Environmental Question #25 [PFAS]

Courtesy of Reddit user u/headgyheart

Q: Hi! I would like to understand the effects of PFAS chemicals on us and the animals we share the planet with. I hear they are types of plastic additives to give plastics desired qualities and that there are hundreds, but few are regulated. Do we need to worry about tap water? Are there specific ones we should worry about? Are there good studies out about them…? I have so many questions and also an unrelated second question - are there viable plastic alternatives for things like consumer goods, or single use plastics? Why aren’t they being expanded quickly, if so? Too pricey?

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A: This is a great question that I'm sure many people share with you, so I'll make sure to give a detailed answer to do your question justice.

First a little bit of background information about PFAS. PFAS stands for PerFluoroAlkylated Substances, and the important word there is "substances." You're right that there are many many different kinds of PFAS, several hundred in fact. As an analogy, you can think of it like wood. Oak, pine, maple, and mahogany all fall under the umbrella of "wood," along with hundreds of other wood types, and while there are certainly differences between wood types, all of the different wood types have more similarities with each other than they do differences. The same is true for PFAS, although there are many types of PFAS, they all have more similarities than they do differences.

The one thing that all of the PFAS have in common is that almost nothing can stick to them. I'm sure you know the common chemical principle that oil and water don't mix. Oil and water can also take solid forms, and that "non-mixing" principle holds true. For example, wax is a form of solid oil, so any water spilled on it will slide right off. Waxed canvas jackets are popular right now, so I'll use one as an example. Let's say you have a fancy new waxed canvas jacket, and you love it because it's comfortable and it keeps you dry, so you wear it to go get pizza with your friends on a rainy day. The jacket repels all of the rain wonderfully, but when you accidentally get some pizza grease on your nice new jacket, the grease stain soaks into the waxed fabric and will never come out. That's because the wax is a form of oil and so is the pizza grease, so they mix together. Wouldn't it be nice if your jacket could repel both oil and water, so it would stay clean and dry all the time?

That is the central idea behind PFAS. Water repels oil, oil repels water, and PFAS repels everything. A jacket coated in PFAS instead of wax would have pizza grease slide off it just as well as water slides off it. I'm sure you can see why people would find that incredibly useful, and develop different kinds of specialized PFAS for all sorts of different applications like cookware, clothing, and furniture. I'm even in favor of PFAS being used for some highly specific applications like spacecrafts. There is a lot of PFAS used in satellites and other spacecrafts, because there is dirt in space and it's not easy to send a person up to clean the gunk off of a satellite, so it makes sense to protect the satellite with an everything-repellent coating.

The obvious downside of course is that PFAS is toxic. To put it in perspective, it's not the most toxic thing in the world--lead and mercury are much more toxic than PFAS for example--but PFAS carries its own unique risks. One strange thing about PFAS is that adult human bodies are actually quite good at filtering PFAS out of our systems with minimal harm along the way. The problem only really starts to occur when we are exposed to more than our bodies can handle, or if someone with a weaken toxin-removal systems in their body is exposed to PFAS. One particularly insidious part of this is that for pregnant and nursing mothers, their bodies use the placenta and breast milk as methods to remove PFAS from the body. This causes whatever PFAS was in the mother's body to become highly concentrated and passed onto the baby, whose body isn't developed enough to filter out PFAS yet. This can result in a variety of birth defects and developmental problems. 

In adults who are exposed to high amounts of PFAS, the result is a variety of cancers. There is already overwhelming evidence pointing to PFAS causing various cancers, and the list just keeps getting longer as research continues to be conducted in the field. It is important to note though, that the people who are getting PFAS-related cancers are people who are exposed to extremely high amounts of PFAS. That means people who work in PFAS factories, people who live near PFAS factories or dump sites, and firefighters. PFAS-based fire suppressant foams were the standard for many years, so firefighters who worked closely with those foams for years have some of the highest rates of PFAS-related cancers.

For those of us outside those high-risk groups, PFAS is less of a concern. That's not to say that PFAS is safe, but dose makes the poison, and most of us aren't exposed to very much PFAS. The main real concern is that since PFAS repels basically everything, other chemicals can't react with it to break it down. Since PFAS can't decompose by any natural process, it is often called a "forever chemical." Practically what that means is that every single molecule of PFAS that has ever been created is still out in the world somewhere. In most places, the concentration isn't high enough to cause significant harm, but if companies were to continue manufacturing PFAS, then I'm sure you can imagine how the concentration of PFAS would gradually increase everywhere until every living thing is constantly exposed to a toxic dose of PFAS.

So to directly answer your question, yes PFAS is in the tap water, and it is most likely in your body too, but unless you live near a current or former PFAS factory, then you are probably not being exposed to enough PFAS to be worried about it. Also the water sources for bottled water are just as likely to be exposed to PFAS as your tap water source is, so there isn't really an easy way around it.

You shouldn't worry yourself with looking out for specific PFAS types. All of them are varying degrees of toxic, any public confusion about that was created by the PFAS manufacturers in an attempt to avoid lawsuits while continuing to make PFAS. It's even possible to produce PFAS safely by sealing all of the machines used to make it inside the factory and ensuring there are no leaks. All of the PFAS spills that have occurred up to now have been caused by negligent practices like not reporting spills and putting PFAS-contaminated wash water down the regular drain.

 

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