Wonderful fabric for mountain gear.
Unfortunately, like Teflon cooking pans, its amazing properties come from a coating with perfluorinated octyl sulfonate, a known endocrine disruptor:
Unfortunately, like Teflon cooking pans, its amazing properties come from a coating with perfluorinated octyl sulfonate, a known endocrine disruptor:
does that count as being overused, or just as intended?
I also doubt you would get similar endocrine disruption with PTFE polymerization biproducts since you won't have the "polar head/fluorinated tail" structure that PFOTS has.
PFOS was used in the manufacturing process. It’s quite problematic, but it’s actually the end product.
Either way, my concerns are mostly: how much fluorinated waste they release from factories and what happens at the end of product lifetime. Solid fluorinated compounds don't seem atrocious, as they can be reduced to safe minerals if burned properly unlike the spray-on compounds and factory leakage.
One is called GenX and Chemours (DuPont) has been poisoning the city of Wilmington.
The video covers Chemours, DuPont, etc. and how there's a town in the US where the rain and soil is poisonous due to PFOA production in the past (and still on-going: not PFAS but other deemed-safe-by-corporate-lawyers PFOAs). The man who they interviewed had pet dogs that he would let outside and the husky loved being outside in the rain. However, the dog developed sores / lesions on its back and then died. Turns out the groundwater and basically the whole environment around the PFOA factory is highly toxic.
The video also interviewed a worker at a PFOA plant in Germany who has (had?) thyroid cancer, I believe it was, and suffers from many disrupted endocrine system effects. (He worked inside a PFOA factory where sometimes the chemical vapor would condense on the ceiling and drip down on to the workers. Again, the ground water and soil there is not safe for human or animal consumption.)
They also cover / touch upon the lawsuits that farmers with grazing cattle (that died off) tried to bring against PFOA manufacturers like DuPont, Chemours, etc. Unfortunately, most of those farmers are now dead due to cancers of various sorts (from consuming PFOA-laden groundwater, the same water which they were giving to their animals which died by the hundreds a few decades ago).
They also touch upon how difficult it is to recycle PFOA-containing fabrics: they must be incinerated at much higher temperatures to render the compounds inert and safe for disposal in the way that regular trash is disposed of after incineration.