[Music] our main story tonight concerns chemicals the substances that along with spaghetti heineken and human arms should never be kept in a vat in your neighbor's garage specifically we'll be talking about a particular class of chemicals tonight called pifas which stand for per and polyfluoroalkyl substances they go by a wide variety of chemical names like all of these and they are used by recognizable brands like gore-tex and teflon among many many others but the main thing they have in common is that they make surfaces that don't get stuff stuck to them which is something a lot of us care about although arguably some more than others missy if you saute scallops in a non-stick pan they won't stick that's why it's called nonstick i don't know what nonstick means it takes a sweetheart but me you know as tempted as i am to mock gordon ramsay as a british person who's also inexplicably made a career of shrieking obscenities and americans and not understanding texas game has no choice but to recognize game and while ice cream you scream he screams we all scream for non-stick pants there's just two big problems here first these chemicals have been linked to a massive array of health issues high exposures to these two major p-files alone have been linked to high cholesterol ulcerative colitis pregnancy-induced hypertension thyroid disease testicular and kidney cancer and decreased response to vaccines which is clearly terrible although also shouldn't really be that surprising to you things the original name for this show was that thing you like is bad with saudi long legs and second p-files are what's known as forever chemicals studies have estimated they have lifetimes in the thousands of years and that combination of toxicity and longevity is a real problem as one chemical engineer tried to explain to congress a few years back it doesn't go away this is a man-made chemical we just pass the baton to our generations of kids in fact if you were to incinerate and cremate me i would technically be a fluorochemical hazardous source the teflon mesh that's used in my hernia produces a very toxic gas and decomposes to something called devil's piss which is hydrofluoric acid you can't kill this beast you can only control it yeah that doesn't sound great does it also it is hard to believe there's something called devil's piss that isn't gordon ramsay's very real line of alcoholic sparkling water hell seltzer which you could apparently get in flavours such as mean green berry inferno knicker twist and that's forked held seltzer for people who hate water and themselves but the thing is that man is absolutely right to an extent that you may not currently realize the world is basically soaked in the devil's piss right now and not in a remotely hot way so tonight we thought we'd take a look at just how bad these substances are how long some of their major manufacturers knew about it and how hard this will all be to fix and let's start by looking one of the most ubiquitous pfas pfoa also known as c8 because of its eight carbon molecules 3m started selling c8 back in 1951 to the chemical giant dupont which then used it to make teflon which it marketed through ads like this i used to be a slave to scraping and scrubbing pots and pans but i've been liberated by teflon food doesn't stick to teflon like it does to other things see okay i used to be a slave is just not something that should be coming out of a white child's face unless it's pinocchio after he becomes a real boy and even then he's still not really free is he he's a slave to society in a prison of his own mind just like the rest of us your nose might not be growing anymore in yawkey but make no mistake you are lying to yourself but the thing is by the time that ad aired 3m and dupont already knew that these chemicals accumulated in humans and animals that they didn't degrade in the environment and that they could increase the size of the liver in rats rabbits and dogs so the warning signs were very much there before they had a white child slave claimed that teflon liberated her from the back breaking labour of scraping muffin trays and in the decades that followed they learned even more in 1981 3m found ingestion of pfas caused birth defects in rats and when they told dupont about this and dupont then tested the children of employees in their teflon division they found that of seven births two had eye defects information interestingly dupont did not make public and by 1991 it had gotten unambiguous warnings that it then spectacularly ignored 3m told dupont that under no circumstances should you put it in waterways it's right there in the document don't put this in the waterways but at the end of the day they start dumping so much c8 ends in the water that they at one point lose track of how much they've actually put out there wow harmful chemicals are just not something you should lose track of they're not your car keys or your middle child oh oh i'm sorry i lose him in a supermarket one time and suddenly i'm a bad parent calm down it's not like he was gonna run out of food but wait it gets even worse two years after that in 1993 a dupont memo shows that for the first time they had a viable candidate to replace c8 one that appeared to be less toxic and stayed in the body for a much shorter duration of time but the company decided against it because the risk was too great specifically the risks of their bottom line and the fact that teflon products were worth roughly a billion dollars in annual revenue to them proving once overall corporations truly are people specifically sociopaths and yet despite knowing all of that dupont kept pushing for teflon to be used in more and more places and in this ad from 1994 they basically present it as being wizardry chemistry is the is the practice of magic people think of teflon they think of frying pans teflon is not one thing putting teflon on a surface will stop bugs from crawling up trees they'll fall right off the tree teflon as a chain lube is something i've come up with for bicycles you know only dupont makes teflon you can use it in satellites on fabrics or leather when's the last time you heard about a leather raincoat you can let your imagination run wild it's not often that you get to make something new in this world okay there's a lot that i don't understand about that and including why it was shot by someone who's still testing out the zoom function on their camcorder or why that in-cell santa giggles so menacingly at the idea of a non-stick leather raincoat although i will say if that's his bar it does seem pretty easy to make something new in the world i'll show you leather umbrella leather flower leather snake and leather elmo that is four great ideas i just came up with and i'm not even a phd in a cosby sweater and if you are wondering where the epa was in all this you should know they were more than a little hamstrung here under the 1976 toxic substances control acts the epa can require testing for chemicals only when it's been provided evidence of potential harm a set up which largely allows chemical companies to regulate themselves which is an absolutely terrifying sequence of words right up there with incoming face time from geoffrey tubin nobody wants to hear that and even when the epa has taken steps they've been pretty limited for instance in 2016 they issued a health advisory for two of the biggest p files including c8 setting an acceptable level for them in drinking water of 70 parts per trillion which incidentally a lot of people still think is too high but also crucially an epa health advisory is non-enforceable and no one is going to respect a rule if it's not enforced it's like one of those signs that everyone sees but ignores like please take one on a candy bowl or please no sculpture at madame two swords i'm doing it i'm taking two fun-sized snicker bars and then i'm gonna wax michael buble i'm doing it it's already done get over it and that lacks level of oversight combined with dumping on a scale so high they lose track of it has had severe consequences when epidemiologists studied the medical history of people who lived near a dupont plant they found residents with high exposure to drinking water contaminated with c8 had much higher rates of kidney and testicular cancers and it was even worse for the people working inside the facilities as this man who worked in one of dupont's testing labs and has since been diagnosed with ulcerative colitis and rectal cancer can attest people would handle that product on their job every day day in night out and then when we went to 12 hour shifts at 12 hours at a time we heated it and breathed it every day ken worked on a four-man team at dupont's plant testing c8 between 1974 and 2001 of the four he's the only one still alive the people i loved they died and we were like a family look that is clearly awful but you don't actually even have to live in a town where pea fires are dumped or work in a factory that makes them to be affected here remember pea fires last a long time so if they sink into the groundwater or are released into the air they can travel and they can bio accumulate meaning that they build up in your body over time and that brings us to a shocking discovery because in the 1970s dupont and 3m started testing workers to check the levels of pfas in their blood and 3m wanted a control group with clean blood so that they'd have a baseline but as this environmental activist points out the company quickly realized something truly horrifying there was no clean blood they tested kids they tested adults they went to asia they went all over the world and everywhere they looked practically they found their chemicals in people's blood eventually they did find some clean blood it turned out it was the blood that had been taken from army recruits and archived saved at the start of the korean war yup it's true in fact a cdc study has found that c8 is now in the blood of 99.7 of americans i mean at the very least vin diesel and i finally have something in common every single thing about our genetic makeup general attitude and vocal tamber is dramatically different but when it comes to toxic chemicals in our blood it's potato potato my friend or should i say my family and while dupont may be a particularly stark example they are far from the only entity involved here the military uses pfas in foam to extinguish fire so pfas have built up around military bases and many companies have used a lot of p-files in a lot of their products for instance a shoe company called wolverine used p-files in its waterproof hush puppies but it was only after local reporting that residents near its factory in belmont michigan knew to get their water tested and for one family the mcnaughtons the results were pretty striking and before you watch this remember the epa's acceptable level in drinking water is 70 parts per trillion they lived in their house about three years when tobin learned she was pregnant with their son jack we're really excited i wanted that to go really well so i drank eight glasses of water a day i liked kept track i ate really healthy in april of 2016 jack was born he had an immense appetite for water he was thirsty all the time tests showed almost 2 000 parts per trillion of pfas in the mcnaughton's water as soon as they could tobin and seth had jack's blood tested the results 484 000 parts per trillion more than 100 times the national average he's the highest level pfasts that we know right now of any child in the united states he's get sick market and his vaccine vaccinations haven't worked wow that is incredible usually when your child is the highest in something your instinct is to brag about it but good luck finding a bumper sticker with my child has the highest level of p-files in the united states on it nobody wants that and look i have to tell you wolverine says that it's moved to fix the problem for homeowners in that area although you should know it is just not a simple thing to go about doing this is what i affectionately call megatron my whole home filter this right here but it goes through each of these tanks these are full of granulated carbon and it goes through them in order and then comes out this one and is clean so every week they come and test it at the intake and then also at the exit so that we know that the water is empty of that oh great news you did it wolverine problem solved all it takes is a four tank system affectionately nicknamed megatron a spare room large enough to house it and a weekly visit from a tank technician for the rest of your life water problem more like what's your problem this is a system that works but clearly a megatron in every home is not a viable solution for this or indeed any problem and maybe because of that and definitely because of a court-approved settlement wolverine has since gone to the trouble and expense of switching that woman from her tainted well water to the municipal water supply and yet many companies are continuing to do the bare minimum here or even trying to evade responsibility dupont for instance settled a class-action lawsuit with residents of the town where it was dumping c8 and shortly afterward agreed to eventually phase out using the chemical which sounds good but there are some significant asterisks on that because while they did stop using c8 they simply switched to a different kind of pfas something called gen x spinning the manufacturer of it off into a separate company comores now did they do that so that any legal liability wouldn't stick to them and instead slide right off them like bugs on a teflon tree who can say apparently not me legally what i can say is that while comores claims gen x is safer scientists still have significant concerns about its presence in our water supply this is in my view more of a risk than we should be forced to take this compound's a member of a class of compounds that are all thought to be able to make people sick with cancers of various kinds other kinds of dysfunction we don't know the full extent of it so with what these scientists do know we ask them if they think the water is safe enough to drink nope i drink tequila straight but i won't drink tap water well that doesn't sound good if casual friday scientists over here won't drink the tap water there might be some cause for alarm and while we have just focused on a handful of individual pfas tonight there are hundreds if not thousands of them so the problem is if and when gen x is eventually found to be harmful companies can presumably just move on to another one then onto another one and so on and so on and at this point you might be thinking holy this is absolutely terrible should i start immediately throwing away all of my pants well i will start with the good news megan mccain is no longer on the view this rock looks like cookie monster and no you don't necessarily need to throw away all of your pants experts say that it's very unlikely p-files will be released if the pans aren't overheated or scraped now you're under slightly more risk of exposure from clothing that contains p-files which is unfortunately most stain-proof or waterproof fabrics including certain items from companies like lululemon north face and patagonia or indeed from food wrappers that contain p-files which are unfortunately used by multiple chains including some of the packaging at starbucks chick-fil-a and subway and all of these companies insist that they are working to remove pfas from their products completely in the coming months and years and i hope that that is true but we have heard things like that before and yet here we are and it is not like it is easy to know which products you're buying do and don't contain p-files it's not like they have to carry labels stating this product contains devil's piss although that's actually a very good idea and they should absolutely have to do that but the bigger issue is no matter how responsible consumers choose to be if the factory that makes the chemical does not dispose of its waste properly it's likely getting into your bloodstream anyway which is pretty frustrating as the activist you saw earlier points out no one said hey you know i'm i'm good with a little teflon chemical in my baby's blood no one said that they said i love these pans exactly no one loves pan so much they'd be willing to put poison in their babies blood well to be honest one person does but in his defense the pans don't stink now if you are worried about what the water is like where you live you can go to this address ewg.org pfast map and if you don't like what you see you can consider solutions like drinking bottled water or using a reverse osmosis filter but the truth is it shouldn't just be on us as individuals because pfas should not be in most consumer products at all and as companies seem unlikely to all take them out voluntarily we badly need legislation limiting their use to only essential items like certain medical devices and protective clothing but not just that we need to change the way that we regulate p-files completely instead of regulating them one at a time as we do now we should do it as an entire class of chemicals this would enable the epa to more effectively regulate not just the p5s already in use but replacements like gen x when they are introduced and in the meantime if companies are going to keep leaning in on the convenience of their products without acknowledging the cost maybe we can help them by providing their ads with some much needed context chemistry is the practice of magic like abracadabra zonks and wizards all chemistry people think of teflon and they think of frying pans big hot plates with smooth long sticks teflon is not one thing it's disease sickness and it's everywhere that's dupont magic ta-da it's not close to my mouth right you know i'm self-conscious about the mouth you know about that did you say yes or no putting pfaz on a surface will stop bugs crawling up trees i'll tell you how they'll contract ulcerative colitis and just die in front of your eyes thousand little right bugs you know i'm self-conscious you know i'm self-conscious about the mouth and the close-up stuff and spitting you said it's going to be a normal shoot no focusing on that i put pfaz in a bicycle chain why because i suffer from chronic insomnia probably got it from beef ass and they're everywhere the same chemicals that are in me are in you and even in your child i put something in your child and when this stuff gets in the water whoa that's the real bippity boppity magic bippity boppity match bippity boppity magic contamination levels like you've never seen it's incredible when was the last time you heard about a leather raincoat giving you kidney cancer how you can let your imagination run wild mine's running right now it's not often you get to put something toxic in the world [Music] that's our show thank you so much for watching we'll see you next week good night you