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Mike Belliveau is the founder, president and executive director of Defend Our Health.
Imagine waking up to a nightmare. Your drinking water well is polluted with highly toxic industrial chemicals. Or your farm is similarly poisoned and may go under. These same chemicals are in your family’s bloodstream at levels shown to cause kidney and testicular cancer, increase risk of infectious disease and harm healthy childhood development.
Unfortunately, this frightful tragedy is real for more than 300 well owners and 50 farm families in Maine. And the count keeps rising. The culprit — per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, a class of widely used toxic substances known as PFAS or “forever chemicals” because they don’t break down in the environment.
Maine continues to find and halt exposure from PFAS-tainted food and water. But that’s a futile task unless we also prevent future PFAS pollution. That’s why unnecessary uses of forever chemicals must be replaced with safer solutions whenever practicable.
That’s exactly what the Maine Legislature decided when they passed a 2021 law by an overwhelmingly bipartisan margin.
But the chemical industry sells $28 billion worth of PFAS every year. They don’t want to stop.
That’s why the industry continues to attack the policy leadership of states like Maine, Minnesota and others who are all working to prevent PFAS pollution. (But don’t look to the federal government for quick action; it wrongly approved PFAS use in the first place.)
The latest messaging from the chemical industry showed up in two recent opinion columns in the Bangor Daily News.
The first, “PFAS ban could do more harm than good,” (BDN, July 16), came from the Consumer Choice Center. This Washington, D.C.-based group readily admits to taking funds from the chemical industry and other corporate interests. It hardly speaks for Maine consumers.
The second, “There are reasons to be cautious on PFAS regulations,” (BDN, July 18) was written by Andre Cushing, my former state senator. I don’t recall seeing Cushing participate in a single PFAS policy discussion in the last five years.
These messengers misstate the 2021 law. Maine will only phase out non-essential uses of PFAS and not until the end of the decade. Some PFAS uses will continue when industry shows they are truly essential, such as certain medical products, and there’s no safer alternative available to do the same job. That’s a reasonable, common-sense approach.
PFAS cannot be safely used in most consumer and commercial products.
That’s why Maine has joined a dozen states in easing unnecessary PFAS uses off the market. New state laws prohibit PFAS use in commercial firefighting foam, food packaging, takeout containers and cosmetics. By 2025, PFAS also will be removed from carpeting, clothing, couches, fabric treatment, cookware, cleaners, menstruation products, dental floss and ski wax.
In most cases, PFAS cannot be produced or safely used by industry without serious factory pollution that threatens health and the environment. The annual costs of PFAS damage may run to more than $15 trillion globally.
Thankfully, many market leaders are responding. For example, L.L. Bean, the iconic Maine brand, announced a phase-out of PFAS in all its private-label products by 2024. Twin Rivers, which runs a Madawaska paper mill, sells PFAS-free fast-food wrappers.
The Legislature took more bipartisan action on PFAS products this year. The deadline for reporting all PFAS uses was extended until 2025. The new law makes the PFAS reporting requirements more workable and informative. That lessens the burden on manufacturers who must disclose.
A first-ever database will reveal what products and industries still use PFAS. That will inform decisions about which uses remain currently unavoidable, and which should be phased out by 2030. These are common-sense, bipartisan policies.
Instead of defending its PFAS markets, the chemical industry and its allies should invest in greener chemistry, and cash in on the business opportunity to innovate new solutions that work just as well or better. But that don’t cause the same threat to human health, the environment and economic prosperity posed by PFAS, the forever chemicals.
