Title: How One Company Secretly Poisoned The Planet
Author: Veritasium

Transcript:
In 1929 in Chicago,
people kept mysteriously
dying inside their homes.
It took 15 deaths for the
authorities to realize
that these people were getting
killed by...
their fridges
because fridges back then were
no longer just boxes of ice.
Instead, they relied
on a chemical looping
through the back to stay cold.
And the best chemical for
the job was methyl chloride,
a toxic and virtually odorless gas.
So if it somehow leaked from the fridge,
it could kill you without warning.
Other fridges used
flammable gases instead,
so a leak combined with
a spark from the stove,
and your house could
suddenly go up in flames.
So one company tried
to solve this problem,
but in the process,
they accidentally created a
seemingly magical substance.
Soon, it made its way into
a huge range of products,
which were so popular they ended up
in nearly every home in America.
But what people didn't know
was that these products came at a price.
The chemicals used to make them
were being released into the environment,
slowly poisoning everyone
on the planet,
including me.
(swelling music)
- You have high levels of a
chemical you never heard of.
- It shocks me.
Like, where could this have come from?
- Almost every living creature,
from polar bears to birds to fish,
massive worldwide contamination
by completely manmade
chemicals that are fingerprints
back to just a couple of companies.
- This is a video about one
of the biggest chemical
coverups in history.
For legal reasons, I want to
note that this investigation
is based on publicly available
documents, recordings,
and third-party opinions.
All sources are linked in the description.
The story all began with
an attempt to save lives.
In 1936, a chemical company
called DuPont set out
to find a safer alternative
to the gases used in fridges,
one that was neither toxic nor flammable.
Their lead scientist on the project
was a 27-year-old chemist
named Roy J. Plunkett.
He was experimenting
with a gas called
tetrafluoroethylene, or TFE.
It's a pair of double-bonded carbons,
each bonded to two fluorine atoms.
One morning, as Plunkett
was setting up a test,
his assistant picked out
a cylinder full of TFE
and twisted the valve,
but nothing came out.
Plunkett thought the gas must have leaked,
but the cylinder still weighed
about as much as a full one,
so he grabbed a saw and
cut the cylinder in half.
Inside, he was shocked to see it was full
of a white, slippery powder.
So what happened to the gas?
Well, what the chemist reasoned
was that under the high
pressure of the cylinder,
one of the double bonds
between the carbons in
TFE must have broken.
And now those two carbon atoms
each had a bonding site free.
So one of them probably
grabbed onto a carbon
from a different TFE molecule,
breaking its double bond.
And then that molecule did the same,
and the process repeated again and again
until all of the TFE was
trapped in these long chains.
The gas had polymerized into
polytetrafluoroethylene,
forming this slippery powder.
Plunkett just wanted to get rid of it
because it ruined his experiment.
But before throwing it out,
he decided to do some tests on it.
So he tried pouring water on it,
but the water just beaded off.
So he tried acid. Again, nothing happened.
Then he tried the strongest base he had,
but that wouldn't melt it either.
Plunkett went through all
of the solvents in the lab,
but the powder remained intact.
It wouldn't melt, corrode,
or react with anything.
It was seemingly indestructible.
The reason it was so indestructible
was because of this bond,
the carbon-fluorine bond.
See, out of all of the elements,
fluorine is the greediest,
the most electron-hungry atom.
Its outer shell is a single electron away
from being complete, which
would make it perfectly stable.
So fluorine really, really
wants that electron.
And because it's so small
compared to most other elements,
the protons in its nucleus can get close
to the electrons of other atoms.
And because of their positive charge,
they pull on them really hard.
So near a carbon atom,
fluorine grabs onto one
of the carbon's electrons
to complete its outer shell,
and this keeps the two
atoms bonded together.
But the fluorine isn't done there.
It keeps tugging on
the carbon's electrons,
pulling them closer to itself,
which makes fluorine
slightly negatively charged
and the carbon slightly positive.
So now there's an electrostatic attraction
that makes this bond even stronger.
Now, in reality, electrons
behave more like fuzzy clouds
than the orbiting points
in this animation,
but the principle still holds.
In terms of energy,
this is actually the strongest single bond
a carbon can form.
So if other atoms or molecules get close,
they're essentially ignored.
And Plunkett's magic powder
was completely covered
in carbon-fluorine bonds,
so it hardly reacted with anything.
Okay, so he is got this
incredibly inert stuff.
Was he really trying to get rid of it?
- He actually didn't
know what to do with it
'cause like what do you
do with the material
that doesn't, you know,
react with anything?
But luckily his employer, DuPont,
they were actually working
with the US Army on the Manhattan Project.
So they were refining
uranium and plutonium
'cause of course there's
a World War II reference
in a Veritasium video.
You just have to have it.
- To get the fuel for nuclear
bombs, enriched uranium,
you first have to turn the uranium
into a gas, uranium hexafluoride.
It was a nasty chemical
that corroded everything.
So all the gaskets, seals,
and miles of pipe in
the plant at Oak Ridge
had to constantly replaced,
slowing down production.
- But then DuPont was like, "Listen,
we have this seemingly
indestructible chemical, right?
It doesn't react with
stuff it doesn't corrode,
so maybe we can try and use it
against uranium hexafluoride."
So they get a bunch of this powder,
they cram it together under high pressure
to create these cakes, essentially.
Now you had a solid of this material
that you could machine
into gaskets and cylinders
that you could push into these pipes
and put these tube linings into the pipe,
and boom, it works like
magic, like a charm.
The uranium hexafluoride was no match
for this magic material.
- As Gordon Fee, the manager
of the nuclear weapons plant, put it,
"There was never a substitute
considered, as far as I know."
The material worked so well
that the army wanted to
use it for everything.
The same gaskets and seals
were installed into fuel tanks
and airplane engines to protect
them from oil and water.
And weapons manufacturing
plants no longer had issues
with the corrosive nitric acid
needed to make explosives.
DuPont saw the potential too,
so they trademarked the material in 1944.
- They didn't trademark it
under the name polytetrafluoroethylene
'cause, admittedly,
that name kind of sucks.
So they took T-E from
tetra, F-L from fluoro,
and then they had a bunch
of these other miracle
materials, rayon, nylon.
So they took O-N from the end
of those, and boom, Teflon.
- Nice. Okay, that's a good name.
Under the army's order, DuPont
ramped up Teflon production
at their test plant in
Arlington, New Jersey,
giving their whole
supply to the government.
But DuPont struggled to
produce enough Teflon
to meet the military's demand.
As their Arlington scientists put it,
the major advantages of
polytetrafluoroethylene,
solvent resistance and
high thermal stability,
offer obstacles from the
standpoint of ease in fabrication.
- You could only really
mold Teflon into solids,
so gasket, seals, pipes,
but you couldn't put it
into water to make a spray
because it doesn't dissolve in water.
They actually didn't know
anything that dissolved Teflon,
but there was an even bigger
problem at that point.
- To polymerize TFE into Teflon,
you can add a reactive atom
or molecule that will hijack
the first carbon double bond
and start the reaction.
This is called the initiator.
And the bond formed between
it and the first TFE molecule
releases a small amount of energy.
Then a bit of energy is also released
when the next TFE molecule joins the chain
and the next and the next.
And if the process isn't controlled,
the reaction gets very hot very quickly.
And if it gets above 200 degrees celsius,
TFE rapidly decomposes into
carbon and tetrafluoromethane,
which releases even
more energy all at once.
This caused a massive explosion
at the Arlington plant in
1944, killing two workers.
You need a way to dissipate the heat,
take the heat away from the reaction
without it staying in there
and, therefore, expanding
and creating that force.
- Yeah, and one of the ways to do that
was to have the reaction
happening in water,
because water can absorb
a huge amount of energy
before it ever heats up.
- But if you inject TFE
into a water cylinder,
the gas doesn't dissolve.
Even at high pressure, most
of the TFE just stays on top.
So if you add an initiator,
the polymerization is
triggered in one place,
and so it can still cause an explosion.
What you need is some way
to disperse the TFE
throughout the water first.
And to do that, DuPont needed help.
In 1951, they purchased
a special acid from 3M,
the company behind Scotch Tape.
This acid, called PFOA,
looked almost exactly like Teflon.
It had a chain of eight carbon
atoms covered in fluorines,
but at the other end, there
was a double-bonded oxygen
and an OH group.
That's what makes it an acid.
And since there were eight
carbons in the chain,
DuPont also referred to the acid as C8.
The tail end of C8, like
Teflon, was hydrophobic,
but the acid head group loved water,
it was hydrophilic.
So when you add C8 into water,
the molecules rearrange themselves
so that the heads touch the water,
but the Teflon-like tails don't.
They create little bubbles
all throughout the water,
which are virtually dry on the inside.
If you now inject TFE and
stir the whole mixture up,
well, the hydrophobic gas ends up
in the middle of these C8 bubbles.
And those bubbles are dispersed everywhere
evenly throughout the water.
You know what this reminds me of, is soap.
So it's the great combiner
that allows, like, oil and water to mix.
- And now if you sprinkle
in initiator molecules,
the initiator molecules
also go into these bubbles.
They start the polymerization reaction,
so from TFE to Teflon.
But now since it's happening spread all
throughout these bubbles,
the heat is evenly dissipated
throughout the water, and no one explodes.
- And since Teflon is now
suspended in a solution,
you can spray it onto
surfaces like a coating.
This thing doesn't stick to anything.
How do you stick it to the gaskets?
You know, how do you actually use it?
- Yeah, yeah, yeah,
that's a good question.
So the trick was actually the surface
had to be really rough.
So what you do is you
sandblast it to create grooves
and imperfections at this,
like, nanoscopic level.
Now if you spray the coating on,
what happens is, if you heat
it up, the water evaporates,
the C8, it also evaporates,
but Teflon, instead of it
evaporating, it just softens up.
So although there's no
chemical interaction here,
now it's mechanically
stuck to the surface.
That's how they got it to stick.
(suspenseful music)
(quirky music)
- With the war over,
the army lifted the secrecy
bans on the Teflon patents,
and DuPont was allowed
to sell it commercially.
And suddenly, people all over the world
were coating everyday items in Teflon,
trying to create a world-changing product.
One day in 1954, a French
engineer, Marc Gregoire,
tried putting Teflon on his
fishing gear to prevent tangles.
- But then his wife saw him doing that,
and her reaction was that,
"This is absolute nonsense.
No one is ever gonna use this.
You should do something that
someone's actually gonna use.
So how about you put it on a
pan? Make a pan non-stick."
- And once these pans hit the market,
it was a cooking revolution.
- Teflon.
- Teflon.
- Teflon.
- And DuPont knew
exactly how to market it.
- Even oatmeal won't stick to Teflon.
- Hey, neat. Let me try.
- And it wasn't just non-stick pans.
Teflon, C8, and chemicals like
it were used in everything.
- Slip-Away contains the
magic of DuPont's Teflon.
- Suddenly, we had Teflon
stain-resistant carpets
and stain protection sprays
like 3M's Scotchgard.
Jackets lined with Teflon were
waterproof and breathable.
- Gore-Tex is the brand name.
- Teflon was so inert that
medical implants made out of it
wouldn't be rejected by the body.
It was used to coat the Statue
of Liberty's steel framework
to save it from corrosion.
And even bullets were coated with Teflon
to minimize the damage they did coming out
of the gun barrel.
The term Teflon was so ubiquitous
that when the Italian mobster John Gotti
was being prosecuted in the late 1980s,
none of the charges
against him would stick.
So he was dubbed Teflon Don.
By the late 1990s,
the Teflon business generated
roughly a billion dollars
in yearly sales for DuPont.
- Teflon has a great future,
and its uses will be many.
- The chemicals were everywhere,
even where they shouldn't be.
- He suspected that
something in this creek
was poisoning his cows.
- Earl was desperate.
So he hired a lawyer.
- He came to our offices armed
with boxes of VHS videotapes.
We started watching these videotapes,
and you know, there was
a serious problem here.
- The animals were wasting away,
and they were skin and bones,
and they had tumors and black teeth.
And you could see, on the videotape,
white foam coming out of the pipe
on this landfill next door
with these animals
standing in the white foam.
The hair on their hooves
was being eaten off
by whatever was in the water.
- It was a discharge pipe,
and it had the marking
of E.I. du Pont de Nemours and Company.
- And the landfill that pipe
was draining from belonged
to DuPont's massive factory complex
outside of Parkersburg, West
Virginia, just six miles away.
That factory was Washington Works,
the first commercial Teflon plant.
It provided jobs for almost
2,000 people in the town.
And DuPont's presence was felt everywhere.
- I have been a resident of
Parkersburg for 48 years.
I do not work for the DuPont company,
but I have seen how their
people have done much
for the cultural growth of this community.
- There are facilities for
tennis, camping, swimming,
softball, and more than 20
areas equipped for cookouts
and family picnics.
- DuPont took care of the community.
So when the town folk got word
that Earl Tennant hired
a lawyer to investigate,
they shunned him and his family.
As his sister-in-law put it,
we'd walk into a restaurant
and everybody in the restaurant
would get up and leave.
But Earl wasn't scared
off, and neither was Rob.
- I thought this was gonna
be pretty straightforward.
- See, the US Environmental
Protection Agency, the EPA,
dictates exactly which chemicals are safe
to be disposed of in a
landfill and in what amounts.
- We would get those records and permits,
and it would tell us which chemical
was causing this problem.
But none of those records
were really showing anything
that was really causing a problem,
you know, nothing that would
explain that white foam.
- Whatever was in Earl's
water wasn't on the permits.
Now, already in the 1950s,
people knew that Teflon,
specifically PTFE, was pretty safe.
It's a long and extremely inert molecule.
So if you ingest it, your
body just flushes it out.
However, if you heat Teflon
to 350 degrees Celsius,
it starts releasing fumes
that make people sick.
This often happened to
workers in Teflon plants.
Stray PTFE powder would
fall onto their cigarettes
as they were working,
and then later they would
accidentally smoke one
of these cigarettes.
Luckily, the symptoms were mild:
fatigue, tightness of chest, headaches,
and they would usually
pass within 48 hours.
It was called polymer fume fever.
And even though it rarely happens today,
it's why you should never
overheat your Teflon pan
to these temperatures,
especially if you have pet birds at home,
because the fumes are
much more toxic to them.
But Teflon couldn't have
poisoned Earl's cows.
There were no fumes or high temperatures,
so there must have been
something else in the water.
Rob filed a legal request
for all of the Washington
Works operational records,
and DuPont sent them over,
more than 60,000 documents.
- A lot of folks would try to say,
"Okay, you you want a lot of documents,
we'll give you a of documents"
and hope that there'd be no way
somebody could actually wade
through all of these files
and all of these materials.
But I am the kind of
person that I do dig in,
and I do want to go
through those documents,
so I actually did read all of that.
- And in those files,
a certain chemical kept
popping up everywhere,
C8.
- I never saw the kinds
of things I was seeing now
in these documents from DuPont.
(foreboding music)
- In 1961, the same year
Teflon pans hit the US market,
DuPont's in-house scientists
tested C8 on rats.
Ingesting as little as 1.5 milligrams
of C8 per kilogram of body
weight caused the rat's livers
to grow abnormally.
And a dose of 570 milligrams
per kilogram was lethal.
For reference, sodium cyanide,
one of the most dangerous
poisons, is lethal to rats
in doses of five to 15
milligrams per kilogram.
But even though C8 was less fatal,
it was concerning for two other reasons.
First, like Teflon,
its tail is made of carbon-fluorine bonds,
which makes it incredibly stable.
So C8 wouldn't break down in
the environment for decades.
And second, C8 looks like the fatty acids
that humans and animals
need for normal functioning,
just with fluorines instead of hydrogens.
So the concern was that C8
could get into the bloodstream,
hitch a ride on the proteins
that transport fatty acids around,
and get almost anywhere in the body.
And because of the carbon-fluorine bonds,
humans and animals have
no way to break down C8,
so it could slowly build up,
mimicking those fatty acids
and potentially disrupting
the systems they regulate,
like the liver.
- Toxic, persistent, bioaccumulative.
So the concern was it's
like a ticking time bomb.
It's got more opportunity to cause harm.
- As a safety measure, that
same rat study suggested
that all these materials should
be handled with extreme care
and that contact with skin
should be strictly avoided.
In 1962, DuPont redid the study
and confirmed that high
doses of C8 kill rats
through injury to the stomach, intestine,
brain, lungs, and pancreas.
Then in 1965, they found those
same toxic effects in dogs.
The evidence was mounting.
(suspenseful music)
(camera clicks)
- They were even studying monkeys.
Some of the monkeys were dropping dead.
These chemicals were causing toxic effects
in multiple organ systems
in multiple species.
All these studies weren't being shared
with the scientific community.
- And likely no one outside
of DuPont would've noticed
something was wrong
if it was not for...
- Tooth decay, the most
widespread of all diseases.
- In the 1950s, tooth decay
was a nationwide problem.
So the US started adding
inorganic fluorides
like sodium fluoride to
the public water supply.
This helped fight cavities.
- 16 years after fluoridation,
all children will have
65% less tooth decay.
- In 1975, researchers wanted to know
if that inorganic fluoride was
getting into people's blood.
So they sampled blood from around the US,
and the results were as expected.
More fluoride in the tap
water meant more fluoride
in the blood.
But they found another type
of fluorine in the blood too,
which was organic fluorine,
carbon-fluorine bonds, and it
didn't follow the same trend.
- Well, these researchers were wondering,
where's this coming from?
Because this is not a
naturally occurring substance.
And they did research,
and they found that 3M was
making these organic fluorides,
things like PFOA.
All right, so they approached
3M in 1975, asking them,
"Hey, we found this stuff
in the general US population's blood.
You know, could it be yours?"
And 3M pled ignorance.
- But just three months later,
3M compared the spectrum of
organic fluorine from the study
to their own chemicals, and
it was a match.
Their chemicals were
getting into the blood
of people all across the United States,
but they didn't tell the researchers.
3M and DuPont were worried,
so they checked their own workers' blood,
and they found that they too
were contaminated with C8
at levels 1,000 times higher
than those in the study.
And when DuPont checked
their medical records,
many of these workers were
showing signs of liver disease.
Meanwhile, DuPont was
dumping almost 10 tons of C8
into the Ohio River each year,
and they were piling
up thousands more tons
as C8 sludge that would leach
from the landfill next to Earl's farm,
all while showing commercials like these.
- And the water that
eventually flows to the river
is collected at five points and analyzed
to make sure we don't pollute the Ohio.
- And by the early '80s,
the first cancer study is done in rats,
and it confirms PFOA causes,
not just might be linked with,
but causes testicular tumors, all right?
That sends alarm bells
off within the company
because the concern is, of course,
we're putting this in the air,
we're putting in the water.
It's in Teflon.
- DuPont collected samples
around Washington Works,
and C8 wasn't just in the river,
it was in the public water supply.
So in 1984, DuPont officials met
to assess whether C8 should be swapped
for a safer chemical.
But their conclusion
was that currently none
of the options developed are,
from a fine powder business standpoint,
economically attractive,
so C8 stuck around,
and DuPont just came up with a
safe dose for drinking water.
- DuPont scientists are the
first people on the planet
to say what would be a
safe level for humans.
They calculated something
like 0.6 parts per billion,
which they rounded up to one.
And the importance of
that is, at that time,
that was about the lowest level
you could detect in water.
Essentially, if we can
detect it, it's too high.
- So to put that into perspective,
here is one 2,500-liter tank of water.
It filled to the brim.
Now, imagine you take one drop
of PFOA, 0.05 milliliters,
and you place it not in one of these tanks
or two or three,
20 of these tanks.
That's one part per billion,
and that's the number DuPont thought
would be unsafe for humans to drink.
- And after determining
its own safety metric,
DuPont tested the landfill
wastewater leaching
into Earl's creek.
It came back at 1,600 parts per billion.
- They didn't tell anybody.
So at that point, I
thought I had figured out
what had finally happened to the cows.
- Rob compiled all the
evidence into a 900-page letter
and sent it to the EPA,
the Department of Justice,
and even the US Attorney General.
And just a few months later,
DuPont settled with Earl Tennant
and his family for an undisclosed sum,
although they didn't
admit to any wrongdoing.
- But this stuff wasn't just
in the water the cows were drinking.
This was in
the surrounding communities'
public wells, right?
People around Mr. Tennant,
the tens of thousands of people
in that community had
likely been drinking this
for decades and didn't know.
- So Rob sued DuPont again,
now on behalf of the 70,000
people around Parkersburg
who were unwittingly exposed to C8.
And it wasn't just
Parkersburg or West Virginia.
In the year 2000, researchers
analyzed blood samples
from thousands of Americans
all across the country,
and 100% of those samples
came back positive for C8
at an average of five parts per billion.
But if virtually everyone
in the US is contaminated,
how harmful could C8 really be?
This is exactly what Rob had to find out
to have a fighting chance against DuPont.
So in 2005, he spearheaded a medical study
of everyone around Washington Works.
- Scientists need to know
if the chemical C8 causes
any health problems.
By completing a health questionnaire
and having your blood
tested, you can help.
- Analyzing the blood samples
and medical records took seven long years,
and many in Parkersburg passed away
before a verdict was even reached,
including Earl and his wife Sandra.
But finally, in 2013,
an independent science
panel had the results.
They confirmed a probable link between C8
and six human diseases,
including thyroid disease,
testicular cancer, and kidney cancer.
And these findings were based
solely on the nearby community
with an average C8 blood
level of 28 parts per billion.
So for example, an American
male has around a 1 in 43 chance
of developing kidney cancer.
It's around 1 in 73 for females,
but a person with more
than 30 parts per billion
of C8 in their blood serum
might have about double the odds,
so roughly 1 in 22 for males
and 1 in 37 for females.
But the data in many
of these studies only included survivors,
not people who might have
already died from C8 exposure.
So the verdict was
that the findings must be
interpreted with caution.
The true risk of C8 might be even higher.
Luckily, once these studies
were published in 2013,
DuPont was pressured by the
regulators to phase out C8.
And by 2017, they had to
pay out over $600 million
to victims of C8 exposure,
which is a pretty small price to pay
for a company that made almost $80 billion
in sales just that year.
And all throughout, DuPont
denied any wrongdoing,
but that wasn't the end of it
for Parkersburg or anyone else
because DuPont separated
its entire Teflon business
into a spinoff company, Chemours,
that agreed to use a different chemical.
So what was it?
- They simply took C8 and
knocked two carbons off
and started making C6.
- They called it GenX.
Because it was shorter
and had an oxygen atom
interrupting the carbon chain,
it was expected to be more degradable.
So Chemours claimed a dose as
high as 70 parts per billion
of GenX in drinking water
would still be safe.
- That chemical gets shipped
to the same plant in West Virginia.
So now GenX goes into the air.
GenX goes into the Ohio River.
GenX is found in public water supplies.
So GenX is allowed to
come out into the world,
be used in Teflon.
Then the cancer study is done,
which shows GenX causes
the exact same three tumors
in rats that PFOA did:
liver, testicular, and pancreatic.
- And the fact that its chain
is shorter also makes GenX more mobile,
so it could contaminate larger areas.
The truth is we just don't
know enough about it,
and that's exactly the problem.
- It took us decades to get to the point
of finally addressing C8.
They simply tweak it a bit,
change the chemical name.
All of the science and all
of the concern, that's on C8.
This is C6 or C9 or C4.
You don't have enough evidence
that these other ones are bad.
This is Whac-A-Mole.
We get to the point we're addressing one
and the new one pops up
and we're told we have to start over.
- And it isn't just C8 or GenX.
They belong to a family
of over 14,000 different
manmade chemicals,
all covered in carbon-fluorine bonds.
And companies can make
them however they want,
C7s, C9s, branched, polymers, acids.
The generic term for all of
these substances is PFAS,
per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances,
and like Teflon, they have
almost magical qualities.
They repel liquids,
so PFAS are used to make
clothing waterproof.
They're also grease-resistant,
so we coat things like fast food wrappers
and microwave popcorn bags
in PFAS to prevent stains.
Waterproof lipstick and
mascara, hygiene products,
and even contact lenses have PFAS in.
Even the screen you're watching this on,
likely has a PFAS anti-smudge coating.
(brooding music)
The trouble is that the
same carbon-fluorine bonds
that make PFAS so stable
and useful in consumer products
also make them incredibly
persistent in the environment.
Which is why you might also know PFAS
under a different name, forever chemicals.
They have been found
everywhere from bustling cities
to untouched areas of wilderness.
Every continent, including
Antarctica, has PFAS all over it.
- Almost every living creature
from polar bears to birds to fish,
I mean, this stuff is
being found everywhere.
So massive worldwide contamination,
but by completely manmade chemicals
that are fingerprints back to
just a couple of companies.
- Even though companies knew
how dangerous these
chemicals were 50 years ago,
they decided not to inform
the public and the regulators.
So we're only finding out
about this global contamination now.
And there've been many cases
where important public health information
doesn't get widely disseminated for years.
And whenever that happens,
media coverage can be inconsistent,
which is why I've partnered
up with Ground News
as the sponsor of this video.
Their platform reveals how
stories like these are covered
across the media landscape.
For example, a recent study suggested
that 23 million Americans
were exposed to forever
chemicals through wastewater,
but you probably haven't seen the story
since fewer than 40
outlets even published it.
And take a look at how different some
of these headlines are.
With Ground News,
you can also see that
government-funded sources
had limited reporting of this story,
and only 9% of the publications
were right-leaning.
So Ground News flagged this
as a potential blind spot.
It's highlighted on their blind-spot feed
where you can see stories
that are disproportionately covered
by one side of the political spectrum.
The whole point of
Veritasium is to make videos
that get to the truth,
whether that's explaining misconceptions
or getting to the bottom of
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And now back to PFAS.
(quirky music)
Okay, now I wanna find out how much
of these chemicals is
actually in my blood.
So I have a little test here. (groans)
I hate the idea of drawing
my own blood. (groans)
Okay, that was pretty easy, actually.
I was really worried
that there was not gonna
be enough blood coming out.
But there was plenty.
(sighs) So the question is,
how much of these dangerous
chemicals are in my blood?
- Has anyone ever come back with blood
that has zero PFAS whatsoever?
- I've been doing blood
testing on PFAS since 2007,
and I've never seen a non-detect.
- No way.
- So I hear that 98%
of the population has PFAS in their blood,
but I'm looking for that 2% that doesn't
because I've yet to see them.
- That's incredible, I mean very,
very bad incredible, but wow.
- But if everyone on
Earth has trace amounts
of these chemicals in their blood,
how much harm could they really be doing?
- I wanna make a distinction
because it turns out not all
PFAS are equally dangerous.
You can kind of split
them up into two groups.
First up, you have long, repeating chains
of carbon-fluorine bonds
that are tens or hundreds
of thousands of atoms long,
so stuff like Teflon.
These are so big and inert that
even if you do ingest them,
your body's just gonna flush them out.
They can't be absorbed
into your bloodstream,
so you're pretty safe.
They're called fluoropolymers
because of the long repeating chains
of carbon and fluorine bonds.
But the catch is to make
these fluoropolymers,
stuff like Teflon, you need
to use processing aids,
things like PFOA or GenX,
and those are the nasty ones.
These molecules are 5 to 10 carbons long,
which makes them small enough
to actually enter the bloodstream.
They have functional groups at the ends
that are usually acids.
The most common ones are
perfluoroalkyl acids,
which means that they can bind
to the proteins in your blood
and be transported anywhere in the body.
So they slowly accumulate
and build up over time.
Now, there are more than
just two groups of PFAS
and even different definitions
of what PFAS even are,
but most of what we know really relates
to just a handful of chemicals
from this group here,
to these perfluoroalkyl acids.
(wondrous music)
- Perhaps the most comprehensive
document on PFAS toxicity
was published in 2022
by the National Academies of Sciences,
Engineering, and Medicine.
And it looked at only
seven perfluoroalkyl acids.
These are sister chemicals to PFOA.
And some of them, like PFOS and PFHxS,
were used heavily in
the production of stain
and water-resistant products
like 3M's Scotchgard
before they too got phased
out due to toxicity concerns.
The report surmised that if the sum
of these seven acids in your blood
is below two parts per billion,
there shouldn't be any harm.
If your level is between 2
and 20 parts per billion,
there's a potential for
harmful health effects.
Although the exact mechanism
by which PFAS cause harm
isn't fully understood,
exposure has most
consistently been associated
with high cholesterol, a
decreased immune system response
to vaccines and infections, kidney cancer,
and decreased growth in infants.
But PFAS have also been linked
to dozens of other conditions,
and above 20 parts per billion,
the risk is even greater.
So where do I fall on this graph?
- Right, so I have your results here.
- You're not gonna tell me what yours were
before I see mine?
- No.
- All right.
- You're positive for PFOA.
- Okay.
- The level for PFOA for
a US person went down
from five parts per
billion around the 2000s
to around 1.46, what you have.
So you're super average for a US person.
- Great. Okay.
- The good news is though,
no GenX for you or for me,
which is great.
- All right, let's go.
- But the real surprise, I ,guess is PFOS,
the sister chemical, and it
was used in a similar way,
so stain-resistant
carpets, treated clothing,
and your result is at
8.93 parts per billion,
whereas the US average is 4.3.
-Yeah.
- That's crazy.
- Yeah, it is crazy
'cause it was discontinued
pretty much in 2002.
- This is not the results I expected.
I honestly expected very boring results
of, like, yeah, you're
around the middle of the pack
or a little bit on the low side.
- And then for PFHxS,
basically PFOS but six
instead of eight carbons,
your levels here are almost
seven parts per billion,
but the US average average
is one part per billion.
You're higher than 95% of Americans.
- It just, like, it shocks me
'cause, like, I was fully walking
into this meeting expecting to be,
you know, roughly average.
- Yeah, to me, it's scary.
You know, you live in
a normal life thinking
that you're taking care of everything,
and then you have high levels
of a chemical you never heard of.
- The combined sum of all
the PFAS detected in my blood
was 17.92 parts per billion,
more than double the US median.
I'm just below the level
where the National Academies
recommend additional screenings
for PFAS-related diseases.
I had no idea I would come
back with such elevated levels.
I'd love to get the
level, sort of, down a bit
to a level where I feel
like it's more in line
with the general population.
- Yeah.
- But, like, where could
this have come from?
There are three main ways we get exposed
to forever chemicals,
and the one you'll hear
the most about in the media
is likely PFAS-containing products.
- Shampoo, dental floss,
paints, varnishes.
- Potentially dangerous chemicals.
- Dangerous chemicals, toxic chemicals.
- People are throwing out
their non-stick cookware.
- My wife threw out all our
non-stick pans over a year ago,
and since then, we've been
using stainless steel.
She is very good at making it
not stick. Me, not so much.
But are pans really the problem?
The actual coating on the pan is Teflon,
which, again, is just a long, inert chain
of carbon-fluorine bonds.
So even if you ingest it, it
doesn't react with your body.
If you have a pan like that at home,
you probably don't need to throw it out.
The same goes for most other
PFAS-containing products.
Waterproof clothing,
stain-resistant furniture,
and sweat-proof watchbands
might all release some level of PFAS,
but the risk of direct exposure
through skin is likely low.
So the bigger problem is how easily PFAS
from these products can
end up in the environment.
And many of the factories
that make these products
don't have a good track record
of keeping the chemicals contained.
- People don't understand
that the stories that you see,
for example, what was happening
in the community in West Virginia,
this is the same chemical
and the same things
that we're seeing play
out now in Australia
and in Japan, in Italy,
in Germany, in the UK.
I mean, there are a lot of folks
that are still not grasping the fact
that these are the same chemicals.
- Our second main source
of exposure is food.
A lot of it comes packaged
in PFAS-treated materials,
like takeout boxes,
microwave popcorn bags,
and burger wrappers.
It's on a burger wrapper.
Is it a tiny amount? Is it
a ridiculously tiny amount?
- We actually did tests at the lab
with stuff that usually contains PFAS.
So microwave popcorn, fast food wrappers,
paper cups that are waterproof.
So I have tap water here
from a house in London.
Could we boil some water?
Because usually you
interact with these products
when they're hot and then see
if any of the PFAS leaches off
and you potentially
eat them or drink them.
- This is citizen science, right?
So it's, like, there might be some error,
but with a solid control
and then with the same tap
water going to all of them,
we can at least get something, yeah.
- Yeah, and even if we get nothing,
we'll know that people are probably safe
using these products.
All right.
- Whisk it around.
- Yeah, really get that PFAS
in that water, right.
- The juices going.
- And get the
PFAS juices going.
- Well, it's supposed
to be safe for human consumption.
- Yeah.
- That's the wild thing.
- We sloshed it around there,
hot water, boiling water
for around 30 seconds,
and then we tested that water
to see if any of the PFAS
that are used to coat these items
would actually make it into the water.
So here's what I got.
And these are parts per trillion now.
So for PFOA, good news.
Basically no detection anywhere
except for the microwave popcorn.
I will say these are very low
levels, but hold your horses
'cause microwave popcorn gets worse.
- The thing about microwave popcorn,
it's sitting in there
wrapped up with the popcorn
for months or years
before you ever stick
it in your microwave.
That gives those chemicals plenty of time
to, like, leach into the oils,
and it's gonna go all over the popcorn,
and you're gonna eat it.
This could explain some
of our own results.
The level for PFPeA,
which is a shorter variation of PFOA,
came back at 10 parts per trillion
after the popcorn bag test.
And you can see similar results
in some of the other PFAS species.
- But then microwave popcorn
actually drops for PFOS.
Why could that be? We don't actually know.
- I was gonna say maybe the PFOS, like,
went on that wrapper and found its friends
and just hung out there.
- Yeah, could be.
I know we've only done,
like, one test here.
No repeat measurements, so we
can't conclude much from this,
but there's something to be said
for when you're using these products,
they're gonna leach into your
water and leach into your food
- And research tends to agree.
A 2019 study found that eating fast food
and microwave popcorn especially
can increase your PFAS load
while eating homecooked meals doesn't.
But even something as simple
as reheating your food
on a plate instead of in
the original packaging
could prevent PFAS from
migrating to your food.
Now, you might expect
that these part per
trillion levels we detected
in the London tap water
are nothing compared
to the parts per billion
you'd find in human blood,
but the surprising thing is that
to have two parts per billion
of PFOA in your blood,
you don't need to drink water
with two parts per billion of PFOA in it
because PFAS accumulate
in your body over time.
So even water with as little
as four parts per trillion
of PFOA combined with other
exposure can be enough
to maintain your blood levels this high.
And this is why, in addition to food,
water is your biggest source of exposure.
This is especially true if
you live near a PFAS factory
where the local water is
often heavily contaminated.
But the same goes for areas
near military bases or airports.
See, adding chemicals like PFOA
or PFOS to water lowers
its surface tension
so the water gets more slippery,
and these chemicals also tend to foam up.
So they make for an excellent ingredient
in firefighting foams,
they spread quicker,
and the foam blocks access
to oxygen extremely well.
And since both military bases
and airports frequently do
fire drills with these foams,
they end up seeping
into the surrounding soil and groundwater.
But it doesn't stop there.
- Currently, we have reached
planetary saturation levels
for PFAS, which means that
when you look up at that cloud
and it rains, it rains unsafe levels
of at least four PFAS species.
- It turns out that our entire water cycle
is contaminated with PFAS.
So even when it rains
on the Tibetan Plateau,
that rain contains PFAS.
To check the water levels in your area,
you can use these maps
that show PFAS
contamination across the US,
Europe, and Australia.
What about Los Angeles, Encino?
That's where I spent, like,
7 of the last 10 years.
- Crescenta Valley.
- Those are all high.
- Yeah.
- Santa Clarita, some.
PFHxS level is crazy.
So maybe you're getting your
water from Santa Clarita.
- Wow.
- There's a calculator.
It could give you what an
estimate in your blood serum is.
What we can try to do now is
put that up in the calculator,
see if you get something close
to what you have, if you want.
- Sure.
- PFHxS, so typical value for an adult
is one part per billion,
and then the Santa Clarita water
is around 37 parts per trillion.
- If you look after, like, 10 years.
- So after roughly 10 years of exposure,
you would have to have 6.85
parts per billion in your blood.
And then I can tell you
that you are at 6.84.
- That would explain things.
Now, I can't say for sure
where my drinking water was coming from,
but if I was consistently
drinking water contaminated
at similar levels, then that
would explain my results.
But if you are worried
about your own water,
you should contact your provider directly
for the most relevant information.
It's concerning just
how unregulated drinking water has been.
It was actually only a
year ago in April 2024
that the US EPA finally set legal limits
for PFAS in drinking water.
The safe level for PFOA went down
from DuPont's initial one part per billion
to four parts per trillion.
- So we're no longer talking
about one drop of PFOA
in 20 of these tanks,
we're talking about one drop in 5,000.
That's five Olympic-sized swimming pools.
And if there's even a
drop of PFOA in there,
the EPA is concerned.
- The same four parts per trillion limit
was also set for PFOS,
the sister chemical.
And GenX went down
from the 70,000 parts per
trillion initially proposed
by Chemours to just 10.
The same goes for PFHxS.
For reference, the EPA's
limit for lead in water
is 10,000 parts per trillion,
and for cyanide, 200,000,
- It gives you a pretty clear indication
of how concerned the
scientific community is.
- And just when we got EPA limits,
we got a new administration in the US,
which might be reversing
some of the PFAS bans.
So you can't always
depend on the regulators,
and you seemingly can't
depend on the companies
that make this stuff to
dispose of it safely.
So what can you do?
If your water is contaminated,
you might want to consider
getting a PFAS-certified filter.
Reverse osmosis, granulated active carbon,
and ion exchange filters are all capable
of removing PFAS out of drinking water.
But the responsibility
to filter drinking water
shouldn't come down to the individual.
PFAS should be captured at the
source, during manufacturing,
before they ever reach the environment.
And some companies like Puraffinity
are developing custom
filters to make that happen.
- So very lab-looking lab.
- Exactly. Yeah, yeah.
So could you walk me through, like,
what all these pipes do, and
what do you have in here?
- So this water is representative
of where you've had a big
firefighting foam incident.
So you wanna filter this water,
but basically, the concept
is take it from the top
through the vessel.
As it passes through this material,
it basically sticks on
to some of the PFAS chemicals in water,
and then you run into
another part of treatment
and a third one.
- To me, it seems like if PFAS
are so, like, bioaccumulative
and actually persistent and stable,
they don't really react with things.
So how do you force them to
react with stuff in here?
- Basically, taking advantage
of this long organic tail
as well as the polar head,
and so you can have some
electrostatic interactions
with the polar head,
and then you can have some hydrophilic
and hydrophobic
interactions with the tail.
And by combining these
three binding mechanisms,
you increase massively your
likelihood of binding PFAS,
even if it's still difficult.
- Right, do the levels
drop 100% already here,
or do you see a gradual decrease in PFAS
as you go?
- That's the cool question.
- Okay.
- So in the beginning,
it drops 100% after this one.
- Oh, so problem solved, or?
- Problem solved for the time being.
- Okay. Okay.
- What we see right now
is it will last about 40,000
volumes of this vessel.
So a 10-liter vessel would
basically provides all
of the PFAS treatment for a household.
- In a year.
- For a year.
- You want this to be in factories first,
so it never gets into the water.
- Yeah.
- Yeah.
- We are talking to the
fluorochemicals manufacturers,
and they're really trying to,
yeah, move forward rather than
just wait for regulations.
(bright music)
- Everyone's true risk from
PFAS will be different.
It depends on dozens of factors,
like your water
contamination, your lifestyle,
what you eat.
But how much should you
really worry about it?
Like, if I'm at 17 or
18 parts per billion,
is that the equivalent of
drinking a beer a night
or going out in the Australian
sun without sunscreen?
- So what I like to do is
create this hierarchy of risk.
And in terms of hierarchy
of risk reduction,
number one on that is
stopping smoking, exercising,
consuming a healthy, whole-food diet,
and making sure you're getting
seven to nine hours of sleep.
Then you have medium
levels of intervention,
seeing your primary care doctor,
controlling your cholesterol numbers.
And then on the lower tier that you have,
PFAS probably falls into that lower tier.
- Being preventative about PFAS exposure
is currently our only option
because there are no approved
medical treatments available.
However, if you compare PFAS contamination
between the sexes, male levels
are consistently higher,
at least up until around the age of 50
when menopause usually starts.
This is partly because
menstruation, birth,
and lactation are all ways
PFAS can escape the body.
PFAS can pass through the placenta
and into the fetus during pregnancy,
and then the baby can also get
exposed through breast milk.
- It's something that pregnant people
should be extremely careful about.
You know, young children
are incredibly susceptible.
They're drinking more
water, they're growing,
they're near surfaces
like treated carpets.
- Now, not everyone has
to change their lifestyle
because of PFAS, but if you
are in a high-risk group
because of pregnancy
or because you live or work
in a PFAS-contaminated area,
you might want to consider it.
(fire roaring)
Firefighters have
especially high PFAS levels
because their gear and
foams are laced with them.
Remarkably, a 2022 study found
that when firefighters donated blood
or plasma frequently enough,
they reduced their PFAS levels
by up to 30% within a year.
- And it's kind of ironic that,
you know, our health system's
coming back to bloodletting.
- What do you think about
the idea of donating blood
as a way to reduce PFAS in the body?
- I've never heard of that as a strategy.
That's kind of interesting.
Well, I definitely recommend
people donate blood more frequently,
not because of PFAS exposure,
but because of the fact
we desperately need blood.
What's important to note is that,
especially in this current administration,
we need to be very careful
about shifting budgets away
from research agencies
because without that research,
the guidance that I'm giving
is gonna be significantly more flawed.
The reason I'm able to
talk about what we know
and what we don't know
comes from that research.
So if we're gonna be cutting the budgets
to these major agencies
and letting scientists go,
we're only gonna get worse
and worse information.
- We are still a good few years away
from proper medical treatment
and better PFAS regulations
because this is extremely tricky.
There are places where we
should ban PFAS completely,
like hygiene products,
cosmetics, and food packaging,
and some countries are already doing that.
But we also can't ban PFAS
altogether, at least not yet,
because we still rely on these chemicals
for things like medical implants.
And it's currently impossible
to make semiconductors
for our electronics without them
- All the tubing
for the vaccine
manufacturing is PFAS-based.
They take us to space as
well, our space suits.
But even in these niche applications,
we have to be responsible
around how we use it.
- People are coming together
from a lot of different disciplines
to create destruction mechanisms,
to create novel capture materials,
and to create novel replacements.
I am excited and inspired
by all of the great work
that's going on around me.
So I think if people want to learn more,
I would advise them to
learn about the risk,
but then also learn
about the new technology
that's being developed
that will hopefully put
us in the right direction.
- So to me,
you know, one of the most
important things we can do
is have discussions like
what we're doing right here.
If the story and the
information's out there,
people can make informed choices
about whether they want to
continue purchasing things
that have these materials in them.
And what we're seeing is
consumers, as they do become aware,
are saying, "No, we don't
want these chemicals."
And companies are
voluntarily coming forward
and taking these chemicals out of products
because the consumers
are now demanding it.
- We've been here before
with leaded gasoline,
Freon, and asbestos.
And each time, we did the research
and made the right decision
to phase these chemicals out.
With PFAS, we're just starting
to understand the problem.
But I'm hopeful we'll make
the same decision again.
If you want to inform
yourself more about PFAS,
we've attached all the sources we've used
to make this video down
in the description.
It's actually our longest episode ever,
and we couldn't have made it
without the help of our
sponsor, Ground News.
So if you wanna be more informed
about the issues around the
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