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--:-- John Bickley: Welcome to Morning Wire, I'm John Bickley.
--:-- Georgia Howe: And I'm Georgia Howe.
--:-- John Bickley: It's Sunday, August 27th, and this is an extra edition of Morning Wire.
--:-- Georgia Howe: Today, we're talking about forever chemicals. They're a class of industrial chemicals that were introduced into the food supply and environment decades ago, but due to their nearly indestructible nature, are now accumulating in the water supply and in our cells.
--:-- John Bickley: Joining us is Daily Wire senior editor Cabot Phillips, who's speaking to Northwestern University chemistry professor and researcher Will Dichtel about the silent risks of forever chemicals and what can be done to protect our families and the environment from their hazards.
--:-- Cabot Phillips: Hey, Professor Dichtel, thanks so much for joining us.
--:-- Will Dichtel: Hi, Cabot. It's good to be with you.
--:-- Cabot Phillips: So we'll just start with the open-ended question. What are Forever Chemicals? How would you describe to the average person who's not aware?
--:-- Will Dichtel: Forever Chemicals are a large group of substances that have been used industrially in consumer products and oftentimes in military use all over the country, all over the world since about the 1940s. And they're called forever chemicals because they are fairly foreign to nature. And so they don't break down in the environment. And unfortunately, we found that they also accumulate in humans and seem to have negative health effects.
--:-- Cabot Phillips: What are some of those negative health effects that we've seen?
--:-- Will Dichtel: Well, the full ramifications of them are still being studied, but already we're aware of increased incidence of cancers, complications in pregnancy and childbirth, reduced immune response and reduced response to vaccines, elevated cholesterol, and altered liver function.
--:-- Cabot Phillips: Is it possible that they're also having an effect on human hormones? And could this be contributing to some of the decline we've seen in birth rates and sperm counts?
--:-- Will Dichtel: It's possible. I don't want to overly attribute them to that effect. But there are so many thousands of these forever chemicals known, and we are only starting to understand the effects of a few of them. And so much less combinations of them. And so certainly that is of concern.
--:-- Cabot Phillips: Got it. And when did the scientific community begin to take notice that these could be detrimental? When did it start to sound alarm bells?
--:-- Will Dichtel: Well, there's been more and more attention being paid to them over the last 10 to 20 years. But really, over the last few years, has this issue really started to be recognized by the general public?
--:-- Cabot Phillips: The manufacturers of these chemicals have made a lot of money on them over many decades. And unfortunately, they were the first to start to worry about their health effects. But they obscured that information for a long period of time. And so now it's it we're really have a huge problem worldwide with these pollutants. And we're really just getting started with real solutions.
--:-- Cabot Phillips: So backtracking a bit, why are these chemicals used by manufacturers?
--:-- Will Dichtel: They have really useful properties if they didn't have kind of the negative effects to go along with them. They are both water and oil. And so whenever you have coatings on things that resist both water and oil, like traditionally Scotchgard and other waterproofing, or lots of oil barriers on things like pizza boxes, microwave popcorn bags, a very common use.
--:-- Cabot Phillips: They've been used to put out jet fuel fires for a long time. And so they've been used on military bases for both training exercises and in actual use for a long period of time. So many DOD facilities, the groundwater is contaminated by these compounds. And they're in many thousands of consumer products. I've heard estimates of 20,000 or more.
--:-- Cabot Phillips: So they really are everywhere. And that's a major issue is that it's very hard for the average consumer to avoid them by making good choices.
--:-- Cabot Phillips: We saw a recent report this month that estimates around 50% of drinking water in the United States has been contaminated by forever chemicals. What does that mean for the average American? How concerned should people be by those figures?
--:-- Will Dichtel: I think we all need to be very concerned. It's the kind of thing where it's kind of the constant exposure to low concentrations over long periods of time are what is associated with these negative health effects. And essentially, we've polluted the whole world with them up to this point. And so going forward, as I just said, it's hard for the average person to just start to make different consumer choices to avoid them. And instead, we need to deal with this more at the societal level where we really need to phase them out. And then we also need to clean them up where it's possible to do so, such as in drinking water.
--:-- Cabot Phillips: So this may not be in your area as much on the policy side, but I'm interested, do you have a take on sorts of regulation you would like to see for the government? Do you think this needs to be led from a governmental standpoint? Or is there a role for these companies themselves to get involved? Like, what would you like to see from a regulatory standpoint?
--:-- Will Dichtel: Well, I think that they need to be phased out for all but the most essential uses. So for example, There are some uses of these forever chemicals that are so entwined with our national security and with our view of modern life, such as the manufacture of semiconductors, where we're going to want to phase them out of there too, but we're not going to be able to do that immediately. But a lot of places where these forever chemicals have been used are really, they're nice to have, but not need to have. And that's where we really need to target phasing them out.
--:-- Cabot Phillips: I think the history of the last two to three decades shows that the manufacturers cannot be trusted to regulate themselves. They behaved extremely badly and they continue to lobby for very, very slow regulation of these substances.
--:-- Will Dichtel: So if the status quo is OK, then no further regulation is needed. But I would argue that this is a case where no matter what your political persuasion is, we all want to drink clean water. And I think that this is a case where the consumer really doesn't want to be an expert on the thousands of PFAS that are out there and all the nuances of it. And so this is a place where appropriate regulation, I think, is very warranted. And then also kind of the principle of the polluter paying for it all really should be a big component of that as well.
--:-- Cabot Phillips: I want to get to some of your work specifically, but one more question just on the impacts of Forever Chemicals. What do we see from an environmental standpoint? How do they seem to impact ecosystems and nature more broadly just beyond human beings?
--:-- Will Dichtel: Yeah, certainly they affecting all kinds of wildlife and perhaps plant life as well. We're finding them in livestock that are drinking contaminated water or exposed to contaminated land. We're finding them in most freshwater fish are now contaminated with forever chemicals. And when these animals are exposed to very, very high concentrations, well beyond anything that a human would typically experience, they tend to have much more rapid health declines. But I'm not aware of a full accounting of all the negative health effects to various wildlife, but there's no circumstance where they're good.
--:-- Cabot Phillips: Yeah. So I want to get to your work. You'll have to forgive me. I don't have a science background, so I don't want to put words in your mouth. So I'll just let you describe the work that you're doing to combat Forever Chemicals. Can you walk us through some of your findings? It seems like almost a breakthrough of sorts. Talk to us about what you're doing.
--:-- Will Dichtel: Sure. Well, my lab at Northwestern has been focused on developing new materials to purify water. And that's how we became aware of the PFAS problem several years ago. And so we have developed polymers based out of byproducts of corn that can remove PFAS down to very, very, very trace levels to where they're essentially undetectable. And another aspect of our discoveries in that area are that the materials that we've made can be rinsed off and reused. And so that led us to our most recent breakthrough is that the question is, okay, once you have a contaminated material, you purify this water and you want to reuse it, you're creating a PFAS waste stream. And so ultimately you want a final solution for that. And so we started looking into PFAS destruction as well.
--:-- Cabot Phillips: So last year we discovered a new type of reaction where we kind of found an Achilles heel of most of the PFAS that are out there. And that weak point of the molecule, even though they're called forever chemicals, if you hit it in under just the right conditions, they fall apart to safe byproducts. And that happens under much more mild conditions than most people thought possible.
--:-- Will Dichtel: And so we are very excited about that. It just involves taking the forever chemicals, putting them in a common organic solvent with lye or sodium hydroxide, which is a very, very common and inexpensive chemical. And then heat them up gently to roughly the temperature of boiling water. And ultimately, they fall apart into safe byproducts. They're not PFAS anymore.
--:-- Cabot Phillips: Is this something that could be scaled? Do you think this is something that could help solve the crisis that's going on with contaminated water? How broad are the impacts of your findings?
--:-- Will Dichtel: I think we're still figuring that out. In terms of destroying PFAS, whether our method proves to be the most efficient or other methods that are coming along in parallel to that, there are going to be ways to destroy PFAS. And all of them are going to start with a removal step from water, almost certainly. And then some sort of application of energy or chemicals to break them down. And our method is potentially scalable. There are others as well. And so I think that it definitely is good but it only a partial solution. It would be far better to not have the pollutants be there in the first place. And so that's why I advocate for phasing out these chemicals and cleaning up where we can.
--:-- Cabot Phillips: You mentioned some other tactics that are being studied. What do those look like?
--:-- Will Dichtel: Well, there are many ways to apply a lot of energy to these molecules. Some people are exploring ways to apply electricity to them. Some are reacting them with very high energy gases called plasmas. Some are heating them up in what's called supercritical water, which is water under very, very high temperature and very high pressure, well beyond the boiling point, so up at 300 degrees or so. And they'll sometimes break down under those conditions. And so the sum total of these findings indicate that forever chemicals will break down. None of these conditions are really close to what they would experience in the environment. So the forever chemicals are not going to break down by these mechanisms, but there are ways that we can apply these methods to controlled waste streams of forever chemicals that will allow them to be broken down and decommissioned.
--:-- Cabot Phillips: Does there seem to be government interest in funding research like yours? What have you seen on that front?
--:-- Will Dichtel: Yes, there's a lot of interest. Obviously, clean water and these negative health effects and the scope of the problem are all reasons that the federal government has been interested. And then also because this problem has a big presence around military bases, right? I mean, it's really, really important here because we essentially have a lot of groundwater around these places where our servicemen live, their families live, where this is a huge problem. So there's funding from various like the Environmental Protection Agency, but there's also a lot of interest from the Department of Defense to help solve this problem.
--:-- Cabot Phillips: Fascinating. So in closing, final question, just again for our listeners, what are steps that tangibly people can be taking to lessen the impact of forever chemicals in their daily lives?
--:-- Will Dichtel: Well, I think if you're in a community where your water is affected, your local municipal water treatment, or if you're on well water, you should test your well water yourself and look for these things. If you are in that category, there are some whole home water purification systems that you can get for now while you wait for the problem to be addressed more at the municipal level. So if you have means to do that, I would do that soon. But the larger message is that it's really hard for consumers to avoid these things. And so I would advise asking your leaders, your congresspeople, your state representatives, what they are doing about this, because it really is going to be a problem that we're going to be fighting for some time. I would draw parallels to how we've dealt as a society with lead over the years, which is still not a solved problem. But we've taken steps over decades to reduce children's exposure to lead. That's going to be the kind of thing we're going to be doing about PFAS over the coming decades.
--:-- Cabot Phillips: All right. This was wonderful. This was incredibly helpful. Professor Dictel, thank you so much for your time. And we really thank you for the work you're doing on this, too. It's really important what you're doing.
--:-- Will Dichtel: My pleasure. Thanks for having me.
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--:-- John Bickley: That was Daily Wire senior editor Cabot Phillips talking with chemistry professor Will Dichtel, and this has been an extra edition of Morning Wire.
