October 2019 Newsletter: PFAS for Halloween
I hope you are enjoying the beginning of autumn. Shortly I’ll be heading to Raja Ampat, small islands northwest of West Papau Indonesia for my longest holiday since I founded our Institute. This remote ocean region boasts some of the world’s richest coral reefs. I’m looking forward to excellent snorkeling and diving. My connectivity will be intermittent when I’m away (November 10 to December 2).
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You’re invited to ski with me in Washington.
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Please get in touch if you might be interested in joining me for cross-country skiing in the fabled Methow Valley in northern Washington. I’m planning to stay at the Mazama Country Inn located on the 120 miles of groomed ski trails.
I also wanted to share with you an important new paper that colleagues and I just published in ES&T Letters:”Organophosphate Ester Flame Retardants: Are They a Regrettable Substitute for Polybrominated Diphenyl Ethers?”
After much scientific research and policy work, the whole class of organohalogen flame retardants is being phased out of use in electronics in Europe and also eventually in the US. Can you believe, the same toxic class of flame retardant chemicals that our work helped remove from baby pajamas back in the 1970s has continued to be used? Unfortunately, the replacements appear to be similarly harmful. I invited some of the world’s leading scientists who study flame retardants to join with me in writing a paper comparing the old toxic chemicals with these new ones, which are equally harmful. We are calling on product manufacturers to demand that the chemical industry come up with healthier flame retardants and more innovative solutions. To learn more, check out our press release and our paper.
I recently contributed a video talk on the relationship between climate change, plastic pollution and toxics to the first-ever Global Plastic Health Summit in Amsterdam. You can view my talk and videos of all the talks from this important gathering of scientists and policy makers on the Plastic Soup Foundation website here or on YouTube.
In honor of the International Year of the Periodic Table, Bloomberg Businessweek devoted an issue to stories about interesting people connected to each of the chemical elements. To my amazement, they chose me to represent Bromine. I wonder what the producers of brominated flame retardants think about this!
Finally, mark your calendars for February 7, 2020, for the Flame Retardant Dilemma and Beyond at UC Berkeley. You can learn from experts about reducing harm from chemical classes of concern at this annual gathering of participants from business, government, NGOs and academia. Register here.
Kind regards,
Dark Waters
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PFAS on the big screen
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Please go see the important new film Dark Waters November 22 to 24, its opening weekend in New York or Los Angeles, or the weekend after Thanksgiving in other cities. A big opening weekend will help the film succeed.
Mark Ruffalo and Anne Hathaway play our good friend Rob Bilott and his wife for this thrilling story about a community with PFAS-contaminated air and water and the duplicity of DuPont.
This gripping film has the potential to bring our message about reducing harm from toxic chemicals to a much wider audience. We are working with the movie’s social action team in the hopes that this film will have a large impact as did other Participant films such as Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth and Spotlight.
PFAS for Halloween?
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PFAS: The ‘Forever Chemicals’
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We are eagerly awaiting news on the fate of important provisions on PFAS chemicals that are in both the Senate and the House versions of the U.S. military budget–which must pass.
Proposals include the military switching to PFAS-free fire-fighting foam, and monitoring all of our nation’s water supplies for PFAS. Having worked on the science and policy of PFAS since 2013, we are delighted to see these positive provisions.
- Emily Donovan, Co-founder of Clean Cape Fear, asks: “When you take your children or grandchildren trick-or-treating, do you let them have mystery candy? Why in the world are we allowing ourselves to drink mystery chemicals?“
- “There is an old saying ‘nothing lasts forever,’” says Michigan Representative Debbie Dingell. “Unfortunately, nothing, that is, except perfluorinated chemicals.“
If the current PFAS provisions in the US military budget pass, we will be moving in a direction towards less mystery chemicals in drinking water and in us. Please wish your representative and senators a Happy Halloween and ask them to support strong PFAS provisions in the military budget to reduce the use of scary chemicals for a healthier world.
A Mysterious Epidemic
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My healthy young cats, Molly and Micho
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A mysterious epidemic of hyperthyroid disease is affecting pet cats in North America. According to my veterinarian friend Steve Gardiner, hyperthyroid disease in cats hardly existed in the late 1970s when flame retardants were beginning to be added to furniture. Toxic PBDE flame retardants began to be phased out of use in 2005; yet, in a case of regrettable substitution, the main replacement flame retardant was chlorinated tris, the same flame retardant our work helped remove from baby pajamas back in the 1970s.
A recent study in Environmental Science & Technology used silicon collar tags to learn about cats’ exposure to chlorinated tris. Dust contaminated with flame retardants sticks to the silicon tags. The researchers used the level flame retardants in this dust to estimate a cat’s level. They found that exposure to chlorinated tris is associated with hyperthyroidism in cats.
A Halloween Flashback
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| A vintage toxic couch from 2011 |
Eight years ago we used this spooky photo in our Halloween newsletter. The couch was adorned with skulls, not as a fashion statement, but because the foam contained toxic flame retardants. These harmful chemicals were added to couches like this one because of an outdated California furniture flammability standard called Technical Bulletin 117 (TB117).
Calendar
Be sure to go see the Participant film Dark Waters, starring Mark Ruffalo and Anne Hathaway as Rob Bilott and his wife during the films opening weekend in New York and Los Angeles, November 22 to 24, and in dozens of cities the following weekend.