January 18, 2005 — By Michael Hawthorne, Chicago Tribune
PARKERSBURG, W. Va. — More than 50 years
after DuPont started producing Teflon near this Ohio River town, federal
officials are accusing the company of hiding information suggesting that a
chemical used to make the popular stick- and stain-resistant coating might cause
cancer, birth defects and other ailments.
Environmental regulators are particularly alarmed because scientists are finding
perfluorooctanoic acid, or PFOA, in the blood of people worldwide and it takes
years for the chemical to leave the body. The U.S. Environmental Protection
Agency reported last week that exposure even to low levels of PFOA could be
harmful.
With virtually no government oversight, PFOA has been used since the early 1950s
in the manufacture of non-stick cookware, rain-repellent clothing and hundreds
of other products. The EPA says at this point there is no reason for consumers
to stop using those items. But so many unresolved questions remain about PFOA
that the agency is asking an outside panel of experts to assess the risks.
"The fact that a chemical with those non-stick properties nonetheless
accumulates in people was not expected," said Charles Auer, director of the
EPA's Office of Pollution Prevention and Toxics.
Critics say the lack of knowledge about PFOA and related chemicals--called
perfluorinated compounds--exposes a system where environmental regulators
largely rely on companies that profit from industrial chemicals to sound alarms
about their safety. Questions about potential effects on human health and the
environment often aren't raised until years after a chemical is introduced to
the marketplace.
The long and mostly secret history of PFOA began to unravel down the road from
DuPont's Teflon plant in a West Virginia courtroom, where a Parkersburg family
began asking questions in the late 1990s about a mysterious wasting disease
killing their cattle.
Jim and Della Tennant suspected the culprit might lurk in a froth-covered creek
that meandered past a DuPont landfill near the Teflon plant before spilling into
their pasture. Their lawsuit ended with a monetary settlement that avoided
assigning blame for the dead cows, but the legal battle uncovered a trove of
industry documents about PFOA.
One document detailed how DuPont scientists started warning company executives
to avoid human contact with PFOA as early as 1961. Industry tests later
determined the chemical accumulates in the body, doesn't break down in the
environment and causes ailments in animals, including cancer, liver damage and
birth defects.
Recent studies have found that PFOA levels in some children are in the range of
those that caused developmental problems in rats.
"We're not very popular with some of the folks over at the plant," said Della
Tennant, who lives in a subdivision known as DuPont Manor, a sign of the firm's
importance in this corner of Appalachia. "But I don't know how you could sleep
at night not telling people about this contamination."
If found guilty of illegally withholding information by an administrative law
judge, DuPont could face more than $300 million in fines--about $100 million
more than the company is estimated to make each year from products manufactured
with PFOA.
DuPont already has agreed to pay up to $345 million to settle another lawsuit
filed on behalf of 60,000 West Virginians and Ohioans whose drinking water is
contaminated with PFOA. Much of what the public is starting to learn about the
chemical comes from industry documents submitted during court proceedings.
Those documents also prompted the EPA's ongoing review of health risks, which
could lead to rules that limit or phase out the use of PFOA.
Company officials say they share the government's concerns about the presence of
PFOA in human blood but contend they did nothing wrong and that the chemical
affects animals differently than people.
"DuPont remains confident that based on over 50 years of use and experience with
PFOA there is no evidence to indicate that it harms human health or the
environment," said company spokesman R. Clifton Webb.
The company's Teflon plant--a sprawling complex of towers, smokestacks and metal
buildings--rises above the flood plain in a sharp bend of the Ohio River. The
area has become something of a makeshift laboratory as scientists scramble to
learn more about the chemical behind world-famous brand names such as Teflon,
Stainmaster and Gore-Tex.
Since 1976, federal law has required companies to disclose what they know about
any risks posed by toxic chemicals. The EPA says independent efforts to figure
out how people are exposed to PFOA and what it might do to them should have
started by the early 1980s, when DuPont discovered an employee had passed the
chemical to her fetus.
Among other things, the EPA accuses DuPont of failing to notify the agency when
two of five babies born to plant employees in 1981 had eye and face defects
similar to those found in newborn rats exposed to PFOA.
DuPont also has known since at least 1984 that water wells in West Virginia and
Ohio were contaminated with PFOA, according to company records. But people who
rely on the wells for drinking water didn't find out until 2002, when internal
DuPont documents started pouring into court.
"Someone made a conscious decision to expose us to this without telling us,"
said Robert Griffin, general manager of the Little Hocking Water Association,
which supplies drinking water to 12,000 Ohio customers from wells across the
river from the Teflon plant.
"If you wanted people to be lab rats for such a long period," Griffin said,
"nobody would ever allow it."
Company lawyers contend DuPont wasn't obligated to share the information because
PFOA doesn't meet the legal definition of a toxic chemical that poses a
"substantial risk."
DuPont documents, though, show company officials were worried the public would
learn that PFOA had contaminated local water supplies. One benefit of settling
the lawsuit over the Tennant family's dead cattle, company attorneys advised in
an internal e-mail, would be preventing the release of information about PFOA in
the water.
"Biggest potential downside: plant contamination issues surface, case becomes
class action," DuPont attorney Bernard J. Reilly concluded in a March 2000 email
outlining tradeoffs if the company chose to fight the Tennants in court.
DuPont says it has reduced air and water emissions of PFOA by 90 percent at the
Teflon plant. Yet levels of the chemical in water wells on the Ohio side of the
river are the highest recorded to date, according to tests last fall.
"Drinking water data in possession of DuPont 'reasonably supports the
conclusion' that PFOA 'presents a substantial risk of injury to health,'" the
EPA wrote in an October filing.
Scientists are just now starting to learn how much of the chemical is in
people's blood and how far it has traveled from the handful of sites where PFOA
is manufactured or used--information that highlights new challenges for
scientists and regulators.
Substances added to food are regulated by the Food and Drug Administration and
must undergo rigorous testing before their use. But critics say that with
industrial chemicals the EPA is limited by laws that make it difficult to order
testing.
The agency reported in 1998 that it had no toxicity data or "safe level" for 43
percent of the 2,800 chemicals produced in volumes of 1 million pounds a year or
more.
"It borders on the ridiculous," said Tim Kropp, a senior scientist with the
nonprofit Environmental Working Group, which has helped draw the EPA's attention
to PFOA and other compounds. "There is no way consumers can be knowledgeable
about all of these chemicals. That's why we need the government to ensure they
are safe."
The EPA's case against DuPont has gradually evolved over four years as industry
concerns about PFOA came to light.
Agency officials initially were worried about a related perfluorinated chemical
in Scotchgard, the stain-resistant coating pioneered by 3M. Regulators started
focusing on PFOA after the EPA pressured 3M in 2000 to stop making the
compounds, prompted by research that found the chemicals in human blood and in
foods such as apples, bread, green beans and ground beef.
3M had been the chief supplier of PFOA to DuPont, which now makes the chemical
at a plant in North Carolina.
DuPont announced last week that a new study of more than 1,000 workers at the
Teflon plant found virtually no health effects from exposure to PFOA. Some
workers were found to have higher-than-expected cholesterol levels.
Tests on lab animals have found links to illnesses including liver and
testicular cancer, reduced weight of newborns and immune-system suppression. The
findings concern EPA officials because rats flush the chemical out of their
bodies within days, while PFOA stays in human blood for at least four years.
As a result, the EPA says, the potential for human health effects cannot be
ruled out.
"Low-level exposure to people over time produces blood concentrations that may
be of concern," Auer said. "As time goes on and the opportunity for exposure
continues, those blood concentrations could move to even higher levels."
Scientists still aren't sure how PFOA is spreading around the planet. While
DuPont says the manufacturing process leaves only trace amounts of the chemical
in non-stick cookware and other goods, some researchers think that as Teflon
products age they release chemicals that then break down into PFOA.
The compound also is released into air and water during manufacturing. Studies
that have found PFOA in salmon in the Great Lakes, polar bears in the Arctic and
dolphins in the Mediterranean Sea suggest the chemical travels easily through
the atmosphere.
Another theory the EPA and academic researchers are testing is that other
perfluorinated chemicals, known as telomers, break down to PFOA. Made by DuPont
and other companies, telomers are used in stain- and grease-repellent coatings
for carpets, clothing and fast-food packaging.
Researchers studying PFOA levels in the Great Lakes think that when carpets and
clothing treated with telomers are cleaned, some of the chemicals wash into
sewage treatment plants that are not equipped to remove them before wastewater
is dumped into lakes and rivers. Landfill runoff could be another source.
Last spring, former DuPont chemist Glenn R. Evers told a lawyer for people
living near the DuPont plant that the chemicals can be absorbed from french fry
boxes, microwave popcorn bags and hamburger wrappers, among other items,
according to a partial transcript filed by the EPA. The company responded by
describing Evers as a disgruntled former employee with little direct knowledge
of PFOA.
In Parkersburg, some are reluctant to question one of the community's leading
benefactors, even after the PFOA contamination became public. With more than
2,000 employees, the Teflon plant is the largest manufacturer in a valley lined
with plastics factories and refineries, a hub of economic strength in a region
plagued by chronic unemployment.
"We're not ignoring it, but you've got to look at all the good things they do,"
said George Kellenberger, president of the Mid-Ohio Valley Chamber of Commerce.
But others drawn to the area by the promise of a good job and the rolling,
pine-covered hills aren't so sure.
By the time Matt and Melinda McDowell built their dream home a few miles north
of the Teflon plant, DuPont had known for more than a decade that the local
water supply was contaminated with PFOA.
Like thousands of others in the valley, the McDowells recently received a letter
informing them that DuPont promises to install treatment equipment for six area
water systems under terms of the recent legal settlement. But they worry about
their two sons, ages 8 and 12, who have drunk and breathed PFOA for most of
their lives.
"We are subjecting our children and ourselves to a giant science experiment,"
Matt McDowell said. "We don't know what it's doing to us. But the bottom line is
it doesn't belong in drinking water and it definitely doesn't belong in our
bodies."
Source: Knight Ridder/Tribune Business News