--:-- [Theme music fades out]
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Forever Chemicals are everywhere. Okay, so the big one is drinking water. You go into the bathroom, it can be in soap, shampoo, conditioner, hand lotion, dental floss, which I hate because then it's in your teeth, right?
--:-- Barbara Moran: Oh, they're in my teeth? Cosmetics are really bad. A lot of waterproof cosmetics, which is actually a deal breaker for a lot of women I talk to.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: The other big place is the kitchen. Okay, nonstick cookware, takeout containers, your food really high and a lot of fish. And then in the living room, there might be like stain proofing on the carpet, stain proofing on the upholstery, in the dust bunnies.
--:-- Barbara Moran: There's forever chemicals in the dust bunnies? Yeah, and it's also in breast milk.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Coming up on Today Explained, the Biden administration wants to do something about it.
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--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Today Explained, Sean Ramos from Back in April, we brought you an episode on forever chemicals because they're everywhere. And just a few days ago, we got some historic news about these chemicals. The chemical and manufacturing behemoth 3M reached a $10.3 billion settlement with a ton of American cities and towns over claims that the company contaminated their drinking water.
--:-- Barbara Moran: To celebrate the occasion, we're bringing you an episode we made this April about Forever Chemicals with Barbara Moran from WBUR in Boston.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: We'll get to 3M eventually, but we made the episode to talk about other big news, news that the EPA had drafted new water regulations around Forever Chemicals. And that is a huge deal because drinking water is one of the main ways that people ingest PFAS chemicals and the EPA is finally going to regulate it.
--:-- Barbara Moran: The EPA's proposal applies to six of those chemicals, known as PFAS compounds, and would require water utilities to clean any detectable level out of their systems. So this is a huge announcement that came out in March.
--:-- Barbara Moran: For people who don't know anything about Forever Chemicals or PFAS, what are they?
--:-- Barbara Moran: OK, PFAS chemicals are these class of about thousands of chemicals that were invented in the 1930s. PFAS is an acronym for a family of man-made compounds called per- and polyfluoral alkali substances. And they turn out to have all these amazing properties, like they are heat-resistant and water-resistant and oil-resistant.
--:-- Barbara Moran: So they're using thousands of products, like stain-resistant carpeting. Even DuPont says it cannot rule out that Teflon-connected products, such as its Stainmaster carpet treatment, give off the chemical. And water-resistant clothing and cosmetics.
--:-- Barbara Moran: Researchers at the University of Notre Dame found more than three-quarters of waterproof mascara, nearly two-thirds of foundations, and liquid lipsticks they tested have high levels of PFAS chemicals. And Teflon pans.
--:-- Barbara Moran: If Teflon gets hot enough, depends on what you're cooking or how long you leave the pot on the stove, it gives off fumes that can kill birds. And all of these things that people use every day. Things like pizza boxes, paper plates, rain jackets, ski wax, even guitar strings.
--:-- Barbara Moran: So because they're so widely used and they've been used for so long, they're now everywhere. They're in water and air and soil. Mm. Yes. And our blood, I'm told?
--:-- Barbara Moran: Yes, of 98. It's either 98 or 99 percent of Americans have some PFAS in their blood. Okay, so here's the thing that's interesting. When I hear that, I'm like, well, how bad can it be? Because I'm not dying, I don't think.
--:-- Barbara Moran: Same, I don't think. I don't think. So why is it so bad? So here's why it turns out PFAS chemicals are so bad. One, they stick around forever. They are nearly indestructible. You just can't get rid of them.
--:-- Barbara Moran: You can't get rid of them. Like most toxins you get in your body, they eventually go out. PFAS will stay in your body for years. And they have a structure that makes them affect almost every organ system in your body.
--:-- Barbara Moran: So they've been connected with all kinds of diseases, like liver disease and kidney cancer and testicular cancer and immune problems and digestive problems and high cholesterol. Obesity, risk of diabetes, cardiovascular disease, a whole suite of health outcomes that we're quite concerned about are associated with exposures to these compounds.
--:-- Barbara Moran: Why are they so bad? Why are they causing so many terrible things? Scientists are not 100% sure of the mechanism of how they do these things in the body.
--:-- Barbara Moran: They kind of mimic certain other things that are good, So your body kind of lets them in and they disrupt all kinds of different functions in your body. But there's a ton of research going on with that.
--:-- Barbara Moran: They just know which organs and systems that they are hurting, but they're not exactly sure how. What the heck are these things doing in the tap water
--:-- Barbara Moran: Scientists with the Environmental Working Group in Washington have detected some amount of PFAS in groundwater or drinking water in nearly 2 American communities across 49 states The contamination often linked to nearby industrial sites, landfills, airports, and military bases where the chemicals may have seeped into the ground.
--:-- Barbara Moran: You have, say, waterproof clothing. You put them in your wash. Eventually, this stuff washes off or flakes off. It gets into the wastewater that goes out into the wastewater treatment plant. Then it goes out into the world.
--:-- Barbara Moran: You know, it washes off of things into stormwater. If you have it in your food, that can go into the drain. It's in sort of landfill leachate. It's in firefighting foam. So anywhere there's a fire, it leaks out of the firefighting foam and gets into the groundwater.
--:-- Barbara Moran: A-Triple-F, aqueous film-forming foam, is an unsurpassed way to stop a raging petroleum fire. For about 20 years, firefighters used it in training exercises. The foam is water and oil repellent thanks to perfluorinated chemicals, more commonly known as PFAS.
--:-- Barbara Moran: So all of this stuff, eventually it all sort of leaks down and gets into the groundwater, which ends up in the drinking water. And so this is how people first discovered it in drinking water.
--:-- Barbara Moran: This remains one of the main ways that people get exposed, especially if you live near somewhere like a firefighting academy where there's been a ton of this foam used, right? It's in your drinking water.
--:-- Barbara Moran: That's why this EPA announcement is such a big deal that they're finally going to deal with it in drinking water because that's the first big enchilada that they have to deal with.
--:-- Barbara Moran: Here I am drinking water wondering. No, my drinking water is safe because I check it. because I'm obsessed.
--:-- Barbara Moran: Oh, yeah? How do you check it? Well, Massachusetts, because we're ahead of the game here, we've regulated PFAS and drinking water for a few years now. And so you can go online if you live here in Massachusetts and look up your drinking water system to see if it's okay.
--:-- Barbara Moran: That sounds great. I'm guessing not everyone has that opportunity. No, there's like a handful of states, maybe 10 or 12 that already regulate it. Those states are kind of ahead of the game. and the federal government is finally catching up.
--:-- Barbara Moran: So now all of the states are going to have to figure out how to measure it in their drinking water and regulate it. Tell me more about that. How did the federal government just decide, hey, maybe we should pay attention to these forever chemicals that are in breast milk and the blood of our nation and small children and causing this raft of horrible calamities you talked about?
--:-- Barbara Moran: Yeah, this is the big question is what took the EPA so long to finally regulate these things in drinking water. And there had been calls to do it for years and years and nothing happened under Trump.
--:-- Barbara Moran: And then Biden came into office and said, yeah, we're moving ahead on PFAS. Everybody's sort of waiting, waiting, waiting. And then finally, the regulations came out in March.
--:-- Barbara Moran: I mean, people knew years ago that these chemicals in drinking water were a problem, right? And all the states were kind of waiting around for the EPA to do something. And then some of the states were like, the hell with this. We're not waiting for the EPA. We're just going to do our own thing.
--:-- Barbara Moran: What exactly did the EPA say in March? So the EPA said in March that they are going to regulate six PFAS chemicals in drinking water. When finalized, this proposed regulation will require public water systems to monitor these chemicals.
--:-- Barbara Moran: It will also require systems to notify the public and reduce the levels of these PFAS as prescribed. So that means that if this regulation goes through as they're proposing, then every municipal water system in the country will have to measure these six PFAS chemicals and filter the water to get them out if they're in there.
--:-- Barbara Moran: So that's good. They're doing something. But it's only six of these chemicals, and there's like thousands of them. Thousands? Why just six?
--:-- Barbara Moran: The six that the EPA is regulating are the ones that we know the most about. So there's enough evidence to know that these six should be regulated. Although a lot of scientists say, how about we regulate all of them and not just these six?
--:-- Barbara Moran: So there's a lot of controversy over how to regulate these things, whether you should just look at a few that we know are bad or look at all of them, assuming that they're all bad.
--:-- Barbara Moran: Well, be it six or, you know, a hundred or a thousand of them, how would the government then go about getting these forever chemicals out of the water if they're forever chemicals? You can filter them out of water. You know, you can use like a Gigunda filter.
--:-- Barbara Moran: This brand new water treatment facility in Mansfield filters PFAS, known as forever chemicals, out of the drinking water by sending it through a massive carbon filtration system. 40,000 pounds of carbon in each one of these vessels. The PFAS adheres to the carbon, so that's what removes the PFAS.
--:-- Barbara Moran: They're really expensive, of course. But maybe worth it. Oh, it's totally worth it. You've got to get it out of the drinking water. Okay, everybody, get it out of the drinking water, no matter what it costs.
--:-- Barbara Moran: This has been a public service announcement. Yes, yes. Get the chemicals out of the drinking water. Absolutely.
--:-- Barbara Moran: From Barbara Moran WBUR. You heard it here. Yes. The problem is then all the PFAS is stuck in the filter.
--:-- Barbara Moran: Uh-huh. Then what? Then you either... Launch it into space. This is what everybody says to me about every single toxin. They're like, can we just shoot it in the sun? And I'm like, what? No, you can't shoot it in the sun.
--:-- Barbara Moran: Okay. It's our problem. We should keep the problems that we've created here on our polluted planet. Exactly. And then you have to put it in a landfill. But that doesn't get rid of the PFAS, really. You're still left the PFAS.
--:-- Barbara Moran: The PFAS just keeps piling up and piling up and piling up. Also, another PSA from Barb is that all this regulation does not help people with private wells, which are actually a lot, a huge percentage of people.
--:-- Barbara Moran: Especially in rural areas, you get your water from a private well. You have to go out and test your well by yourself. So go do it, even though it costs you money. Because you want to know.
--:-- Barbara Moran: Oh What have we done to ourselves Barbara What is this all for? Just so we can go out for a run and not get wet? Just get wet.
--:-- Barbara Moran: You know what? I'm glad that I'm bringing you into this level of despair that I have now felt for months. I've been here for a long time. I've been saying those exact words to myself. Like, what have we done?
--:-- Barbara Moran: You know, I love Teflon. I guess. And I like waterproof cosmetics and I love waterproof hiking gear. But yeah, we don't need to have toxic chemicals in everything.
--:-- Barbara Moran: Back with Barb in a minute on Today Explained. Support for Today Explained comes from Chime. Nobody likes fees and complicated banking, says Chime.
--:-- Barbara Moran: And Chime gets that, says Chime. Chime is a financial technology company that says they understand that every dollar counts. So when you set up direct deposit through Chime, they say you get access to fee-free features, such as free overdraft coverage, getting paid up to two days early with direct deposit, so much more.
--:-- Barbara Moran: Chime says with qualifying direct deposits, you can be eligible for free overdraft, up to $200 on debit card purchases and cash withdrawals. Plus, they say you don't need to worry about monthly fees or maintenance fees. You can work on your financial goals through Chime today.
--:-- Barbara Moran: You can open an account in two minutes at chime.com slash explained. That's chime.com slash explained. Chime feels like progress. Chime is a financial technology company, not a bank. Banking services and debit card provided by the Bancor Bank N.A. Or Stride Bank N.A. Members FDIC.
--:-- Barbara Moran: Spot me eligibility requirements and overdraft limits apply. Timing depends on submission of payment file. Fees apply at out-of-network ATMs. Bank ranking and number of ATMs according to U.S. News and World Report 2023. Chime checking account required.
--:-- Barbara Moran: Every day, millions of customers engage with AI agents like me. We resolve queries fast. We work 24-7 and we're helpful, knowledgeable, and empathetic. We're built to be the voice of the brands we serve. Sierra is the platform for building better, more human customer experiences with AI.
--:-- Barbara Moran: No hold music, no generic answers, no frustration. Visit sierra.ai to learn more. That's the promise of Coupons. Today Explained is back with Barbara Moran from WBUR. And I asked her an obvious question. Why not just replace these dang forever chemicals with something less toxic?
--:-- Barbara Moran: OK, so, well, this is part of the problem, right, is the companies that make it, they're like, OK, we'll take out this bad stuff. But then they put in some other stuff. It's not really regulated. You're worried. Are they just putting in another bad thing?
--:-- Barbara Moran: The ultimate solution for all this is better regulating chemicals before we put them out in the world, A. B, finding a way to actually destroy the stuff when we're done with it. And in the meantime, helping people limit their exposure to it.
--:-- Barbara Moran: Getting out of people's drinking water, helping people have safer products so that we're not exposed so much to these things. Do you know the history of how these things came to be? You know, they were invented in the 1930s. And now I want to tell you a chemical story.
--:-- Barbara Moran: I'm Larry Livingston of the DuPont Company. This story is about a new plastic material trademarked Teflon. So they invented these chemicals and they're amazing. They have these amazing qualities. This is very like the graduate, the future is plastics, plastics. Plastics. It is, totally. It's these people. There's a great future in plastics. Absolutely.
--:-- Barbara Moran: And they're like, woo, this is amazing. We could use it in this and we could use it in this and this and this and this. And it became most famous used by DuPont in products like Teflon. I think that was the one that most people were familiar with. Cookware never needs scouring. If it has DuPont, Teflon.
--:-- Barbara Moran: And that's how it also came to light that they were toxic because of the factory where they're making Teflon when they had workers exposed to it. And also it got into the water there. And now it's everywhere.
--:-- Barbara Moran: When did companies really start to understand how bad these things were? So the companies knew that they were bad long, long before they told anybody about it. They knew it because some of the female workers had children with birth defects.
--:-- Barbara Moran: These internal DuPont documents, only now made public, showed the company knew that of eight women working on the Teflon line in 1981, two had children with birth defects. And they knew in, like, animal tests that these chemicals had problems. And they kept this information quiet for a long time. And it eventually came out in lawsuits.
--:-- Barbara Moran: When we got into the litigation with DuPont, we got access to a lot of the internal documents. And we found out that DuPont and another company called 3M had been studying this chemical dating back to the 1950s and 1960s.
--:-- Barbara Moran: So how do companies respond to the information that, by the way, these forever chemicals that you're putting into every last product you make are really bad for people and cause a host of diseases and conditions that people are doing their darndest to avoid in regular life?
--:-- Barbara Moran: Well, I think it goes the usual way. First, they say, no, they're not. They're fine. What are you talking about? And then they say, OK, well, they're not as bad as you think. And then they're like, oh, OK. Maybe some of them are bad, but not all of them.
--:-- Barbara Moran: You know, and what they did was they phased out the first two best known ones. So they phased those out. But then they just replaced them with other ones that they said were better but weren't really. And 3M has said they're going to phase them out completely by 2025.
--:-- Barbara Moran: Oh, yeah? Yeah. So that's big. And you're like, woohoo, 3M. But like scientists I talk to, they're like, woohoo. But are they actually just replacing them with some other thing? That could have some other unknown consequences.
--:-- Barbara Moran: Exactly. When do people learn about the negative effects of PFAS, if not right now on this show? Oh, God. They have to know by now this is all I talk about.
--:-- Barbara Moran: So I feel like... I would hope so. I would not be surprised if people hear about this for the first time. I mean let see So I think it sort of first came to light in around the late 90s early 2000s I would say a lot of people probably heard about it because there was a movie with Mark Ruffalo in it called Dark Waters Not a lot of people saw that movie despite the Hulk being in it.
--:-- Barbara Moran: It's not my fault. The movie was made for you and me. I know. There's this one scene in the movie where the guy played by Mark Ruffalo basically has a total freakout and starts getting rid of all the stuff in his house that has PFAS in it. And I'm like, yeah. Holy crap. Rob! What? I thought someone was breaking in, for God's sakes! No, it's just me. Rob, you need to tell me when the hell's going on. were being poisoned. I'm that guy. I went around and threw away all our dental floss.
--:-- Barbara Moran: But if you ripped up your house to take everything out of your house that had PFAS in it, it sounds like you'd have to kick yourself out of your house. I know. And your wife with the breast milk. I know. And your child who ate a dust bunny and now has them in their system. It's not practical. I know.
--:-- Barbara Moran: So then I had to say, okay, Barb, just sit down and take some deep breaths. Here's how I think about it to keep myself from freaking out. It's kind of like air pollution, right? If you live in the world, you're probably going to encounter air pollution, right? Yeah. Right? Okay. Yeah. So what you want to do is you want to limit it. You don't want to go stand behind an exhaust pipe and suck in exhaust, okay?
--:-- Barbara Moran: Okay. Especially if you have asthma. So go for the big ticket items. Make sure your drinking water is cleaned up. Make sure you do not microwave stuff in your takeout containers. That is scientifically proven to be bad?
--:-- Barbara Moran: Yeah, there's often PFAS in takeout containers. So we got the water, we got the microwave. What else? Another big thing, you're not gonna like this one either, but if you do like recreational fishing or hunting, you should check the place where you're fishing to make sure it's okay.
--:-- Barbara Moran: Like check the water streams, the water quality. Yeah, and you can usually do that online. You should do this anyway, because some places, a lot of places now are saying you should not fish or take fish from certain places because of the PFAS. Fish is one of the highest PFAS-laden foods. So be careful with your fish.
--:-- Barbara Moran: So like you're trying to eat less red meat because cows are so bad for the environment. So you start doing a fish-heavy diet and then you find out that, by the way, you're doomed there too. You're not doomed. Let's not go there. See, everybody's always telling me I'm the doom and gloom reporter because I'm the climate environment reporter. So let's not just do doom and gloom. Let's, like, empower ourselves.
--:-- Barbara Moran: But how worried are you right now about Dwayne The Rock Johnson, who eats something like 821 pounds of cod every year? I can confirm it to a certain degree that I was eating many pounds of food per day, including a lot of cod. He might be duped. I don't want to doom The Rock. I love The Rock. Let's not doom him. I'm a good guy. but sometimes I do bad things.
--:-- Barbara Moran: This conversation with you, Barb, has been a wake-up call for me personally, maybe for some of our audience. Is it realistic to try and live a PFAS-free life? Is it realistic to avoid these forever chemicals? And if we can't, is there a reason to despair?
--:-- Barbara Moran: You cannot avoid them. You can't avoid them in the world we live in altogether, okay? But don't despair, because you can cut your exposure way, way, way down by just going for the big ticket items. And the biggest ticket item is drinking water. And the federal government is finally doing something about it. So that is a huge amount of hope right there.
--:-- Barbara Moran: But there have been previous administrations who have been all about disbanding the EPA. is the federal government doing something right now necessarily an indication that the federal government will be doing something in 10 years? It's really hard to roll back regulations. Is it? Once you get them in place.
--:-- Barbara Moran: Didn't like Obama do a bunch of regulations and then his successor undid them all. And now his successor is trying to put them back in place. Isn't it kind of how it goes? Cyclical? Almost, but not quite. Trump made a really strong effort to roll back a lot of regulations and had a little bit of success, not a ton of success. Americans want safe drinking water. And so I think this one is going to stick.
--:-- Barbara Moran: You know what that is, Barb? No. That's a glimmer of hope. Thank you. I do like to give those glimmers.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Barbara Moran is the doom and gloom reporter at WBUR in Boston, but she likes a glimmer. So does Avishai Artsy. He produced this episode. We were edited by Amina Alsadi, fact-checked by Halima Shah and Laura Bullard, and mixed by Paul Robert Mounsey.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: The rest of the team at Today Explained is comprised of Heidi Mawagdi, Amanda Llewellyn, Miles Bryan, Siona Petros, and Victoria Chamberlain. Lots of help from Jolie Myers and Patrick Boyd. Music from Breakmaster Cylinder. Email us anytime at todayexplained at vox.com. We're on the radio with help from WNYC, and we are part of the Vox Media Podcast Network.
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