Jeff Dormo is president of Honeywell Advanced Materials.
Maine stands out as an innovative and creative national leader in the fight against climate change. The state’s Maine Won’t Wait climate plan is a key example of thorough planning with realistic outcomes — actual concrete investments that are already starting to yield results.
Maine’s leaders recognized that simple steps — like converting the heating equipment in Maine’s homes and businesses from fossil fuel burning boilers and furnaces to electric heat pumps — have a meaningful impact.
Unfortunately, Maine’s leadership on another environmental front may unintentionally stand in the way of the state’s climate progress. Maine’s ban on PFAS — a very large and diverse family of chemicals, widely used in consumer, commercial, and industrial products — was among the country’s first.
Let me be clear. I fully support all efforts to regulate and, where necessary, prohibit any PFAS chemicals found to be a cause for concern — in Maine and beyond. However, as the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) put it, there are about 10,000 substances defined as PFAS — but the term “does not inform whether a compound is harmful and is not a basis for regulation.”
Some substances defined as PFAS are non-problematic (non-persistent, non-bioaccumulative, and non-toxic) and they are used in ways that are tackling some of the world’s biggest challenges. I work for a company that manufactures some of those products — products that are sometimes included in the broad class of PFAS because of their chemical structure but are designed to be safe for intended use and support the fight against climate change.
I’m talking specifically about a class of substances that have been thoroughly studied and approved for use by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, called hydrofluoroolefins or HFOs. We don’t make HFOs in Maine, but Maine’s construction contractors, air conditioning and refrigeration companies, and countless other companies in the state that deal in refrigeration, insulation, heat pumps, and other applications are our customers.
HFOs were invented at our premier Research and Innovation Lab in Buffalo, New York, and commercialized in the early 2010s as a low global warming technology used in refrigeration and building insulation applications, specially designed to replace older, high-global-warming products. They are designed to be energy efficient and optimized for each application. This, combined with the properties that differentiate HFOs from compounds that may cause concern, is the precise reason the U.S. EPA does not consider HFOs to be PFAS.
HFO-based refrigerants are a critical part of energy efficient electric heat pumps. HFO refrigerants are what make heat pumps work — they are the lifeblood of the system. Without access to HFOs, the only refrigerant options left to power your heat pumps could be fossil fuel-derived, less energy efficient industrial refrigeration gases such as ammonia or propane. These substances are both toxic and highly flammable.
Unnecessarily banning HFOs directly undermines Maine’s efforts to decarbonize through use of heat pumps and is not in line with U.S. EPA guidance. The same enthusiasm and leadership that has enabled Maine to become a national leader in combating some of our nation’s biggest environmental challenges may also force the state into retreat.
The good news is the issue can be easily and quickly addressed. Right now, Maine’s lawmakers are meeting in Augusta, and they have an opportunity to improve upon the state’s PFAS law. By releasing amendments to Maine’s PFAS law and excluding products that do not negatively impact human health but strengthen Maine’s fight against climate change, we can continue to make progress on emissions reductions without creating unnecessary costs and unintended consequences.
Maine’s position as a leader in addressing the nation’s most formidable challenges is on the line. Maine has proven its capability before, and it’s time to do it again.
