3M reaches $10.3B settlement over PFAS contamination of water systems

On a similar tack, there was a recent documentary by Vice on PFAS in Michigan and how it's shutting down farms, while the source emitters in the industrial space continue operating. https://youtu.be/X9GTa3a-tFo

The thing speculated in the video is the industrial emitter focused on in the video (Tribar) is depended on by the automotive industry (Ford, Chrysler) which would cause factories to pause (job loss, etc.) and such if immediately shut down.

The contamination is already in your organism.

Nonstick pans, food packaging, fish, microwave popcorn, waterproof clothes, contact lenses, and so many other products.

Find someone with a LCMS and have your food tested.

Doesn't that involve passing water through a bunch of plastic filters and then letting it sit in a big plastic holding tank?

check containers too.. but good idea regardless as it's bioaccumulative so less exposure is better

For anyone wondering if this works, the EPA seems to think it does:

>>> High-pressure membranes, such as nanofiltration or reverse osmosis, have been extremely effective at removing PFAS. Reverse osmosis membranes are tighter than nanofiltration membranes. This technology depends on membrane permeability. A standard difference between the two is that a nanofiltration membrane will reject hardness to a high degree, but pass sodium chloride; whereas reverse osmosis membrane will reject all salts to a high degree. This also allows nanofiltration to remove particles while retaining minerals that reverse osmosis would likely remove.

>>> Research shows that these types of membranes are typically more than 90 percent effective at removing a wide range of PFAS, including shorter chain PFAS.

https://www.epa.gov/sciencematters/reducing-pfas-drinking-wa...

Which one did you go with

I doubt that amount will help cover removing it from just about all the rainwater on the planet.[0][1]

[0] https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.est.2c02765

[1] https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-62391069

It's not even a slap on the wrist. 3M will just past the costs of this onto end-users (consumers). Their board and C-Suite won't face and personal liability claims or pay a cent towards the settlement costs, nor will they ever see the inside of a jail cell.

Corporations MUST admit liability if they actually are liable. I get that they could face a barrage of legitimate and fiscally damaging claims if they admit liability...but that's the name of the game. I'm tired of the "we're not technically liable" bullshit. You, the corporation, knowingly created a product that you know contained harmful chemicals, and didn't disclose it. Now that it's been proven that 1. you knew they were harmful, and 2. you sold it anyway, you give up all claims to limited liability. It's just mind-bogglingly dumb to claim that you're not liable. Of course you are.

I run a small business that serves an edible product. If a consumer gets sick and my product is 100% provably the culprit, I don't get to say "we're not liable" in court and dictate the terms of the settlement. If the settlement is too high, I'm out of business and ethically speaking, I'm still on the hook for damages. Why do corporations not get the same treatment?

I do wonder exactly what level of corporate malignancy is needed to result in jail sentences. Outside of financial misconduct I can't think of more than a couple (and I'd have to check they actually resulted in custodial sentences).

Union Carbide did I think? I'm off to google it later.

And that Korean Shopping Center that collapsed.

Same with microplastics. With all the inconclusive studies it compels me to believe that even if it's harmful, it's no so harmful.

Pfas are non-stick coatings? I'm going to say it's not on same level of utility as fire, wheel or internal combustion engines.

Perfluorinated chemistry is very nasty and not benign at all.

The issue is not teflon, or similar plastics, but byproducts and precursors of their manufacture. They're chemically super-stable (since, like teflon, they are perflorinated) and super unreactive. That means that they persist for a very long time (until enough UV deteriorates them).

However unreactive doesnt mean harmless. Sure, they have very low acute toxicity, but they still take up volume. Therefore, they interfere with the chemical reaction rates and pathways in your body.

Its called steric interference, which is a fancy way of saying "something is in the way". Think of a very busy line kitchen and some guy is randomly and blindly walking into things and people.

> But so have fire, the wheel, and the automobile

Not sure what harm you attribute to the wheel, but the harms of fire and combustion engines are currently world-class problems, such as the climate. Very much "if we knew then what we know now" situations, and with PFAS and the like, we have the opportunity to act before it becomes an issue.

That's not the issue. These chemicals -they're not just teflon- were put into basically everything, like asbestos was. Cleaning products, spray grease, fabrics, paper, shampoo and cosmetics, stain-resistant coatings. They've already been phased out but the damage is done.

https://www.dhs.wisconsin.gov/chemical/pfas.htm

Fire and wheel has a 'little' more benefit than an artificial, proprietary, lied to be unharmful, avoidable substence manufactured for huge profit and not for an overwhelming benefit and demand from the society. It could have been substituted with something else perhaps, with clearly know risks like fire or automobiles, in all or in almost all use cases, and in many many cases in marginally important use cases (cookware, packaging, water repellence, etc.).

Not the same. Really not the same, overwhelmingly not the same.

Not sure, it's not nearly enough money for that.

The article says a lot of the money is going to be used for monitoring, and then that monitoring, if it found pollution, would be allocated to better fitlering systems.

Their net income per year is $5b. This plus the ear plugs settlement is a disaster for them.

There are no insurance towers with over $2b of limit. As a consequence this is going to seriously hurt 3M. In addition this will drastically increase the cost of their (and their peer's) insurance policies over the next 10 years.

A charitable reading suggests this is paid out to just one city, which would seem to be about right (If you value a house at $100K, then $1B would cover ruining the water supply of 10,000 houses. A city could easily contain 100,000 such buildings.

A less charitable reading is that it covers 300 cities. Maybe they can filter the municipal water supply of that many cities in perpetuity with currently unavailable commercial filter technology?

If it is nationwide, then $10b is a bad punchline.

Lets dig those people out of their graves and punish them, considering how old the decisions are

Fines? We've been issuing such fines for decades and the behaviour persists. Why? Because ultimately the companies and insurance companies don't pay those fines...we do. Sooner or later. One way or another. Those costs find their way to us. Simply put, we - the market - pays those fines.

Unless executives lose freedoms (i.e., go to jail) nothing is going to change. The problem is, that wealthy ruling class can buy freedom when they need to. Those that miraculously lose freedom go to country clubs. On the other hand, if you or I rob the local convenience store (using a fire arm?) we will likely go to jail.

When they endanger the health and welfare of a child...millions of them...we pay the fine. Anyone who calls that justice is a fool.

Consider watching Dark Water movie.

Real life story of lawyer who goes after Duport.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_Waters_(2019_film)?useski...

It's not spinning: it's a legal message.

It's almost always part of the settlement, because it limits future liability on the matter.

Yet news sources always report it as though it's something the company voluntarily says.

If they admitted liability, people could sue for individual damages on top of the settlement. It's a buy-out, water under the bridge kinda thing, because individual lawsuits would cost years, would cost each individual thousands, and could cost 3M even more once all added up. It's a legal logistical nightmare.

Instead, people are offered a one time payment to basically drop the case. I think a lot are happy to take it because it means they don't have to fight a tedious legal battle.

The issue with this topic largely has to do with political & financial interest.

(1) who benefits financially?

(2) who benefits politically from the finances & who’s potentially at legal risk?

(3) who’s career is advanced / harmed?

Ultimately, with this topic (as with many others), there are no neutral observers. There are multiple camps competing for influence - which these studies benefit.

Recall doctors and studies were supporting tobacco and cocaine as good for you. They even had doctors / PhDs advertising and publishing it as such. Many argue the same with climate change (lots of political & financial interest), Covid, etc.

Study of PFAs have a similar challenge because it was heavily & widely used. Similar to DDT, it takes time for these things to roll through and change. PFAs are generally understood to be toxic & lead to endocrine disruption. Most of the papers I’ve read conclude as much

These chemicals accumulate over long periods of time in you body, reaching ever higher levels. They are silent killers. But, isn't a large part of the scandal that these companies knew for decades from their own studies there was a huge concern about health safety for employees and the environment? They never shared the alarming results to any authorities. So, they themselves knew very well about detrimental effects decades before they were discovered independently by academic research leading to revised standards and law.

Surprisingly, some of the most convincing studies indicating the dangers of PFAS come from 3M themselves[1][2]. These studies were of course never intended for public release:

> In 1961, company lab tests linked C8 exposure to enlarged livers in rats and rabbits. DuPont scientists then conducted tests on humans, asking a group of volunteers to smoke cigarettes laced with C8. “Nine out of 10 people in the highest-dosed group were noticeably ill for an average of nine hours with flu-like symptoms that included chills, backache, fever and coughing,” the researchers noted. “Concerns about the potential toxicity of C8 had been raised internally within DuPont by at least 1954, leading DuPont’s own researchers to conclude by at least 1961 that C8 was toxic and, according to DuPont’s own Toxicology Section Chief, should be ‘handled with extreme care,'” Bartlett’s February 2013 suit against DuPont alleged.

> In one study, for instance, Olsen looked at blood tests of 3M employees at the company’s plants in Antwerp, Belgium, and Decatur, Alabama, both of which made PFOA and PFOS, among other products. By the late 1990s when Olsen was embarking on this research, these chemicals were known within the company to accumulate in humans and alter cholesterol levels in lab animals. Because the workers had undergone three separate rounds of blood tests, Olsen was able to trace the levels of the chemicals in workers’ blood over time. And by combining his results with various clinical measures the company had been tracking in its workers, he was able to see whether there was a relationship between the chemical and these health outcomes. Olsen’s findings, written up in an draft report in October 2001, were clear. There was a positive association between the amount of PFOA in workers’ blood and their levels of cholesterol and triglycerides, states the report, on which Olsen is listed as the principal investigator.

They've also taken some... drastic measures regarding which factory workers are allowed to be exposed to certain PFAS despite publicly denying any connection with birth defects[3]:

> In a November 1982 memo, DuPont's chief medical director, Dr. Bruce Karrh, expressed concern over employee exposure to C8. The company then barred women of child-bearing age from working around C8.

Far be it from me to condemn an abundance of caution, but the timing seems odd when you consider what happened a year prior[3]:

> When Bailey returned to work in 1981, she discovered a memo on a bench in the women's locker room. It detailed a study by 3M, which sold C8 to DuPont, that detailed eye deformities in lab animals whose mothers were fed C8 during pregnancy. Bailey went to the plant's medical doctor and asked if this is what happened to [her child born with an eye deformity]. The doctor denied a connection, according to Bailey, but arranged an appointment at Johns Hopkins University Hospital in Baltimore.

[1]: https://theintercept.com/2018/07/31/3m-pfas-minnesota-pfoa-p... [2]: https://www.ecowatch.com/teflons-toxic-legacy-dupont-knew-fo... [3]: https://www.delawareonline.com/story/news/2016/04/02/c8-susp...

I cannot claim to understand the state of research ... But I think we _can't_ wait for the harms to be fully measured if we're to compensate those impacted. Suppose that drinking PFAS contaminated water decreased your life expectancy -- but to measure that effect with certainty, a meaningful number of people who were impacted would necessarily already be dead and therefore unable to be compensated for the harm done to them. Suppose a fetus whose mother drinks contaminated water has a higher risk of some form of dementia late in life -- only many decades later would the harm be fully understood and the company might no longer even exist (and IANAL but perhaps there are also statutes of limitation?) Waiting to _fully_ characterize the harm seems like a recipe for injustice.

In the mean time, "the water in my district has an extra chemical in it, which doesn't need to exist in any amount, and no one's sure whether or not it's dangerous at this concentration" seems like it's already a form of damage. No one wants to drink it, the land is less valuable, etc etc. Similarly, if sewage contaminated your water, you'd be rightly upset even if that particular sewage doesn't cause a cholera outbreak.

Not to mention a fine that is not an existential threat. 3M has grown massively in comparison to $10B. Recently 50% of the US tap water supply was found to be tainted with PFAs <link pending>

Not sure what you’re romanticizing here, but Soviets were not sending the people who would be at fault here to the gulags. It was political prisoners, counterculture agitators (artists, satirists, etc), criminals, rich people who wouldn’t go along, etc. Politically connected people wouldn’t end up there.

> The Soviets at least had the decency to send some people to the gulag.

First people on the train would be the victims that made the fuss.

There is a difference in knowledge that a fire department Vs a company producing the material have. First, it's a choice to include these in the product. Second, it's a choice whether to appropriately inform fire departments on how to handle such material. Third, an individual fire department cannot invent removal/capture methodologies, this is again something that would need to be offered by the producer.

I'm astonished how easily the narrative is shifted to blaming the little guy. Is a customer expected to re-verify the toxicity of the products they buy and set up their own recycling system?

Honestly hard to imagine the many comments here spreading doubt on the well-established dangers of pfas and arguing how innocent 3m is are disinterested comments.

both should be punished.