 Hi, everyone. We can all start to take our seats. I hope everyone had the chance to try some of our plastic avoided spread that we worked so hard on. Thank you so much for coming out tonight. It is hard to get people to come to in-person events, so we're really glad that you all were courageous and took time out of your Thursday evening is to join us for a really interesting conversation about PFAS and its connection to the climate crisis. I'm sure we're all feeling overwhelmed for myriad reasons when we're thinking about all of the problems that we face in the world today. But I hope that we feel a little more joyful about meeting tonight and gathering tonight because the more we learn together, the better we are able to fight these challenges that we continue to face every day. So the way this evening will work is we're going to play a video to refresh everyone's memory, just a quick temperature check, actually. Who has never heard of PFAS before? Perfect. One person. It's great. No, this is great. So who knows about PFAS but is not ready to be a panelist on PFAS? OK, some more people. So we will play a quick video to refresh all of our memories on what PFAS is and why it's so concerning and why it's devastating to our world. And then I will invite our wonderful panelists to come up and I will start a discussion with them. And then if you have questions, we will invite some audience members up to ask any questions you have regarding PFAS. So I think those are all for my opening remarks. Oh, actually, I'm not done. I want to say thank you to a lot of people right now. First, I want to say thank you to Wendy McCloskey for helping plan this event. It's really phenomenal to work with you. I want to say thank you to Jill Feldman, who was unfortunately not here tonight. But she was just as monumental in making this event happen. And Louise Bodich of Mothers Out Front, Brookline, who also was really important in making this event happen. And Mothers Out Front, I also want to say thank you to the Social Science and Environmental Health Research Institute at Northeastern for sponsoring this event and making sure that we can have some delicious food to enjoy. And of course, thank you to our wonderful panelists who you will all meet tonight who are really fantastic and have some great wisdom to share. And if I forget to thank anyone, you will hear about it in an email. And I will thank four people. So without further ado, we're going to hit the spacebar and play a video that's just quickly 10 minutes. And yeah, refresh our memories on PFAS. It's a silent threat lurking where you'd least expect it in our drinking water. We assume, of course, it's safe. But scientists are warning about a common and potentially dangerous chemical that can survive in the ground and in our water forever. On a cold winter day on the Stone Ridge Dairy Farm in Arundel, Maine, Fred Stone was more worried about his cows being cold than himself, especially his prized brown Swiss named Blue. She likes to give me a hard time as much as she can. Fred and his wife, Laura, are only the latest generation to work this dairy. It's been in the family for over a century. But since November of 2016, every drop of milk, that white gold that's been a reliable livelihood for generations, is now being poured right down the drain. That's a hell of a waste. Even I can't drink it. He had no idea the wastewater that the state licensed him to use to fertilize his fields was also swimming with potentially toxic chemicals called PFAS. Now, his land, his cows, and yes, their milk, are all contaminated. Have you ever heard of PFAS or any of these chemicals? Never. A lot of people haven't. PFAS is an acronym for a family of man-made compounds called purr- and polyfloral alkali substances. The CDC has listed a host of health effects believed to be associated with exposure to those chemicals, including cancer, liver damage, increased cholesterol, and a lot more. The chemicals are so highly mobile, they're not only being found in soil and groundwater, but in the atmosphere too. In fact, they've even been detected in raindrops falling in some of the most remote areas of the world. This story is about a new plastic material trademark, Teflon. PFAS chemicals have been around for decades. Oh, good thing it's Teflon. DuPont was the first to use PFAS in Teflon, giving us those nonstick pots and pans. Half of this piece of carpet has been treated with this new finish. The other half has not. 3M used a different PFAS in its once popular fabric protector, Scotch Guard. Today, those chemical cousins can still be found in almost anything designed to fend off oil or water or grease. That includes things like pizza boxes, paper plates, rain jackets, ski wax, even guitar strings. PFAS are basically impossible to escape. And scientists say they are likely here to stay. They are nearly indestructible. You just can't get rid of them. You can't get rid of them. Patrick McRoy, the former deputy director of the advocacy group Defend Our Health in Maine, explains just why that staying power is so very troubling. A lot of chemicals, when they go into your body or when they end up in the environment, they break down. They slowly decompose. PFAS don't do that. Once you put PFAS somewhere, it's going to stay there practically forever. That means the levels of the so-called forever chemicals can build up and linger in our bloodstreams forever. How high were your levels when they told you about your water? They're supposed to be under 40 pots per trillion. Ours is 26,000. 26,000 per trillion, yep. I know. I know. Kathy and Bruce Harrington, who live next to a farm, were notified by Maine's Department of Environmental Protection that their drinking water was tainted with PFAS. The likely source was two industrial plants not far away. Your well is right there. Yep, well is right there. They come and test it on water, and they said, we'll send you a report in a couple of weeks or whatever. And they called us in a few days. And they said, do not drink your water. Don't use it for cooking nothing. Oh, for what? asks Bruce. Bottom line is, we don't need freaking eggs to slide out of pans versus people dying. PFAS contamination is really a national crisis. And the real scale of contamination is staggering. The more we test, the more we find it. Melanie Benish, legislative attorney at the Environmental Working Group in Washington, says thousands of sites nationwide are polluted with PFAS. And she lays a blame for that growing crisis squarely at the feet of the companies who invented the chemicals in the first place. It is the manufacturers like DuPont and 3M who have gotten us here today. So they've known for 70 years that they were poisoning the water and they didn't tell the EPA. They didn't tell their neighbors. They didn't tell their workers. They didn't tell anyone because they were making too much money. In the last two decades, thousands of lawsuits have been brought against the manufacturers for allegedly knowing PFAS chemicals were dangerous. While most deny they did anything wrong, settlement offers have been pouring in to the tune of billions of dollars. But Benish says the manufacturers aren't the only ones to blame. There has also been regulatory failure. The FDA, new in the 1960s, the Department of Defense, new in the 1970s, the EPA has known since at least the 90s and they didn't treat the issue with the amount of urgency that it needed. Regulating PFAS is like playing a game of whack-a-mole. DuPont and 3M phased out two of the PFAS suspected of being the most harmful, but they still manufacture others. In fact, there are thousands of variants. Many of them have real similarities that make it very likely that one is just as toxic as the other. Take this plant DuPont built in North Carolina back in the 70s and then spun off to a different company called Camors back in 2015. It's almost like a forensic kind of activity. Almost a decade ago, Detlef Canape, an environmental engineering professor at North Carolina State University, started testing the water near that plant that sits right along the Cape Fear River. In 2017, his research made headlines. The study said a new PFAS called Gen-X was clearly present in the water. If you look at this, the water is completely clear and there's really nothing wrong with it, but it does have very high levels of PFAS and several thousand nanograms per liter. It's unholy. We live in America. I should be able to enjoy a shower and not worry that it's gonna give me or my kids cancer. I don't know that I shuffle these cards. Emily Donovan, mother of two, lives about 80 miles downstream from the Camors plant. The Cape Fear River is a source of drinking water for more than 350,000 people in and around Wilmont. She, like most people, just always assumed it was safe. The EPA doesn't require utilities to regularly test for them. So there's really no way for the average American to know if it's even in their drinking water right now or in their food or in their air. Based on what it called new evidence, this past June, the EPA did update its drinking water advisories about PFAS, warning that even the tiniest amounts over a lifetime may be enough to cause negative health effects in humans, but it stopped short of creating a new federal drinking water standard. There has been no new drinking water standard in the United States since the 1990s. 30 years. Do a post with some of that So Emily co-founded Clean Cape Fear. It's a community action group that, among other things, has been fighting for both federal and state agencies to crack down harder on all of the PFAS pollutants. You have two choices. You can have a breakdown about it or you can channel that energy and that heartbreak into something productive and create a positive. Camors was forced by state environmental regulators to install a host of anti pollution technologies. It's cost the millions. In a statement to CBS News, the company says it's destroying over 99.99% of PFAS in the air and it's reduced PFAS compounds reaching the Cape Fear River by 97%. As for PFAS that have built up in the ground over the years, Camors says it will build a barrier wall that will capture and treat the groundwater. The process it says will remove nearly all of them. The exposure has dropped dramatically for people who live downstream. It's much tougher for the people who live immediately around the plant whose wells are contaminated. This is two week old. Two weeks old. Let us see. What Professor Kanappe is now interested in investigating is to see just how much of any PFAS is present in the food grown nearby. We have analyzed some of the produce from backyard gardens in that area that suggests the levels can be quite high. I'm scared that it is too late. I'm scared that we're gonna die because of what we've ingested. Residents like Jane Jacobs, a member of the native Tuscarora Nation have always seen the land as sacred. But she fears the blight on her tribe's land might just end a way of life. My people have always hunted in these swamps, but they're fed by the rivers. So now the animals are polluted the same way the water is polluted because they drank out of the rivers and out of the swamps. What do you think Ruben? You're not gonna make any sound, are you? No one who lives off the land would willingly poison it. There you go. Fred is certainly one of those people. As are farmers in nearly every state who use treated wastewater to nourish their fields. He, just like his father and his grandfather before him, saw their soil as part of their soil. Cold and drought were supposed to be the biggest threats, not chemical made by man. At some point in time, I'm going to have to tell my father and my grandfather what I did with the farm that they entrusted me with. But this wasn't your fault, though. It wasn't my fault, but it was under my watch. Now it's gonna be gone. That's it. That's the end of the road. Thank you. So on that sober note, we'll invite our panelists up to join us at the front, please. And we'll start with our questions and introductions. All right. So I will start with introductions of our wonderful panelists and they'll each share with us in a brief two minute spiel about their work and what concerns them the most about the PFAS that they study. So starting with Laura Orlando, Laura has over 30 years of experience working on sustainable systems in the built environment with a special focus on community led water and sanitation projects. She has researched toxic substances in municipal water and sewer systems and how pollutants get into those water systems in the first place. She is a co-founder and trustee at the Ecological Health Network, Senior Science Advisor at Just Zero and trustee and contributing editor at Barn Raising Media. Thank you, Laura, for joining us tonight. And for all of you for coming out, I didn't know a whole lot about PFAS like probably the rest of the people at the panel until the last, I don't know, 10 or 15 years or something like that, but I make it a habit to follow what goes into the sewer and what comes out of it. And it's not only human excreta. And the clip we just saw, they got one thing wrong. It was not wastewater that was spread on the farms. It was sewage sludge, which is loaded with PFAS. And that brought this particular family of chemicals to my attention. And I teach at BU School of Public Health as well. And so some of the things that we talk about is what do we do about this? How do we, is there a treatment? What does it mean to separate, to destroy? What are the disposal issues regarding that? What does it mean for human health? What does it mean for ecological health? And so I look forward to sharing that with you all. Thank you, Laura. And next we have Dr. Kim Garrett, who is an environmental toxicologist working with PFAS and the PFAS Project Lab at Northeastern University. And she studies the connections between environmental chemicals and social structures, currently focused on sources of PFAS chemicals and community exposure experiences. Thank you so much, Kim, for joining us. Thanks, Miranda. Thanks for having me. I'm really happy to be invited. Can you hear me all right? Okay, great. So I am an environmental toxicologist and my background is in organic chemical toxicology. And now I've found myself working in the humanities department at Northeastern University in their Social Science Environmental Health Research Institute. And I am really interested in seeing the ways that a single chemical, something that we see as very separate and very scientific and very specific influences our social systems and how our social systems influence the way we interact with molecules. And PFAS is a really important molecule that impacts our social systems and our social systems and governance systems have allowed to lead to contamination. And the things that concern me the most about PFAS at this moment are some of the regulatory loopholes that are allowing PFAS chemicals to be continuously pumped into the environment. So the clip that we watched really positively classified PFAS as a family of chemicals. And if you'd ask someone who works for 3M how many PFAS are there, they would maybe say two or three. But if you ask the EPA and other chemists how many PFAS there, there are over 14,000. And not all of those 14,000 have necessarily been used in our water systems but we really need to approach this broad class of chemicals as a class and a family. But right now there are loopholes that allow companies to decide the definition of a PFAS. And individual states to define a PFAS. And so that's something that I like to look out for but I'm also working on mapping PFAS spatially and seeing what that means for environmental justice and the distance that PFAS can move from sources. Yes, thank you. I'm not a very happy family of chemicals like that. All right, so next we have Dr. Laurel Shader. Dr. Laurel Shader is a senior scientist at Silent Spring Institute in Newton with expertise in environmental engineering and chemistry and public health. Her research focuses on understanding exposures to everyday chemicals of concern, including PFAS in drinking water, food and consumer products and working to reduce exposures to these harmful chemicals and to educate and empower impacted communities. Thank you, Laurel Shader for joining us. Sure, can you hear me okay? Well, it's really a privilege to be here thanks to mothers out front for organizing this event in Miranda as well and everyone else who took a part in organizing this. So I've been studying PFAS since about 2009. So Silent Spring Institute is a nonprofit research organization and our mission is to understand exposures to everyday chemicals in our products and our indoor environments and our food and water and what that means for our health with a particular focus on women's health and breast cancer prevention. We were founded because of concerns about breast cancer rates on Cape Cod by activists at Massachusetts Breast Cancer Coalition. So my first exposure to PFAS, well not actual chemical exposure, but professional exposure was through a study of unregulated drinking water contaminants in public and private drinking water wells on Cape Cod. I wasn't familiar with PFAS at the time but we were actually the first to find PFAS in Cape Cod drinking water and a lot of my research since then has really focused on PFAS, not just in drinking water but also in food, fast food packaging and also in consumer products and trying to understand the relative contributions of those different exposures to our health and what we can do to reduce people's exposures. I'm also concerned about disparities in exposures. Recently I co-authored a paper that found that public water supplies that serve higher communities with higher proportions of Hispanic or Latina residents and Black residents are more likely to have PFAS. So I'm worried about those disparities that can occur. You may have seen a study earlier this year that looked at freshwater fish and exposures and so that makes me thinking about subsistence fishers or tribal communities that are more heavily reliant on those resources. So there's kind of a lot of down news but someone earlier asked what's good news and I would say that there's a lot of action happening right now. There's a lot of regulations and legislation that's being considered or that's been adopted. Some of it's just happening here in Massachusetts. So it's heartening to see a lot of reaction and a lot of regulators and scientists and community groups really tackling this issue and to Kim's point about the class-based approach and to realize we can't just swap out one for another. Not everyone's on board with that. Industries wants to point out all the differences among the PFAS but I think there is gaining a lot of traction, the idea that we really need to tackle this family of chemicals all together and that we can't deal with one of each one separately. Yes, well put, well put. And next we have Robin Bergman. Robin has been a political and environmental activist since her early teens, actively observing the very first Earth Day by organizing a cleanup in her neighborhood. More recently she worked as the field director for an environmental candidate in Cambridge City Council and helped organize several large forums on climate issues both in Arlington and statewide. Most recently Robin co-founded the Trees as a Public Good statewide network and is a member of our Revolution Massachusetts Climate Crisis Working Group and helped research and organize a warrant article for a moratorium and study committee on the installation of new artificial turf in Arlington. She is a craftsperson and elected Arlington town meeting member and a co-founder of Green Arlington. Thank you so much Robin for joining us. Thank you very much for having me and thanks for putting this together. I'd like to give a shout out and thank you to ACMI our local community media for providing all the sound systems. So I'm more like you, I'm not a scientist, I'm not a researcher per se but as an activist I started to run into issues with artificial turf while I was trying to save trees and so I suddenly got aware, I had been aware of the DuPont problem and I'd been following that but I didn't really put them all together as the same kind of class of chemicals and so sometime last year I started hearing more and more about PFAS and I started to really pay attention and go to different forums with different scientists and the more I heard the more I got really upset about it and when I thought about it further I realized that it resonated with me because when I was growing up I was, I didn't know it at the time but I lived near a superfund site and downhill from where I was suddenly like my mother's friends were getting breast cancer, some of them dying from it and then my sister's best friend at age eight died of cancer also, of more of a blood cancer and we thought we were okay because we were uphill but then my mother ended up with cancer five times and I've had a lumpectomy and now everyone I know practically has had either breast cancer or something else so I started to get really really upset about it and started to think about what I could do so I joined forces with several people who are in the room tonight to put up a warrant article in Arlington against artificial turf because one of the things that I kept hearing about water but I didn't hear anything about artificial turf and it's often left out of the list of products because PFAS is in so many things you would not believe how many things it's in contact lenses, it's in dental floss it's in paper goods, it's in everything so we have a real problem on our hands anyway our warrant article I can talk about that more later if people are interested, it was a bittersweet ending because we didn't get the moratorium that we wanted but I would say it was successful in that we forced a lot of people to have to learn about PFAS and artificial turf and kicking and screaming, they really didn't want to and they don't really want to hear about it but we made them have to and so I consider that a success and we did get a study committee which is gonna be happening during the next year to look into it in Arlington to make some recommendation so we're hoping that we can keep new artificial turf from happening here and one other thing I wanted to say is there was recently last week the legislature held a hearing on PFAS and I don't think a recording of it is up yet but you can still submit written testimony against it and I prepared a handout which is at the table which tells you how. Fantastic, thank you, we're so glad you're here to share more about this so the way the panel will work, I'll ask a few questions and then we do have a microphone for audience members when I invite audience members you're more than welcome to stand up and when the time comes you can ask questions that you have as well and I might direct some questions at one panelist in particular but everyone is welcome to jump in and start us off so I'll start us off with Kim I have a chemistry question are fossil fuels used to make PFAS? I think so. Fossil fuels are used to make so many products they're certainly involved in the energy production behind making these complex molecules and they're also heavily involved in their destruction so one of the key factors of PFAS that makes them so persistent is their carbon fluoride bond that's one of the strongest bonds we can observe in chemistry and it takes an immense amount of energy to break that and it takes more than just a rainstorm to break that molecule down it even takes more than our liver enzymes to break that down and so on that scale, PFAS is highly fossil fuel dependent in our current state of destruction but I'm sure that it is used in their production I do not have the mechanism on hand though but I'm certain that they are. Gotcha, thank you I was you're answering both questions as I was gonna reverse that and ask you like are they used in the production of fossil fuels like fracking or gas so. Oh yes. Yeah. Okay, there are a few reports that recently came out of the organization Physicians for Social Responsibility in a variety of states they've been working with an organization from Western Pennsylvania called Frack Tracker where they've been looking at unknown chemicals in fracking fluid and fracking wastewater currently we have something called the Halliburton loophole which allows oil and gas development and specifically fracking to be exempt from the Clean Water Act and so they don't have to report a lot of the chemicals that they're pumping in and so it kind of comes down to these very thoughtful groups of scientists who are interested and have the energy and ability to go out and find what is used in fracking wastewater but PFAS have been found in almost all of the wells that they've found. Yeah, let that sink in. So the next question I have I really would like everyone to answer if they have their own take but I'll have us start off with Laura. How, you know, speaking to the title of this event which is PFAS and the climate crisis how else might the PFAS be related, the PFAS crisis be related to climate change? PFAS intersects with climate change in its manufacturing and with ecological health and human health and when we look at point sources of PFAS we look at manufacturing. There's 17 plants as of 2022. Half of them are owned by DuPont and 3M around the country. One of them in Louisville, Kentucky is a Kimours plant that produces approximately half of the fluorochemicals that are the building blocks of PFAS. Those manufacturing facilities dump about 7 million metric tons equivalent of carbon dioxide. It's equivalent of two coal burning plants running full blast all year long. And the indirect sources of PFAS are in the waste management world, right? So what goes down the drain? What we saw in the clip. So that, it ends up in really two places. One, landfills and it ends up in the landfill leachate. So when it rains, for instance, that water percolates through a landfill and not all but many landfills are lined with plastic when that leachate is captured it's loaded with PFAS at levels in the many tens of thousands of parts per trillion and the parts per billion and so on. And that landfill leachate goes to wastewater treatment plants. Wastewater treatment plants are another source not only from the landfill leachate but from what goes down the drain, right? The many different things that go down the drain. And wastewater treatment plants do not treat for PFAS. In fact, the conditions in the wastewater treatment plant can multiply the amount of PFAS. It's a chemistry set. So the wastewater treatment plant has the building blocks to make terminal PFAS. I don't know a better word for it. The stuff that we care so much about the PFOA and PFOS. So you can get, when you measure what goes in, you can get up to 20 times more coming out, right? So when it comes out, it goes to two places. The treated wastewater, which a receiving body of water takes in St. Louis. It goes into the Mississippi River. Boston goes into the Atlantic Ocean. In the North Andover plant, the second largest in Massachusetts goes into the Merrimack River. And then another byproduct of wastewater treatment is sewage sludge, which another name for that is biosolids. And that's what was spread on those farms in Maine. Horror after horror, right? But there's nothing that says we have to keep spreading sewage sludge on farms, right? We could have a national ban. Maine has banned that practice. So what Kim was saying, these regulatory failures are fixable. And the troubles with PFAS are on, they seem to, every time you look, everything you touch, it's all around. And that is part of the playbook of industry to say, well, jeez, it's in your blood already. It's in everything. So it's, you know, my father at the table 30 years ago, everything gives you cancer, right? But it doesn't have to be that way. And so, you know, I hope I have an opportunity to talk about some of the things that we can do. But those are some examples of the intersection with climate. And also let me say methane, which is being belched from these landfills in wastewater treatment plants. They make up about 20% of all the methane in the United States that goes up into the atmosphere. And methane's a very powerful greenhouse gas. So, closing landfills will help solve the methane problem and the PFAS problem, for example. Can I say something? Two things. One is, with climate change and the climate crisis, we're gonna have a scarcity of drinkable water and this is just making it worse. The other thing is, the climate's getting hotter. Actually, New England is one of the places on the globe that's getting hotter than anywhere else faster, which is really insane, but it is. So, from the artificial turf lens, it's very hot, too hot, it will be too hot to play on those fields because it holds heat because of the substance. It's basically a big plastic mat, some of it with rubber, some of it with other materials. But it's just gonna get impossible. I know that the town of Burlington closes down their artificial turf fields as soon as it hits 85 degrees and high humidity, just to give you an example. So, the more days that we have that are high temperatures, the worse it's gonna get. Thank you. So, I'm gonna ask this question for Laurel first. 3M recently announced, they're one of the PFAS manufacturers. They recently announced that they will cease PFAS production by 2025, which surprised me because I feel like no one ever sets a goal from two years from now. Usually it's like 15 years from now. But they're claiming that they'll cease PFAS production by in two years from now. So, Dr. Shader, what do you make of this announcement and its implications for the future of these forever chemicals? I think it remains to be seen. It's certainly encouraging, I would say, pretty late, but encouraging. I guess it remains to be seen while other manufacturers follow suit or will they kind of move into that space for some of the PFAS that are no longer manufactured in the US and we don't have to do a whole deep chemistry dive, but there are some PFAS that are no longer manufactured in the US. Even industry will recognize that they have a very long amount of time that they stay in our bodies, so years that they circulate in our blood, even if you could stop your exposure to them and the highest level of concerns about toxicity. Industry's response has been to say, okay, we won't make those anymore, but we make these other ones and these are safe, trust us on these being safe, but they look very similar chemically. We know that some of those long chain PFAS are still being manufactured overseas in China, so it's like good news, but it's hard to know how excited to be about it. Can I add something? So, love that they are recognizing that there's an issue with PFAS chemicals, but I am very curious about what their definition of PFAS are. Like Dr. Shader mentioned, they stopped making two long chain PFAS chemicals, which we think of long chain as having six carbons and anything below that, having fewer than six carbons all in a row, but the evidence shows that those short chains behave in very similar ways to the long chains, and so I would be very curious to see what their definition of for this ban is, because they could say we're gonna stop manufacturing PFAS of a certain length, but that doesn't incorporate the full scale. Yeah, so you gotta always read the fine print, an important reminder. So this question I'll start off with Kim. Earlier this month we had some hazy skies from wildfires in Canada, or I guess today Washington, DC and Chicago had some of the worst air quality in the world, which I was surprised about like the world, but it's true, and we know that PFAS are used in flame retardants and firefighting foam as climate change worsens and with it, the wildfires will PFAS use increase to fight these worsening fires? It's possible that they will, but a positive that we've seen in US regulation right now is that they're starting to address the use of fluorinated firefighting foams, and if you had asked that question 10 years ago, I would have said, what's a PFAS? And also, yes, but there's been a lot of activism by firefighter groups and ally scientists who have done health studies and just physical testing of their gear to see how concentrated these things are with PFAS and how it sheds from the gear and also fluorinated firefighting foams are one of the highest concentrated sources of PFAS in our environments being sprayed at airports, firefighting training facilities, military bases for years, and just remaining in the environment and moving through our drinking water. But I would say I'm not sure at the moment, I hope that it turns out that we ban fluorinated firefighting foams because they are useful alternatives and the arguments against some of these alternatives are the matter of one second of efficacy. So the U.S. military requires firefighting foams to be able to put out fires in a certain amount of time. I think it's around 30 seconds. If the alternatives put a fire out in 31 seconds, not allowed to use them. So that's an interesting definitional question again. If I could just add on to what Kim said, certainly those small differences in efficacy and some of the standards specified that to meet the standard, it had to have PFAS in it. So by definition, a fluorine-free foam couldn't meet that definition. I think also one teeny bit of good news, sometimes you see the pictures of fires and you see them putting foam on it and you might worry, is that the foam that has PFAS? And typically that's not the same type of foam. So there's class A foams and class B foams. So as Kim said, at military bases and airports where there's flammable fuels, typically that's where you use the class B foams and those are the AFFF, aqueous foam-forming foams that are the ones that typically have had PFAS, but increasingly there are fluorine-free options. The class A foams are used on wildfires or house fires and typically haven't had PFAS. So that's a little bit of good news, but certainly if there's more fires and there's more firefighter gear needed and more time spent fighting fires, that does raise concerns about on the job exposures among firefighters. Yeah, thank you, this is helpful. So I wanna hear from everyone on this question and I've been thinking about this for a while because I guess the PFAS crisis kind of reminds me of the crisis of CFCs or chlorofluorocarbons that the Montreal Protocol banned and these are the things you find in refrigerators back in the 20th century and some of them are still making their way to the ozone to this day even though we've largely stopped the hole from getting larger if I'm summarizing that somewhat correctly. But yeah, some researchers have predicted that we will be grappling with PFAS contamination for hundreds of years and I recall that a ban was necessary for chlorofluorocarbons to avert further crisis in the ozone layer and of course there's still CFCs making their way to the atmosphere so if it seems like we're still having this problem with CFCs will we be facing a similar issue with PFAS where we're grappling with contamination long after they're completely banned and if they ever are completely banned and what are the best and worst case scenarios then for dealing with PFAS and we can start with Laura. Sure, first I'd like to put Kim and Laurel in charge of our PFAS regulation moving forward. They're called forever chemicals for a reason, right? They don't break down in the soil, in the water, in our bodies, but what we can do is concentrate them, right? So back to landfill leachate. The largest landfill in New York, Seneca Meadows sends about 65 or 70 million gallons of landfill leachate to multiple wastewater treatment plants in New York State. They send the largest amount to Buffalo, 40 million gallons last year. As I mentioned, the wastewater treatment plant doesn't do anything to the PFAS and in fact the precursors in there probably very likely multiply the PFAS that are coming out the outfall pipe which goes into the Niagara River. Doesn't have to be that way. The wastewater treatment, I mean the landfill leachate could concentrate the PFAS by, for instance, partially separating it. There is no technology that completely destroys PFAS at the moment. There's no technology that completely separates PFAS. When you see 97% or 95%, it matters what you start with when something makes you sick at levels or where the EPA is saying there is no safe level, right? So we have to keep that in mind, but we can concentrate it in the membrane mediums, et cetera, that we use to, for instance, you can use membranes like reverse osmosis that have membranes or granulated activated carbon which some water treatment facilities use, and that provides a partial separation and the PFAS concentrate in those mediums. Same with sewage sludge. You have a disposal issue, I'm not saying it's all fixed, but it's the same with what's coming out the wastewater treatment plant. PFAS, for example, tends to partition into the solids, which that's what the sewage sludge essentially is, and so the solid material doesn't have to be spread in a thin layer on millions of acres of farmland, right? And so by concentrating and selectively being very smart with regard to environmental justice and public health and the science chemistry, we can at least make sure these materials aren't in our children's lunch boxes on the fields where our kids play sports or on our fields in the food products we eat. Can I just make one point that's been missing from the conversation, which is one of the problems with PFAS is that the accumulation of exposures makes it more and more toxic to people. So the more you're exposed, the worse it is, and it builds up in your system, and that's one of the problems. Yeah, absolutely, thank you for mentioning that. There are so many complex parts of PFAS exposure. What I would say about the best case scenario is that right now we forgot that our bathtub was running, that our bathtub was filling up. Our bathroom is starting to be filled with water. It's on the floor. We don't come out with a mop and start mopping first. We turn off the tap to stop it from filling any further. Right now the best case scenario is that our oceans and our soil and our drinking water are contaminated with PFAS, but we have an opportunity to turn off the tap while we address destruction issues, concentration issues. And it's a global problem. I'm sure a lot of us became a lot more familiar with the size of the ocean in the past week or two, learning just how deep it actually is and how much water is in there. But that PFAS can be in all of that and really dilute levels are really problematic. And so turning off the tap is the best case scenario right now so that we can then address the global issue as it stands at this moment with hopefully all of those great technologies that are coming out and you can see the headlines about them. I hope that they work at a large scale. We don't have the evidence for their scalability right now. And often they only address a few of the 14,000 chemicals, but I'm really hopeful that those will help us out, but the main thing right now is turning off the tap. And the worst case scenario would be just continuing to produce PFAS. And if I could build on that and get back to the Montreal protocol as well, there's a framework towards this issue of turning off the tap. And if you think about it, it's not like one tap. It's like lots of taps coming from lots of different places. So there's a lot of places where we learned in the film that there are a lot of ways that we can be exposed, a lot of different types of products that they're in. And I guess one of the ways that the Montreal protocol addressed the ozone depleting chemicals was to figure out like where are the non-essential uses and sort of tackling those first. One of the things that industry will say is that PFAS are in life-saving medical devices and protective equipment. And maybe those are ones where we wanna, yeah, for now maybe they are serving a role of protecting people's health and we don't have a good alternative yet. But dental floss, food packaging, there are a lot of non-essential uses and those are like the easy, maybe the faucets are easier to turn off when we think about turning off the tap. And so there's a framework that's, I think it's catching some momentum called the essential uses framework. And it sort of puts PFAS uses into three categories. So one are non-essential uses. So these are uses where there's no real benefit for health or safety or there's a very easy alternative. So like food packaging or cosmetics, things like that. A second band might be like firefighting foam, like Kim mentioned, where it is serving an important function, we absolutely want firefighters to have the tools they need to fight fires, but there are alternatives. And so let's rely on those alternatives that don't have such persistent chemicals. And then there's a category that is considered essential uses, not essential chemicals, but essential uses. And it's important to think of that as not a static category. Maybe we don't have an alternative right now, but with new research and development, there can be alternatives in the future. So there's a lot of low hanging fruit to start with because it can be overwhelming when there's so many different things. So. Can I say one more quick thing, which is this fight is going on internationally and there's something called the Madrid Statement. And it's been signed by scientists, I think 250 scientists in 38 countries to commit themselves to fighting this. So I find that hopeful also. Yeah, and it reminds me too of like the scientists around the world who come together to affirm that indeed the climate crisis is real. So it seems like that's starting to pick up steam with PFAS2 around the world and scientists gathering to say this is something we need to pay attention to. And I really like the metaphor of like turning off the faucet because it can be kind of overwhelming to think of how do we start to address this issue that is so large, simply like climate change too. And turning off the faucet seems like, you know, and there's like you said, there's a low hanging fruit to ease your faucets to turn off than others. So I wanna also invite our audience to start asking questions if they have any. We have a fantastic microphone up there that will move to the middle. And if anyone has a question, they can enter the aisle and line up. Yes, it looks like Diane has a question to start. Fantastic, thanks Diane. Okay, so first two questions and I'm not gonna wait between them, okay? The first is has there been a link, verifiable link between PFAS and cancer. And the reason why I ask that first question is that these kind of overwhelming problems such as asbestos, opioids, tobacco have all benefited from class actions. But you need those kinds of proofs. So do you know if that link has been made and do you know if there are any class action suits going on? Thank you. I'll take a first pass and others can feel free to chime in. So yes, certain types of cancers have been linked to PFAS exposure. Has anyone seen Dark Waters or the devil we know? So that was based in a community in West Virginia close to a DuPont plant where people got exposed to high levels of one long chain PFAS called PFOA also known as C8 and a lawsuit against DuPont funded a big epidemiological, so a big health study. And from that, the scientists who were part of that panel concluded that exposure to PFOA was linked to testicular and kidney cancer. And several other types of cancers have been linked to PFAS exposures. The National Academies of Science, Engineering and Medicine did say there was also a link with breast cancer, although my understanding is that the link is maybe a little less certain. So that's an answer to the first part of your question in terms of class action lawsuits. And I feel like I need to read the news every day because there's always some new PFAS news, but just like yesterday, still need to read the articles about it. There's been class action lawsuits. There's different kinds. Some have to do with individual's health, but there's also a big class action lawsuit where the plaintiffs are water suppliers that have had to expend millions of dollars to put in place water treatment. A lot of my work focuses on Cape Cod and just as an example to give you a sense of the cost. The Hyannis water system that has 14,000 customers has spent $20 million to put in place carbon filtration. And that's being, that cost is being borne by the ratepayers and the residents of Cape Cod. And so in some ways that's an easier lawsuit because they're not trying to say this harmed anyone's health, they're just trying to say like, we had to spend this much money and that's not fair for us to have to pay for that. So those, and so there was just a settlement. I think it was that case or maybe it was another case. Maybe someone else has been following the ins and outs of that multi-district litigation that was being held in South Carolina. And it was 3M, I believe, that started to settle. And I still need to find out which water supplies that applies to, because sometimes the news articles are a little opaque. In terms of class action lawsuits by individuals who think their health has been harmed. I think there are some, I know on Cape Cod I've seen ads for lawyers who are looking for people who might have had exposures. I don't know of a really big one, but like I said, it's hard to keep up with all the PFAS news. So I wonder if anyone else wants to add to that. You might know more, Kim. I don't know of any specific class action lawsuits and especially around cancer, but I would say that our goalpost, I guess for a class action lawsuit of being cancer, there are so many other health issues that are associated with PFAS exposure that we shouldn't have to wait until it is a known human carcinogen to regulate and to prevent its release into the environment. But I would keep an eye on firefighting communities. I think that that is a workplace exposure that disproportionately affects firefighters. And I think that they have certainly grounds for unsafe workplace complaints and things like that. So. I know that, I don't know if they have determined that there's definitely a link, but there have been clusters of different kinds of cancer in different places, especially I'm looking at it from the lens of artificial turf, soccer players, goalies who are close to the ground, loads of them are getting a certain kind of cancer. And then also the Philadelphia Phillies, a lot of their players got brain cancer from playing on artificial turf. So they're looking at these things and collecting data. I don't think anything's definitive yet, but it's looking that way. Their use of fire retardants. Yeah, Dr. Shader brought up an interesting point that I wanted to touch back on and that's the taxpayers and how we're paying for our own pollution. And I think that's a really compelling link to climate change too, because a lot of the fossil fuel infrastructure that we're building or that utility companies are making a profit off of building today, taxpayers are gonna have to continue paying the burdens of that decades from now where energy will just cost a lot more. So this theme or this phenomenon of companies that make a lot of profit off of the backs of taxpayers and taxpayers' health is just a really compelling connection to the PFAS crisis and the climate crisis because it's the same or similar companies who are making these same practices and getting away with the same stuff on the backs of taxpayers and people like us. So I have another question for anyone really to jump in and answer and that is are some PFAS exposures more consequential than others? I know we touched briefly on food packaging and drinking water, but if you were, I mean, not that this is the most necessary question because we simply don't want PFAS in anything, whether it's food packaging or to our fields, but in terms of taking a shower or drinking water or playing on an Astroturf field and having take out every night, are there PFAS? Using non-stick cookware. Yeah, or using non-stick cookware, you know. I can jump in just from the baseline toxicology perspective for any chemical exposure, we think of it as a function of the concentration, the duration and the amount of times that you experience that exposure. And so from that base level, occupational exposures are of a main concern for me because they're typically highly concentrated. If we're thinking of firefighting uniforms or the AFFF, the fluorinated firefighting foams or even people who work in factories who produce PFAS chemicals, they're getting the off-gassing as well. And so we know that inhalation is very different than is different than ingestion and different than dermal exposure. And for a lot of chemicals, inhalation is a way more severe exposure. So I'm always concerned about occupational exposures. I guess for me as an exposure scientist, I think about how we get exposed in different ways. And I think about like a pie chart, right? If you look at all the PFAS that's coming into your body, like where is most of that coming from? And the answer of course is it depends. So if you live in a community where the water is contaminated, it's likely that drinking water would be your largest source of exposure. Typically as that problem is recognized, water systems have been stepping up and taking those contaminators offline or putting in place treatment. EPA is like inching closer to a standard. So it won't just be states like Massachusetts that have their own standards, but all water supplies will have to start testing for and addressing PFAS. And then there's a piece of pie that comes from food and food packaging. So it depends like what are you eating? Do you eat a lot of microwave popcorn? Do you eat a lot of fast food? There's been some links between consumption of fish and shellfish and higher PFAS levels in blood in the general population. And then it also depends on consumer products as well. And there are different ways that the PFAS can get into your body. So some PFAS can are actually volatile so they can come out of the carpet. This carpet might have PFAS in it and end up in the air. And so we breathe those in. We also, we don't think about it, but we all ingest a little bit of dust every day and dust is kind of this reservoir for toxic chemicals in our homes. And if you happen to be a kid, say, and you put your hands in your mouth a lot or you're just really close to the ground a lot, you might per unit of your body weight you get more exposure that way. And then there's occupational exposures as well. So certainly firefighters in certain industries think about people who, for instance ski, people who put ski wax on skis, they can have quite high exposures. People who use a lot of floor wax or apply scotch guard or other stain resistant coatings to furniture. So everyone's like little pie looks different. And researchers, I think, are trying to wrap their heads around, honestly, for a typical person. What does that pie look like? And for me, something I struggle with because we at Science Crane think a lot about how we can translate our research into useful information. And in long term, big picture, we are trying to change chemical policies and inform retailers. We don't think it should be on each individual to have to think about this stuff. But there are things we can do as individuals to protect our families and ourselves. And so we do try to translate our research in that way. And sometimes I feel like there's a little bit of a mismatch because it's easy to think about consumer products. You mentioned nonstick pans. I actually don't know how much exposure you really get from a pan unless you overheat it. Compared to, say, Scotchgard in your couch, compared to fish. And I think people are reluctant to say, you know, you shouldn't eat fish or shellfish and there's a lot of health benefits to that. So I think it's helpful to do more research to understand what those, that pie of exposure is and make sure that the messages that we're giving out are consistent with that. But I think with consumer products, it's kind of the easiest low-hanging fruit for those of us who can figure out, avoiding stain-resistant products or microwave popcorn or the things that we can't avoid. Some of these other ones are harder to tackle. And I think, I'd like to bring the social justice lens to this as well. That's what I was gonna bring up. Right, so more vulnerable populations, communities that are already suffering from health disparities. They have more exposures. They have less access to medical care. It's kind of like the double whammy, right? They're more impacted by the climate catastrophe. They're more impacted by the PFAS exposures that they're getting and they're more exposed, which Laurel mentioned a paper that, it's a terrific paper, it was published, I think in February, right? That she's a co-author on, and I'll let her speak to the paper of God. In front of the author, I'm not gonna summarize it. Yeah. But it showed that people of color, black and brown communities, have greater exposure to water that has PFAS in it than white communities. And back to landfills, Claire Cannon is a researcher at the University of California, Davis, and she's done some terrific work that looks at municipal landfills and where they're located. She looked at every county in the United States and surprise, surprise, they're located near communities of color. Women who are a single head of households living in poverty are much more likely to be living near a landfill. No landfill liner is intact. So there's groundwater pollution, there's airborne pollution, including from PFAS in these places. So those exposures just get multiplied and so the social justice lens is a really important place to look as well. One thing I wanted to add too, is for artificial turf, for example, there really is no such thing as recycling for it and it's either going into landfills or industry is now saying that they can burn it but they're using chemical burning and it's going into the air and then it's landing on everything surrounding it which are usually EJ communities. And then one other thing which is I've been told by some scientists not to eat freshwater fish that they're worse than seafood. I don't know about the fish, the salinity of the water for the fish as an environmental justice angle. Also some of the work that we're doing in the PFAS project lab is looking at how regulations on fish and how contamination of fish can impact indigenous communities and low income communities and folks who subsistence fish and subsistence forage and hunt. And so it is a really big issue. There's a lot of work going on in the Great Lakes States over environmental justice and access to fish. So that's another area to keep your eye on. A study just came out. I just read about it today. I read the abstract, but the business of bio-accumulation, predator fish, they're seeing, which I'm not surprised but they're seeing that the big things that eat the little things are accumulating more PFAS in their fatty tissue bodies. And one other dimension of the social justice issue has to do with, we know this for buying organic produce or buying eco-friendly products. It's easy for us to put a recommendation out. Like if you eat more fresh fruit or you know, eat or buy products that don't say stain resistant or you know, buy the green certified products, they always cost more. And so if your income is lower, like you can't buy those products. And so there are disparities in there and some of the, we try to be cognizant of some of the messages that we share. You know, not everyone is able to implement them in the same way. I've been thinking about this because my son is 15 and he wants to have a little hangout spot with his friends and we're trying to buy a beanbag chair. All the ones that he's finding, I'm sure have flame retardants and PFAS and like I study this stuff every day and I can't figure out if it is PFAS in it. I'm Googling the green ones and they cost like five times as much and that's just not fair. So we need to change that. Yes, go ahead. Do you want this microphone? I have a couple of questions that are just really very personal, I guess. Well, one with related to what you were just saying, I've been vegan, macrobiotic, you know, organic for 50 years so I thought I was gonna miss the bullet and then I remember like 20 years ago I started hearing about how California was using this marvelous new sewage on their organic fields and I thought, oh, there it goes, you know. So if you're going to Whole Foods and you see that this stuff's produced in Mexico or California and it's organic, I'm gonna ask you but my assumption is we don't miss the bullet that way but the other thing that I was Googling right before I came over here, I've just had eye surgery and they put an acrylic lens in my eye and everything on acrylic and PFAS says, oh, acrylic is so much better than plastic, it's so much better than glass and there's nothing that I could find in my brief Googling that relates it to PFAS so I wonder if you could just for personal answer to those two things. I can speak to the organic standard. If it says, if in the United States, so those rules were promulgated 1999, I think. If it says USDA organic, USDA organic, regardless of where it was sourced, Mexico or elsewhere, if it says USDA organic, it was not produced with sewage sludge, right? Cause that is against the organic rules. Now, I'm not saying that people aren't sneaking around and I don't know, some of it is producer responsibility but by and large those rules are protecting us from pesticides, sludge, inner radiation, those are the three big things that the standards keep out or keep our food from being processed or using those particular methods or products. So I can speak to that. The acrylic. I know that PFAS are used in the manufacturing of plastics because they keep the machinery nice and slippery so if you think of something as an extruder, you don't want things to get stuck in there and so PFAS keep that slippery. Of course there are alternatives but the PFAS ends up on some of the products but I do not know much about acrylic or eye acrylic. I just know I have read that contact lenses have them. It speaks. I've read contact lens solutions. Oh really? And sometimes anti-fogging solutions that people are using when everyone's wearing masks and so people still wear masks and glasses fog up. So I don't know specifically about acrylic and other types of plastics as well sometimes get... Well it speaks to the looking at PFAS as a class of chemicals, right? And it speaks to turning off the tap. So we're not saying oh does this have it and this have it and how much of that and what kind over there and what's the appropriate, what's the safe concentration? It speaks to that. This is all of it, ban it all. Our confusion over this also speaks to confidential business information and the power of industry to determine what it needs to report or what it shouldn't report and how public that information can be. So it comes down to consumers to make those decisions but we don't have adequate information to make those decisions so it's kind of a bind. And if it wasn't confusing enough, another thing that can happen is sometimes plastics are treated with fluorine gas to make them last longer and the chemistry that can happen with the fluorine gas and the plastic can make PFAS and there was, I think it was pesticide, jugs that had, they figured out that the pesticides had PFAS and they weren't sure why and PFAS can be added to pesticides also but they figured out it came from the plastics and it was this like fluorination of the plastic. So they weren't adding PFAS to the plastic but it formed. So in case you weren't worried enough already, that's another thing that's making my brain hard. I'm interested in how we influence municipalities for use reduction, for buying and investing in artificial turf fields but also all kinds of plastics, utensils in school cafeterias and my personal pet peeve plastic park benches. I much prefer wood. So I'm just curious, what can we do and how do we influence our municipality decision makers that we need plastic use reduction and that would seem to impact the PFAS use reduction, our exposure hopefully, reduction. Thank you. Well, it's something that at just zero that we're taking on both from an advocacy and a legislative sort of both paths. And so part of that is model bills. Part of that is showing municipalities and communities, those that are doing it right sharing that information with other communities looking at what works and what doesn't work. Beyond plastics is doing terrific work in terms of lobbying and other legislative work. So supporting those organizations but also supporting each other as we try to ban single use plastic and better understand ways that we can drastically reduce the plastic that's in use in our society today. One thing that I'm working on, which I don't know if it'll directly immediately have an effect, but I'm working with a small group statewide, any 10 citizens in Massachusetts can put a petition into the government asking them to regulate something and we are writing one to ask them to regulate artificial turf. So that's in process. And we're going to be soliciting signatures from everyone too so that it's not just 10 people, it's gonna be hundreds of people that sign it to make them to kind of force them to take action. My question is about dental prosthetics because the porcelain that used to be put in the mouse with PFM is now a thing of the past and it's now replaced by Zercogno and everybody has crowns in their mouth. I was wondering if you have any information about that. Thank you. Do not. Not I have something to do with it now. Not I have something to do with it now. Your point earlier about how it's not necessarily about identifying which products have PFAS in them because we know that PFAS are so widely used that we can assume that they're in most products that we use unnecessarily. So I think it really speaks to how it's impossible to keep track of every little thing that they're adding PFAS to. I'm just gonna make one other recommendation which is to pick up one of these handouts that I created and right into our state legislators asking them to ban PFAS. Yes, fantastic. So we are running out of time, but we do have a small action that we want to invite everyone to take part in tonight to support Massachusetts legislators passing this bill on PFAS regulation. If my laptop could be open to them again and we're going to put up the QR code on the screen and people can either scan the QR code and that will actually send a really great letter to your legislators, your state legislators in Massachusetts urging them or saying that as the constituent you really support this PFAS bill. Yes, I want to thank you all for being here. It was wonderful. I learned a lot. Thank you so much. And thank you to everyone who turned out tonight. It's great to see everyone in person. And I appreciate you all for coming out and learning about PFAS. I hope you take further action. If you want to take some more food before you leave we tried to make it a PFAS, you know, a plastic-free food event which was surprisingly difficult. Really challenging. So please help yourself. So thank you all.