Sticking it to Teflon

[pfpcnews]

Sticking it to Teflon

CBC - June 20, 2006

By Robert Sheppard

Surely the irony of non-stick convenience is not lost on anyone anymore. The promise, of course, is that rain, mud, grease, omelettes — whatever — won't stick to your Teflon, Gore-Tex, Scotchgard carpets, jackets, frying pans, fast-food packages, ski waxes, stadium roofs, computer wiring, take your pick.

The uses are so ubiquitous — we have lived with these miracle products for the better part of 50 years now — that their brand names have slipped seamlessly into the vernacular. We've had Teflon presidents and prime ministers, a whole range of Teflon lesser lights; even, in the U.S., a Teflon Don (mafia boss John Gotti, though he ended up in the slammer).

The reality, though, is that these man-made chemicals that make up these products are anything but transient. They are in fact among the most persistent polluters on the planet: They have been found in staggering doses in the tissues of polar bears and seals in the Arctic as well as in tropical birds and dolphins, and in humans on four continents.

In North America, it has been widely reported, as many as 95 per cent of all people have traces of the key ingredient in Teflon — PFOA for perfluorooctanoic acid — in their bloodstream. What's more, this compound, which has been linked (in very high doses) to health and reproductive problems in lab animals, can take decades or longer to be expelled from the body.

Closing the barn door too late

Now Canada, bless it, is set to become the first country in the world to ban the next generation of four so-called long-chain perfluorinated acids (carbon-fluorine mixtures that contain nine or more carbon atoms).

Environment Canada also says it wants to negotiate deals with DuPont and other big manufacturers, similar to what the Environmental Protection Agency in the U.S. has done, to dramatically cut emissions of the current generation of these chemicals during the manufacturing process.

See Canada Gazette, notice of amendment to the Canadian Environmental Protection Act. Also, CBC news, Ottawa to limit non-stick, stain-repellent chemicals.

DuPont, for example, has pledged to reduce the amount of PFOA used to make non-stick coatings and will guarantee that, as of 2015, none of the chemical will be released into the environment at any of its manufacturing plants.

And while this is all well and good, the problem is not really with DuPont's production lines, though it did pay out a $108-million US liability claim two years ago to people who lived near its West Virginia plant and is facing more suits. Neither is the problem with Teflon coatings per se: PFOA is baked off and sealed during the application procedure and should not be released during normal use of a treated pot or pan.

No, the reason PFOA and its fellow stain-resisters are the environmental problem they are, seeping into drinking water and the food chain, is because of the sloppy way they are applied in countless cut-rate manufacturing operations around the world.

These are companies that buy DuPont's product — its perfluorochemical product line is a $1.2-billion a year business at last count — and spray it on willy-nilly in some cases anywhere in the world (hence the PFOA found in the blood stream of people in India and China).

Canada's "crackdown" is not going to have any effect on these operations. Nor will it necessarily limit use of any of the next-generation chemicals: The Environment Canada regs curtail the import and use of these substances but they do not prohibit specifically the import of manufactured products that contain them — even though there is increasing evidence that some of these perfluorochemicals reconstitute themselves as the consumer products break down over time.

Canada's special responsibility

Canada likely won't be alone in seeking to curtail these pervasive chemicals. The European Union is looking into a similar ban and, with Canada, could have some impact on manufacturing standards of perfluorochemicals around the world.

Ottawa began this process two years ago under the Liberals and the Tories were then faced with the dilemma this month of making the temporary ban permanent, which they have done, or abandoning the project altogether.

How we ended up taking the lead is open to speculation. But the fact is that even though Canada is not a primary manufacturer of these chemicals, nor much of a secondary one, we have become one of the top countries in the world when it comes to researching their effect on the environment and human health.

Canadian scientists were among the first to document the wide-ranging pervasiveness of these pollutants on wildlife in the Arctic and elsewhere. Also, the Toronto-based Environment Defence group recently tested the blood and urine of five Canadian families, only to find them coursing with between, on average, 23 and 32 unwanted commercial chemicals, including PFOA and banned substances such as PCBs. (The good news: kids had much lower levels than their parents, suggesting some progress is being made.)

Some of the of the more intriguing Canadian research is showing how consumer products such as non-stick cookware and stain-resistant carpets and clothing break down over time and contribute to the reformation of PFOA and other related chemicals in the environment.

As the products age or are burned or cracked apart, they give off minute amounts of fluorine-based alcohols that are released into the atmosphere and then are rained down into waterways where they recombine into these pervasive chemicals that humans can't seem to get rid of. The individual amounts are small but given the ubiquitous nature of our convenience culture, the global amounts can be huge, possibly hundreds of tonnes annually.

Is Teflon safe?

It seems a bit unfair to keep picking on Teflon and DuPont, though it does have the North American monopoly for these chemicals and its PFOA has been the most studied of these substances.

In January, after years of back and forth with DuPont, the U.S. EPA concluded PFOA is a "likely carcinogen," based on studies in lab animals. At the same time, the EPA said there is no reason for consumers to stop using any products containing PFOA provided they don't heat them to well above normal temperatures or abuse them in some other way. That is also Environment Canada's take as well.

See U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, PFOA homepage. Also, DuPont, PFOA homepage.

For its part, DuPont strongly objects to the idea that PFOA can cause health problems. Company officials told Macleans magazine a year ago that while animal studies have shown PFOA can bring on liver cancer, none of the precursors for this (such as elevated liver enzymes) have come up in a broad way with its own employees, who are exposed to levels hundreds of times higher than the general population.

DuPont also argued that animal studies regularly inject rats with PFOA that can be up to 10,000 times the amounts (five parts per billion) normally found in humans.

However, what the company didn't say was that rats seem able to expunge the chemical from their bodies in a matter of weeks. With humans, it seems to take decades, maybe even a lifetime.

And that's why Environment Canada is seeking to regulate the so-called long chains of carbon-fluorine creations as a "persistent organic pollutant" under the same Stockholm Convention that resulted in the international banning of such notorious chemicals as PCBs and DDT a few years ago. However, allowing these new combinations to continue to exist in a manufactured product may not solve the problem.

SOURCE:
http://www.cbc.ca/news/background/reali ... ppard.html