The Biden administration is tightening the screws on “forever chemicals” used in the production of a wide range of consumer goods, such as nonstick cookware, camping gear, and fast-food packaging — a push that industry groups argue is overly restrictive and will drive up costs.
The rules are part of a yearslong Environmental Protection Agency-led push to crack down on air and water pollution from perfluoroalkyl and polyfluoroalkyl chemicals, or PFAS, which are nearly impossible to break down naturally and are linked to health troubles such as liver and kidney disease, immune problems, and certain cancers.
The agency has proposed or finalized several rules on PFAS: limiting levels in public drinking water, setting new reporting requirements for companies, and allowing the EPA to monitor and fine polluters for improper disposal of the toxins. Other rules are expected to be finalized this summer.
While consumers may not see an immediate impact on store shelves as a result of the EPA’s regulations, which so far deal with the handling and disposal of PFAS toxins rather than dictating their use, they have also given companies a new financial incentive to move away from using PFAS in a bid to avoid public pressure, as well as costly remediation fees.
The PFAS chemical compound repels water, grease, oil, and heat and has been used to make certain cookware and nonstick pans; waterproof products, including umbrellas and hiking and fitness gear; and many types of food packaging, such as pizza boxes, to keep food from getting stuck to the packaging.
Already, some companies have started taking steps to phase out PFAS in a bid to remain competitive and assuage consumers about the safety of their products.
The cookware brand Caraway touted a status as “100% PFAS free,” while Williams-Sonoma now lists some of its products as PFAS-free.
The magazine Food & Wine dedicated a portion of its February issue to rounding up and testing the best nontoxic cookware brands, noting specifically that the “safest options shouldn’t contain any PFAS and should be PFOA-free.”
Outdoor retailers have also scrambled to drop PFAS, eager to edge out their competitors and win the business of a largely climate-conscious customer base.
To that end, the company REI announced in February it would stock its shelves only with PFAS-free cookware beginning this fall, while Patagonia, another big-name outdoor retailer, is in the process of converting its full product line to PFAS-free materials by 2025.
However, doing so won’t be easy. Patagonia admitted as much in an online post last March, in which it announced it would be delaying its planned PFAS phaseout from 2024 to 2025. Despite years of research, the company said, finding a durable waterproof replacement for the material long favored by the outdoors industry proved to be “a struggle.”
PFAS are synthetic chemical compounds. There are more than 12,000 known PFAS chemical compounds that exist today, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates nearly all people in the United States are believed to have some amount of PFAS in their blood, as the result of their widespread use in everyday materials.
The contaminants accumulate over time in the human body much like in the environment — posing risks to people who live near certain industrial facilities or have occupations with higher PFAS exposure, such as firefighting or chemicals manufacturing and processing.
Under President Joe Biden, the EPA launched a “PFAS Strategic Roadmap” in 2021 outlining its plan to crack down on the toxins, including controlling ongoing releases, setting new manufacturing standards, and developing a national testing strategy. Earlier this year, it updated its Toxic Substances Control Act to include PFAS and added some 200 of the contaminants to its Toxics Release Inventory.
Most recently, the EPA published a rule requiring public water utilities to reduce six harmful PFAS compound levels to “near-zero” — the lowest level at which they can be reliably measured, as well as a separate rule requiring two PFAS chemicals, perfluorooctanoic acid and perfluorooctanesulfonic acid, as hazardous substances under the federal Superfund law.
The standards are expected to reduce PFAS exposure for 100 million people, the EPA said in a statement, preventing “thousands” of deaths in the U.S. and reducing serious illness for tens of thousands of others.
Self-policing could help companies avoid high remediation costs and fines under new EPA rules, as well as increases in personal injury claims.
There is “substantial evidence that companies in the chemicals value chain face risks if they are found to be responsible for exposure of toxic substances to the public or their own workers,” Julie Gorte, senior vice president of sustainable investment at the firm Impax Asset Management, told the Washington Examiner.
The DuPont-owned Chemours works facility in North Carolina in 2017 was revealed to have spent decades improperly dumping PFAS chemicals into the atmosphere, which traveled as far as 80 miles away and contaminated the drinking water of hundreds of thousands of residents.
Meanwhile, there has been a growing push to ban or restrict PFAS at the state level.
In 2023 alone, 22 state legislatures introduced more than 260 bills aimed at cracking down on PFAS, according to data compiled by the group Safer States.
As of this writing, three U.S. states — Maine Minnesota, and California — have either passed or proposed legislation to ban PFAS in consumer products by the end of the decade.
PFAS act in a different way than other pollutants, making them uniquely harmful to humans, said Alan Ducatman, a physician and professor emeritus at West Virginia University whose research focuses on PFAS exposure.
PFAS toxins have a unique chemical structure that Ducatman said allows them not only to resist breaking down but also to attach to other particles and travel great distances.
“They have happy feet,” Ducatman said of PFAS. “They get into the atmosphere, and they travel very well through the water.”
In the environment, PFAS chemicals have been found on the bottom of the ocean floor after attaching to particles and dropping thousands of feet and on top of Mount Everest, believed to be the result of outdoor gear that was discarded on the summit.
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Rainer Lohmann, an oceanography professor at the University of Rhode Island who co-authored a study on PFAS in oceans, said he was surprised to find PFAS intact on a 3,000-foot-deep seabed. “That water is ‘old,’ as it has not been in contact with the atmosphere for 50 or even hundreds of years,” he said in January.
Of the thousands of PFAS compounds in the U.S. today, scientists can reliably measure and test for less than 100.