Health inquiries threaten Gulf industry
WASHINGTON — Known as “forever chemicals,” PFAS chemicals used in products such as nonstick pans and stain repellents have long confounded scientists for their ubiquity in the environment — so commonplace that they show up in the blood of humans and animals in the furthest reaches of the earth, including polar bears in Greenland.
But a recent scientific study could provide a clue, linking the contamination to plastic containers used to keep food and other products fresh — a significant line of business for the Gulf Coast’s sprawling petrochemical industry.
Both the Food and Drug Administration and the Environmental Protection Agency are studying the link between plastic and PFAS contamination after EPA scientists recently found that pesticide stored in plastic containers unexpectedly contained PFAS, even though no such chemicals were used in manufacturing the insecticide. More research is needed, but scientists have documented increased rates of cancer, birth defects and organ failure, among other health risks, from one of the PFAS chemicals found in the pesticide containers.
“We don’t know all the possible entry points for PFAS into the environment,” said Michael S. Wong, a chemical engineering professor at Rice University. “That’s the big question right now.”
The government health inquiry presents a potentially serious risk to a U.S. plastics industry that is already under scrutiny over the massive volumes of plastic waste going unrecycled — frequently ending up in oceans to break down and slowly poison marine life. The center of the industry is the U.S. Gulf Coast, where companies such as Exxon Mobil, Dow Chemical, LyondellBasell, Chevron and Phillips 66,
have invested billions of dollars to build and expand petrochemical plants to manufacture plastics and export them around the world.
Scientific researchers say the connection between plastics and group of chemicals known as PFAS, which stands for perfluoroalkyl and polyfluoroalkyl substances, appears to be a process known as fluorination. Fluorination, which treats plastics with toxic fluorine gas and nitrogen, has been used by petrochemical companies for decades to make plastics both more rigid, to avoid the crumpling effect seen in plastic water bottles, and impermeable, which is important for keeping food and other products from spoiling or degrading on the shelf.
The concern is fluorinating plastic changes its chemistry in such a way that potentially dangerous PFAS compounds are formed, Wong said. They can then leach into the products that they are supposed to protect.
“These fluorinated surfaces are a potential release point for PFAS, which means even if you’re not deliberately adding PFAS to your products you may not be off the hook.” Wong said. “It’s an amazing, but not surprising, point of entry.”
The FDA first approved the use of fluorinated plastic for food packaging in 1983, looking at the technology as useful in preventing spoilage. But almost 40 years later, the agency, along with EPA, is examining what other risks they might have exposed the public to in the process.
FDA officials are now examining how commonly fluorinated plastic is used to store food. A study by scientists at the University of Toronto in 2011 reported that hundreds of millions of plastic containers are fluorinated each year to store products from food to cosmetics to industrial chemicals.
“Although the FDA has strict data requirements that must be met to establish safe conditions of use prior to authorization, as new scientific information becomes available, we reassess the safety of these uses,” an FDA spokeswoman said in an email. “The FDA may revoke authorizations if the FDA concludes that there is no longer a reasonable certainty of no harm from the authorized use.”
The identity of most companies that produce fluorinated plastic containers under scrutiny by the FDA is unclear. But one manufacturer is Houston-based Inhance Technnologies. Andrew Thompson, the CEO, said he was working with industry and regulators to identify the source of the PFAS contamination but was not convinced that fluorinated plastic was the source.
“Fluorinated plastic packaging is manufactured by many companies, worldwide, to produce safe, sustainable, compliant, and effective packaging that preserves the quality, shelf-life, efficacy, safety and regulatory compliance for the contents contained,” he said in an email.
Thousands of chemicals
The American Chemistry Council, which represents plastics manufacturers, said it was working with both EPA and state regulators to understand the connection between plastic products and PFAS contamination.
“EPA is still collecting information on this matter so it’s premature to draw specific conclusions until further work is conducted,” said a spokesman for the trade group. “We are also following up with EPA to better understand their work to date and share our scientific expertise to help inform any future work, which might include additional testing, downstream user education, and identification of best practices in this area.”
PFAS chemicals, were developed in the 1940s to repel water, grease and other liquids, eventually finding their way into products from pizza boxes to fire extinguishing foams.
While encompassing thousands of different chemicals, PFAS did not enter public awareness until the early 2000s when residents living around a West Virginia chemical plant operated by DuPont joined a class action lawsuit alleging they had fallen ill because the plant was dumping into their waterways a particularly dangerous PFAS chemical, PFOA.
While that litigation is ongoing, DuPont reached a $16.5 million settlement in 2005 with EPA, agreeing to stop production of PFOA in 2013. Other large manufacturers followed suit shortly thereafter. In 2019, more than 180 countries agreed to ban the manufacturing of PFOA and begin phasing out a similar chemical, PFOS, though the United States is not one of them.
PFOA and PFOS, which like all PFAS chemicals are particularly slow to break down in the environment, continue to show up in U.S. water supplies in relatively low levels. But last year, towns in southeastern Massachassets began finding elevated levels of PFAS chemicals, including PFOS and PFOA, in their public water systems, said Kyla Bennett, science adviser at the nonprofit Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility.
The contamination was eventually linked to a pesticide the Massachusetts Department of Environmental Protection was spraying to kill mosquitoes. When scientists at an EPA lab in Maryland examined unused fluorinated plastic containers of the type that stored the pesticide, they found PFOA, along with seven other types of PFAS chemicals.
“The problem is (fluorine) is such an aggressive chemical it blasts apart the polymers,” said Tom Neltner, chemical policy director for health at the Environmental Defense Fund. “For a long time, it was always firefighting foam and paper plates and stain retardants we worried about when it came to PFAS contamination. Now we’re finding it in plastic. To me, there’s so many questions.”
Those questions don’t have easy answers. When Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility began testing the pesticide used in Massachusetts, it found PFAS contamination not just in fluorinated plastic containers but also containers made of m/etal and other types of plastic as well.
“It’s possible it’s not just the containers,” Bennett said. “PFAS is really sticky stuff. It could be contamination from machinery.”
Another unanswered question: If plastic containers are contaminating the food supply with PFAS chemicals, why aren’t those chemicals consistently showing up in laboratory testing?
In 2019, FDA researchers reported finding elevated levels of PFAS chemicals in food products including meat, seafood and chocolate cake. Then in June, the FDA reported that of 94 food samples it tested for PFOA, PFOS and other PFAS chemicals, only one, a piece of cod, showed elevated levels of the chemical — with levels below what is considered dangerous for human consumption.
Small sample
Following the lawsuit over PFOA in West Virginia, chemical companies developed alternative PFAS chemicals that they maintain present no danger to public health. But of the thousands of PFAS chemicals known to exist, FDA only tests for 16 of them.
The health effects of other PFAS chemicals remain largely unknown, in large part because many of the chemicals themselves are hidden from scientists due to confidentiality laws that aim to protect intellectual property and prevent companies from replicating their competitors’ products, said Linda Birnbaum, a professor at Duke University and former director of the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences.
“We know very little,” she said. “There have been animal studies on some of the replacement PFAS, and they’re finding out they’re doing the same thing as PFOA and PFOS. There is very little human data.”