more fairness in this rant on fluorinated stupidity, a Chemours spokesperson, in a recent podcast, argued how essential fluorinated chemicals are to (gag) “a sustainable future,” for example in industrial applications like making hydrogen. Perhaps that’s true, and it is defensible to use PFAS in some limited (non-substitutable) industrial uses (in a safe and completely controlled way to avoid releases to the environment) but certainly not as an ingredient in pesticides, being sprayed directly into the environment!
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