The Biggest Chemical Cover-up in History

Summary

Highlights

• In 1929, fridges leaked toxic gases, killing people silently; the hunt for a safer alternative began. ⚠️
• Roy J. Plunkett discovered Teflon by mistake while seeking a non-flammable refrigerant. 🎯
• Teflon's indestructibility made it an asset for war efforts, especially in nuclear plants. 🚀
• Despite its benefits, the production of Teflon involved PFOA, which is toxic and pervasive in the environment. 🌐
• Nearly all Americans have PFAS in their blood, with dire health implications including cancer risks. 🩺
• Efforts to replace PFAS in products are ongoing but face significant scientific and regulatory challenges. ⚖️
• Environmental and personal exposure to PFAS are widespread, calling for urgent action and awareness. 📢

Key Takeaways

• Fridges in the 1920s had deadly leaks; a company invented a magical chemical to fix this problem, which also led to more issues. 🚨
• Teflon was discovered by accident, proving to be incredibly non-reactive and useful in many applications, from cookware to nuclear plants. 🎨
• The dangers of PFAS, including C8, used in the production of Teflon, have far-reaching health and environmental impacts. 🌍
• Many people have high levels of PFAS in their blood, which can lead to diseases like cancer, and there are currently few ways to remove them. 🩸
• The worldwide contamination by PFAS is alarmingly high, linked back to a few originating companies, showcasing major corporate cover-ups. 🕵️‍♂️

Overview

Chapters

• 00:00 - 00:30: Introduction: The Mysterious Fridge Deaths In 1929, a series of mysterious deaths occurred in Chicago homes, with 15 people dying before the cause was traced back to their fridges. Unlike earlier models that used ice, these newer fridges relied on a cooling mechanism involving methyl chloride, a toxic and odorless gas that could fatally leak.
• 00:30 - 02:00: The Discovery of Teflon The chapter titled 'The Discovery of Teflon' discusses the accidental invention of Teflon while attempting to solve a problem with refrigerators using hazardous gases. The innovation led to Teflon's integration into numerous extremely popular household products, unbeknownst to consumers of the underlying negative consequences.
• 02:00 - 03:00: Teflon's Role in WWII and Commercialization The chapter discusses the role of Teflon and its chemical components used during WWII and how their production led to environmental contamination. The narrative reveals the pervasive presence of these manmade chemicals, implicating major companies in global pollution affecting all living creatures, including humans.
• 03:00 - 05:00: The Downside of Teflon's Success This video chapter discusses 'The Downside of Teflon's Success,' highlighting one of the significant chemical coverups in history. The investigation is based on publicly available materials and third-party opinions. The story originates in 1936 when DuPont, a chemical company, sought a non-toxic, non-flammable alternative to gases used in refrigeration.
• 05:00 - 08:00: The Emergence of C8 and Its Dangers This chapter introduces the key figure, Roy J. Plunkett, a young chemist involved in a pivotal experiment with a gas known as tetrafluoroethylene (TFE). The chapter highlights a significant incident where a TFE cylinder, expected to contain gas, appeared empty, leading Plunkett to suspect a gas leak.
• 08:00 - 12:00: Uncovering the Truth: Legal Battles and Research A chemist discovering something unusual with a gas cylinder, leading to a hypothesis about the chemical structure having changed due to high pressure.
• 12:00 - 15:30: The Global Impact of PFAS The chapter describes the discovery of polytetrafluoroethylene (PTFE) when a TFE gas polymerized into this substance during an experiment. Although initially considered a failed experiment and a nuisance by Plunkett, further examination revealed its unique properties, such as water resistance. This led to further exploration instead of discarding it.
• 15:30 - 16:00: Conclusion: Moving Forward and Finding Solutions The chapter 'Conclusion: Moving Forward and Finding Solutions' discusses the experimentation conducted by Plunkett, who tried various acids and strong bases to dissolve a particular powder, but all his efforts were unsuccessful. The powder proved to be resistant to melting, corrosion, and reaction to any of the solvents used, indicating its indestructibility. The text attributes this remarkable resilience to the carbon-fluorine bond in the substance.

The Biggest Chemical Cover-up in History Transcription

• 00:00 - 00:30 In 1929 in Chicago, people kept mysteriously dying inside their homes. It took 15 deaths for the authorities to realize that these people were getting killed by... their fridges because fridges back then were no longer just boxes of ice. Instead, they relied on a chemical looping through the back to stay cold. And the best chemical for the job was methyl chloride, a toxic and virtually odorless gas. So if it somehow leaked from the fridge,
• 00:30 - 01:00 it could kill you without warning. Other fridges used flammable gases instead, so a leak combined with a spark from the stove, and your house could suddenly go up in flames. So one company tried to solve this problem, but in the process, they accidentally created a seemingly magical substance. Soon, it made its way into a huge range of products, which were so popular they ended up in nearly every home in America. But what people didn't know was that these products came at a price.
• 01:00 - 01:30 The chemicals used to make them were being released into the environment, slowly poisoning everyone on the planet, including me. (swelling music) - You have high levels of a chemical you never heard of. - It shocks me. Like, where could this have come from? - Almost every living creature, from polar bears to birds to fish, massive worldwide contamination by completely manmade chemicals that are fingerprints back to just a couple of companies.
• 01:30 - 02:00 - This is a video about one of the biggest chemical coverups in history. For legal reasons, I want to note that this investigation is based on publicly available documents, recordings, and third-party opinions. All sources are linked in the description. The story all began with an attempt to save lives. In 1936, a chemical company called DuPont set out to find a safer alternative to the gases used in fridges, one that was neither toxic nor flammable.
• 02:00 - 02:30 Their lead scientist on the project was a 27-year-old chemist named Roy J. Plunkett. He was experimenting with a gas called tetrafluoroethylene, or TFE. It's a pair of double-bonded carbons, each bonded to two fluorine atoms. One morning, as Plunkett was setting up a test, his assistant picked out a cylinder full of TFE and twisted the valve, but nothing came out. Plunkett thought the gas must have leaked,
• 02:30 - 03:00 but the cylinder still weighed about as much as a full one, so he grabbed a saw and cut the cylinder in half. Inside, he was shocked to see it was full of a white, slippery powder. So what happened to the gas? Well, what the chemist reasoned was that under the high pressure of the cylinder, one of the double bonds between the carbons in TFE must have broken. And now those two carbon atoms each had a bonding site free. So one of them probably grabbed onto a carbon
• 03:00 - 03:30 from a different TFE molecule, breaking its double bond. And then that molecule did the same, and the process repeated again and again until all of the TFE was trapped in these long chains. The gas had polymerized into polytetrafluoroethylene, forming this slippery powder. Plunkett just wanted to get rid of it because it ruined his experiment. But before throwing it out, he decided to do some tests on it. So he tried pouring water on it, but the water just beaded off.
• 03:30 - 04:00 So he tried acid. Again, nothing happened. Then he tried the strongest base he had, but that wouldn't melt it either. Plunkett went through all of the solvents in the lab, but the powder remained intact. It wouldn't melt, corrode, or react with anything. It was seemingly indestructible. The reason it was so indestructible was because of this bond, the carbon-fluorine bond.
• 04:00 - 04:30 See, out of all of the elements, fluorine is the greediest, the most electron-hungry atom. Its outer shell is a single electron away from being complete, which would make it perfectly stable. So fluorine really, really wants that electron. And because it's so small compared to most other elements, the protons in its nucleus can get close to the electrons of other atoms. And because of their positive charge, they pull on them really hard. So near a carbon atom, fluorine grabs onto one of the carbon's electrons
• 04:30 - 05:00 to complete its outer shell, and this keeps the two atoms bonded together. But the fluorine isn't done there. It keeps tugging on the carbon's electrons, pulling them closer to itself, which makes fluorine slightly negatively charged and the carbon slightly positive. So now there's an electrostatic attraction that makes this bond even stronger. Now, in reality, electrons behave more like fuzzy clouds than the orbiting points in this animation, but the principle still holds.
• 05:00 - 05:30 In terms of energy, this is actually the strongest single bond a carbon can form. So if other atoms or molecules get close, they're essentially ignored. And Plunkett's magic powder was completely covered in carbon-fluorine bonds, so it hardly reacted with anything. Okay, so he is got this incredibly inert stuff. Was he really trying to get rid of it? - He actually didn't know what to do with it 'cause like what do you do with the material that doesn't, you know, react with anything? But luckily his employer, DuPont, they were actually working
• 05:30 - 06:00 with the US Army on the Manhattan Project. So they were refining uranium and plutonium 'cause of course there's a World War II reference in a Veritasium video. You just have to have it. - To get the fuel for nuclear bombs, enriched uranium, you first have to turn the uranium into a gas, uranium hexafluoride. It was a nasty chemical that corroded everything. So all the gaskets, seals, and miles of pipe in the plant at Oak Ridge had to constantly replaced, slowing down production. - But then DuPont was like, "Listen,
• 06:00 - 06:30 we have this seemingly indestructible chemical, right? It doesn't react with stuff it doesn't corrode, so maybe we can try and use it against uranium hexafluoride." So they get a bunch of this powder, they cram it together under high pressure to create these cakes, essentially. Now you had a solid of this material that you could machine into gaskets and cylinders that you could push into these pipes and put these tube linings into the pipe, and boom, it works like magic, like a charm. The uranium hexafluoride was no match for this magic material.
• 06:30 - 07:00 - As Gordon Fee, the manager of the nuclear weapons plant, put it, "There was never a substitute considered, as far as I know." The material worked so well that the army wanted to use it for everything. The same gaskets and seals were installed into fuel tanks and airplane engines to protect them from oil and water. And weapons manufacturing plants no longer had issues with the corrosive nitric acid needed to make explosives. DuPont saw the potential too, so they trademarked the material in 1944.
• 07:00 - 07:30 - They didn't trademark it under the name polytetrafluoroethylene 'cause, admittedly, that name kind of sucks. So they took T-E from tetra, F-L from fluoro, and then they had a bunch of these other miracle materials, rayon, nylon. So they took O-N from the end of those, and boom, Teflon. - Nice. Okay, that's a good name. Under the army's order, DuPont ramped up Teflon production at their test plant in Arlington, New Jersey, giving their whole supply to the government. But DuPont struggled to produce enough Teflon
• 07:30 - 08:00 to meet the military's demand. As their Arlington scientists put it, the major advantages of polytetrafluoroethylene, solvent resistance and high thermal stability, offer obstacles from the standpoint of ease in fabrication. - You could only really mold Teflon into solids, so gasket, seals, pipes, but you couldn't put it into water to make a spray because it doesn't dissolve in water. They actually didn't know anything that dissolved Teflon, but there was an even bigger problem at that point. - To polymerize TFE into Teflon, you can add a reactive atom
• 08:00 - 08:30 or molecule that will hijack the first carbon double bond and start the reaction. This is called the initiator. And the bond formed between it and the first TFE molecule releases a small amount of energy. Then a bit of energy is also released when the next TFE molecule joins the chain and the next and the next. And if the process isn't controlled, the reaction gets very hot very quickly. And if it gets above 200 degrees celsius, TFE rapidly decomposes into carbon and tetrafluoromethane,
• 08:30 - 09:00 which releases even more energy all at once. This caused a massive explosion at the Arlington plant in 1944, killing two workers. You need a way to dissipate the heat, take the heat away from the reaction without it staying in there and, therefore, expanding and creating that force. - Yeah, and one of the ways to do that was to have the reaction happening in water,
• 09:00 - 09:30 because water can absorb a huge amount of energy before it ever heats up. - But if you inject TFE into a water cylinder, the gas doesn't dissolve. Even at high pressure, most of the TFE just stays on top. So if you add an initiator, the polymerization is triggered in one place, and so it can still cause an explosion. What you need is some way to disperse the TFE throughout the water first. And to do that, DuPont needed help. In 1951, they purchased a special acid from 3M,
• 09:30 - 10:00 the company behind Scotch Tape. This acid, called PFOA, looked almost exactly like Teflon. It had a chain of eight carbon atoms covered in fluorines, but at the other end, there was a double-bonded oxygen and an OH group. That's what makes it an acid. And since there were eight carbons in the chain, DuPont also referred to the acid as C8. The tail end of C8, like Teflon, was hydrophobic, but the acid head group loved water,
• 10:00 - 10:30 it was hydrophilic. So when you add C8 into water, the molecules rearrange themselves so that the heads touch the water, but the Teflon-like tails don't. They create little bubbles all throughout the water, which are virtually dry on the inside. If you now inject TFE and stir the whole mixture up, well, the hydrophobic gas ends up in the middle of these C8 bubbles. And those bubbles are dispersed everywhere evenly throughout the water.
• 10:30 - 11:00 You know what this reminds me of, is soap. So it's the great combiner that allows, like, oil and water to mix. - And now if you sprinkle in initiator molecules, the initiator molecules also go into these bubbles. They start the polymerization reaction, so from TFE to Teflon. But now since it's happening spread all throughout these bubbles, the heat is evenly dissipated throughout the water, and no one explodes. - And since Teflon is now suspended in a solution, you can spray it onto surfaces like a coating.
• 11:00 - 11:30 This thing doesn't stick to anything. How do you stick it to the gaskets? You know, how do you actually use it? - Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's a good question. So the trick was actually the surface had to be really rough. So what you do is you sandblast it to create grooves and imperfections at this, like, nanoscopic level. Now if you spray the coating on, what happens is, if you heat it up, the water evaporates, the C8, it also evaporates, but Teflon, instead of it evaporating, it just softens up. So although there's no chemical interaction here, now it's mechanically stuck to the surface.
• 11:30 - 12:00 That's how they got it to stick. (suspenseful music) (quirky music) - With the war over, the army lifted the secrecy bans on the Teflon patents, and DuPont was allowed to sell it commercially. And suddenly, people all over the world were coating everyday items in Teflon, trying to create a world-changing product. One day in 1954, a French engineer, Marc Gregoire, tried putting Teflon on his fishing gear to prevent tangles.
• 12:00 - 12:30 - But then his wife saw him doing that, and her reaction was that, "This is absolute nonsense. No one is ever gonna use this. You should do something that someone's actually gonna use. So how about you put it on a pan? Make a pan non-stick." - And once these pans hit the market, it was a cooking revolution. - Teflon. - Teflon. - Teflon. - And DuPont knew exactly how to market it. - Even oatmeal won't stick to Teflon. - Hey, neat. Let me try. - And it wasn't just non-stick pans.
• 12:30 - 13:00 Teflon, C8, and chemicals like it were used in everything. - Slip-Away contains the magic of DuPont's Teflon. - Suddenly, we had Teflon stain-resistant carpets and stain protection sprays like 3M's Scotchgard. Jackets lined with Teflon were waterproof and breathable. - Gore-Tex is the brand name. - Teflon was so inert that medical implants made out of it wouldn't be rejected by the body. It was used to coat the Statue of Liberty's steel framework to save it from corrosion.
• 13:00 - 13:30 And even bullets were coated with Teflon to minimize the damage they did coming out of the gun barrel. The term Teflon was so ubiquitous that when the Italian mobster John Gotti was being prosecuted in the late 1980s, none of the charges against him would stick. So he was dubbed Teflon Don. By the late 1990s, the Teflon business generated roughly a billion dollars in yearly sales for DuPont. - Teflon has a great future, and its uses will be many. - The chemicals were everywhere,
• 13:30 - 14:00 even where they shouldn't be. - He suspected that something in this creek was poisoning his cows.
• 14:00 - 14:30 - Earl was desperate. So he hired a lawyer. - He came to our offices armed with boxes of VHS videotapes. We started watching these videotapes, and you know, there was a serious problem here. - The animals were wasting away,
• 14:30 - 15:00 and they were skin and bones, and they had tumors and black teeth. And you could see, on the videotape, white foam coming out of the pipe on this landfill next door with these animals standing in the white foam. The hair on their hooves was being eaten off by whatever was in the water. - It was a discharge pipe, and it had the marking
• 15:00 - 15:30 of E.I. du Pont de Nemours and Company. - And the landfill that pipe was draining from belonged to DuPont's massive factory complex outside of Parkersburg, West Virginia, just six miles away. That factory was Washington Works, the first commercial Teflon plant. It provided jobs for almost 2,000 people in the town. And DuPont's presence was felt everywhere. - I have been a resident of Parkersburg for 48 years. I do not work for the DuPont company,
• 15:30 - 16:00 but I have seen how their people have done much for the cultural growth of this community. - There are facilities for tennis, camping, swimming, softball, and more than 20 areas equipped for cookouts and family picnics. - DuPont took care of the community. So when the town folk got word that Earl Tennant hired a lawyer to investigate, they shunned him and his family. As his sister-in-law put it, we'd walk into a restaurant and everybody in the restaurant would get up and leave. But Earl wasn't scared off, and neither was Rob.
• 16:00 - 16:30 - I thought this was gonna be pretty straightforward. - See, the US Environmental Protection Agency, the EPA, dictates exactly which chemicals are safe to be disposed of in a landfill and in what amounts. - We would get those records and permits, and it would tell us which chemical was causing this problem. But none of those records were really showing anything that was really causing a problem, you know, nothing that would explain that white foam.
• 16:30 - 17:00 - Whatever was in Earl's water wasn't on the permits. Now, already in the 1950s, people knew that Teflon, specifically PTFE, was pretty safe. It's a long and extremely inert molecule. So if you ingest it, your body just flushes it out. However, if you heat Teflon to 350 degrees Celsius, it starts releasing fumes that make people sick. This often happened to workers in Teflon plants. Stray PTFE powder would fall onto their cigarettes as they were working, and then later they would accidentally smoke one
• 17:00 - 17:30 of these cigarettes. Luckily, the symptoms were mild: fatigue, tightness of chest, headaches, and they would usually pass within 48 hours. It was called polymer fume fever. And even though it rarely happens today, it's why you should never overheat your Teflon pan to these temperatures, especially if you have pet birds at home, because the fumes are much more toxic to them. But Teflon couldn't have poisoned Earl's cows. There were no fumes or high temperatures,
• 17:30 - 18:00 so there must have been something else in the water. Rob filed a legal request for all of the Washington Works operational records, and DuPont sent them over, more than 60,000 documents. - A lot of folks would try to say, "Okay, you you want a lot of documents, we'll give you a of documents" and hope that there'd be no way somebody could actually wade through all of these files and all of these materials. But I am the kind of person that I do dig in,
• 18:00 - 18:30 and I do want to go through those documents, so I actually did read all of that. - And in those files, a certain chemical kept popping up everywhere, C8. - I never saw the kinds of things I was seeing now in these documents from DuPont. (foreboding music) - In 1961, the same year Teflon pans hit the US market, DuPont's in-house scientists tested C8 on rats. Ingesting as little as 1.5 milligrams of C8 per kilogram of body weight caused the rat's livers
• 18:30 - 19:00 to grow abnormally. And a dose of 570 milligrams per kilogram was lethal. For reference, sodium cyanide, one of the most dangerous poisons, is lethal to rats in doses of five to 15 milligrams per kilogram. But even though C8 was less fatal, it was concerning for two other reasons. First, like Teflon, its tail is made of carbon-fluorine bonds, which makes it incredibly stable. So C8 wouldn't break down in the environment for decades.
• 19:00 - 19:30 And second, C8 looks like the fatty acids that humans and animals need for normal functioning, just with fluorines instead of hydrogens. So the concern was that C8 could get into the bloodstream, hitch a ride on the proteins that transport fatty acids around, and get almost anywhere in the body. And because of the carbon-fluorine bonds, humans and animals have no way to break down C8, so it could slowly build up, mimicking those fatty acids and potentially disrupting the systems they regulate, like the liver.
• 19:30 - 20:00 - Toxic, persistent, bioaccumulative. So the concern was it's like a ticking time bomb. It's got more opportunity to cause harm. - As a safety measure, that same rat study suggested that all these materials should be handled with extreme care and that contact with skin should be strictly avoided. In 1962, DuPont redid the study and confirmed that high doses of C8 kill rats through injury to the stomach, intestine, brain, lungs, and pancreas.
• 20:00 - 20:30 Then in 1965, they found those same toxic effects in dogs. The evidence was mounting. (suspenseful music) (camera clicks) - They were even studying monkeys. Some of the monkeys were dropping dead. These chemicals were causing toxic effects in multiple organ systems in multiple species. All these studies weren't being shared with the scientific community. - And likely no one outside of DuPont would've noticed something was wrong
• 20:30 - 21:00 if it was not for... - Tooth decay, the most widespread of all diseases. - In the 1950s, tooth decay was a nationwide problem. So the US started adding inorganic fluorides like sodium fluoride to the public water supply. This helped fight cavities. - 16 years after fluoridation, all children will have 65% less tooth decay. - In 1975, researchers wanted to know if that inorganic fluoride was getting into people's blood.
• 21:00 - 21:30 So they sampled blood from around the US, and the results were as expected. More fluoride in the tap water meant more fluoride in the blood. But they found another type of fluorine in the blood too, which was organic fluorine, carbon-fluorine bonds, and it didn't follow the same trend. - Well, these researchers were wondering, where's this coming from? Because this is not a naturally occurring substance. And they did research, and they found that 3M was making these organic fluorides,
• 21:30 - 22:00 things like PFOA. All right, so they approached 3M in 1975, asking them, "Hey, we found this stuff in the general US population's blood. You know, could it be yours?" And 3M pled ignorance. - But just three months later, 3M compared the spectrum of organic fluorine from the study to their own chemicals, and it was a match. Their chemicals were getting into the blood
• 22:00 - 22:30 of people all across the United States, but they didn't tell the researchers. 3M and DuPont were worried, so they checked their own workers' blood, and they found that they too were contaminated with C8 at levels 1,000 times higher than those in the study. And when DuPont checked their medical records, many of these workers were showing signs of liver disease. Meanwhile, DuPont was dumping almost 10 tons of C8 into the Ohio River each year,
• 22:30 - 23:00 and they were piling up thousands more tons as C8 sludge that would leach from the landfill next to Earl's farm, all while showing commercials like these. - And the water that eventually flows to the river is collected at five points and analyzed to make sure we don't pollute the Ohio. - And by the early '80s, the first cancer study is done in rats, and it confirms PFOA causes, not just might be linked with, but causes testicular tumors, all right?
• 23:00 - 23:30 That sends alarm bells off within the company because the concern is, of course, we're putting this in the air, we're putting in the water. It's in Teflon. - DuPont collected samples around Washington Works, and C8 wasn't just in the river, it was in the public water supply. So in 1984, DuPont officials met to assess whether C8 should be swapped for a safer chemical. But their conclusion was that currently none of the options developed are, from a fine powder business standpoint,
• 23:30 - 24:00 economically attractive, so C8 stuck around, and DuPont just came up with a safe dose for drinking water. - DuPont scientists are the first people on the planet to say what would be a safe level for humans. They calculated something like 0.6 parts per billion, which they rounded up to one. And the importance of that is, at that time, that was about the lowest level you could detect in water. Essentially, if we can detect it, it's too high.
• 24:00 - 24:30 - So to put that into perspective, here is one 2,500-liter tank of water. It filled to the brim. Now, imagine you take one drop of PFOA, 0.05 milliliters, and you place it not in one of these tanks or two or three, 20 of these tanks. That's one part per billion, and that's the number DuPont thought would be unsafe for humans to drink. - And after determining its own safety metric, DuPont tested the landfill wastewater leaching into Earl's creek.
• 24:30 - 25:00 It came back at 1,600 parts per billion. - They didn't tell anybody. So at that point, I thought I had figured out what had finally happened to the cows. - Rob compiled all the evidence into a 900-page letter and sent it to the EPA, the Department of Justice, and even the US Attorney General. And just a few months later, DuPont settled with Earl Tennant and his family for an undisclosed sum, although they didn't admit to any wrongdoing.
• 25:00 - 25:30 - But this stuff wasn't just in the water the cows were drinking. This was in the surrounding communities' public wells, right? People around Mr. Tennant, the tens of thousands of people in that community had likely been drinking this for decades and didn't know. - So Rob sued DuPont again, now on behalf of the 70,000 people around Parkersburg who were unwittingly exposed to C8. And it wasn't just Parkersburg or West Virginia. In the year 2000, researchers analyzed blood samples
• 25:30 - 26:00 from thousands of Americans all across the country, and 100% of those samples came back positive for C8 at an average of five parts per billion. But if virtually everyone in the US is contaminated, how harmful could C8 really be? This is exactly what Rob had to find out to have a fighting chance against DuPont. So in 2005, he spearheaded a medical study of everyone around Washington Works.
• 26:00 - 26:30 - Scientists need to know if the chemical C8 causes any health problems. By completing a health questionnaire and having your blood tested, you can help. - Analyzing the blood samples and medical records took seven long years, and many in Parkersburg passed away before a verdict was even reached, including Earl and his wife Sandra. But finally, in 2013, an independent science panel had the results. They confirmed a probable link between C8 and six human diseases, including thyroid disease,
• 26:30 - 27:00 testicular cancer, and kidney cancer. And these findings were based solely on the nearby community with an average C8 blood level of 28 parts per billion. So for example, an American male has around a 1 in 43 chance of developing kidney cancer. It's around 1 in 73 for females, but a person with more than 30 parts per billion of C8 in their blood serum might have about double the odds, so roughly 1 in 22 for males and 1 in 37 for females.
• 27:00 - 27:30 But the data in many of these studies only included survivors, not people who might have already died from C8 exposure. So the verdict was that the findings must be interpreted with caution. The true risk of C8 might be even higher. Luckily, once these studies were published in 2013, DuPont was pressured by the regulators to phase out C8. And by 2017, they had to pay out over $600 million to victims of C8 exposure, which is a pretty small price to pay
• 27:30 - 28:00 for a company that made almost $80 billion in sales just that year. And all throughout, DuPont denied any wrongdoing, but that wasn't the end of it for Parkersburg or anyone else because DuPont separated its entire Teflon business into a spinoff company, Chemours, that agreed to use a different chemical. So what was it? - They simply took C8 and knocked two carbons off and started making C6.
• 28:00 - 28:30 - They called it GenX. Because it was shorter and had an oxygen atom interrupting the carbon chain, it was expected to be more degradable. So Chemours claimed a dose as high as 70 parts per billion of GenX in drinking water would still be safe. - That chemical gets shipped to the same plant in West Virginia. So now GenX goes into the air. GenX goes into the Ohio River. GenX is found in public water supplies. So GenX is allowed to come out into the world,
• 28:30 - 29:00 be used in Teflon. Then the cancer study is done, which shows GenX causes the exact same three tumors in rats that PFOA did: liver, testicular, and pancreatic. - And the fact that its chain is shorter also makes GenX more mobile, so it could contaminate larger areas. The truth is we just don't know enough about it, and that's exactly the problem. - It took us decades to get to the point of finally addressing C8.
• 29:00 - 29:30 They simply tweak it a bit, change the chemical name. All of the science and all of the concern, that's on C8. This is C6 or C9 or C4. You don't have enough evidence that these other ones are bad. This is Whac-A-Mole. We get to the point we're addressing one and the new one pops up and we're told we have to start over. - And it isn't just C8 or GenX. They belong to a family of over 14,000 different manmade chemicals,
• 29:30 - 30:00 all covered in carbon-fluorine bonds. And companies can make them however they want, C7s, C9s, branched, polymers, acids. The generic term for all of these substances is PFAS, per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, and like Teflon, they have almost magical qualities. They repel liquids, so PFAS are used to make clothing waterproof. They're also grease-resistant, so we coat things like fast food wrappers and microwave popcorn bags in PFAS to prevent stains.
• 30:00 - 30:30 Waterproof lipstick and mascara, hygiene products, and even contact lenses have PFAS in. Even the screen you're watching this on, likely has a PFAS anti-smudge coating. (brooding music) The trouble is that the same carbon-fluorine bonds that make PFAS so stable and useful in consumer products also make them incredibly persistent in the environment. Which is why you might also know PFAS under a different name, forever chemicals.
• 30:30 - 31:00 They have been found everywhere from bustling cities to untouched areas of wilderness. Every continent, including Antarctica, has PFAS all over it. - Almost every living creature from polar bears to birds to fish, I mean, this stuff is being found everywhere. So massive worldwide contamination, but by completely manmade chemicals that are fingerprints back to just a couple of companies.
• 31:00 - 31:30 - Even though companies knew how dangerous these chemicals were 50 years ago, they decided not to inform the public and the regulators. So we're only finding out about this global contamination now. And there've been many cases where important public health information doesn't get widely disseminated for years. And whenever that happens, media coverage can be inconsistent, which is why I've partnered up with Ground News as the sponsor of this video. Their platform reveals how stories like these are covered across the media landscape.
• 31:30 - 32:00 For example, a recent study suggested that 23 million Americans were exposed to forever chemicals through wastewater, but you probably haven't seen the story since fewer than 40 outlets even published it. And take a look at how different some of these headlines are. With Ground News, you can also see that government-funded sources had limited reporting of this story, and only 9% of the publications were right-leaning. So Ground News flagged this as a potential blind spot. It's highlighted on their blind-spot feed
• 32:00 - 32:30 where you can see stories that are disproportionately covered by one side of the political spectrum. The whole point of Veritasium is to make videos that get to the truth, whether that's explaining misconceptions or getting to the bottom of potentially dangerous chemicals. Ground News helps us do that, and they can help you too. So if you, like us, care about getting to the truth, go to ground.news/ve or scan this QR code. Our link gets you 40% off their vantage plan. And now back to PFAS.
• 32:30 - 33:00 (quirky music) Okay, now I wanna find out how much of these chemicals is actually in my blood. So I have a little test here. (groans) I hate the idea of drawing my own blood. (groans) Okay, that was pretty easy, actually. I was really worried that there was not gonna be enough blood coming out. But there was plenty.
• 33:00 - 33:30 (sighs) So the question is, how much of these dangerous chemicals are in my blood? - Has anyone ever come back with blood that has zero PFAS whatsoever? - I've been doing blood testing on PFAS since 2007, and I've never seen a non-detect. - No way. - So I hear that 98% of the population has PFAS in their blood, but I'm looking for that 2% that doesn't because I've yet to see them. - That's incredible, I mean very, very bad incredible, but wow. - But if everyone on Earth has trace amounts
• 33:30 - 34:00 of these chemicals in their blood, how much harm could they really be doing? - I wanna make a distinction because it turns out not all PFAS are equally dangerous. You can kind of split them up into two groups. First up, you have long, repeating chains of carbon-fluorine bonds that are tens or hundreds of thousands of atoms long, so stuff like Teflon. These are so big and inert that even if you do ingest them, your body's just gonna flush them out. They can't be absorbed into your bloodstream, so you're pretty safe.
• 34:00 - 34:30 They're called fluoropolymers because of the long repeating chains of carbon and fluorine bonds. But the catch is to make these fluoropolymers, stuff like Teflon, you need to use processing aids, things like PFOA or GenX, and those are the nasty ones. These molecules are 5 to 10 carbons long, which makes them small enough to actually enter the bloodstream. They have functional groups at the ends that are usually acids. The most common ones are perfluoroalkyl acids, which means that they can bind to the proteins in your blood and be transported anywhere in the body.
• 34:30 - 35:00 So they slowly accumulate and build up over time. Now, there are more than just two groups of PFAS and even different definitions of what PFAS even are, but most of what we know really relates to just a handful of chemicals from this group here, to these perfluoroalkyl acids. (wondrous music) - Perhaps the most comprehensive document on PFAS toxicity was published in 2022 by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. And it looked at only seven perfluoroalkyl acids.
• 35:00 - 35:30 These are sister chemicals to PFOA. And some of them, like PFOS and PFHxS, were used heavily in the production of stain and water-resistant products like 3M's Scotchgard before they too got phased out due to toxicity concerns. The report surmised that if the sum of these seven acids in your blood is below two parts per billion, there shouldn't be any harm. If your level is between 2 and 20 parts per billion, there's a potential for harmful health effects.
• 35:30 - 36:00 Although the exact mechanism by which PFAS cause harm isn't fully understood, exposure has most consistently been associated with high cholesterol, a decreased immune system response to vaccines and infections, kidney cancer, and decreased growth in infants. But PFAS have also been linked to dozens of other conditions, and above 20 parts per billion, the risk is even greater. So where do I fall on this graph? - Right, so I have your results here.
• 36:00 - 36:30 - You're not gonna tell me what yours were before I see mine? - No. - All right. - You're positive for PFOA. - Okay. - The level for PFOA for a US person went down from five parts per billion around the 2000s to around 1.46, what you have. So you're super average for a US person. - Great. Okay. - The good news is though, no GenX for you or for me, which is great. - All right, let's go.
• 36:30 - 37:00 - But the real surprise, I ,guess is PFOS, the sister chemical, and it was used in a similar way, so stain-resistant carpets, treated clothing, and your result is at 8.93 parts per billion, whereas the US average is 4.3. -Yeah. - That's crazy. - Yeah, it is crazy 'cause it was discontinued pretty much in 2002. - This is not the results I expected. I honestly expected very boring results of, like, yeah, you're around the middle of the pack or a little bit on the low side.
• 37:00 - 37:30 - And then for PFHxS, basically PFOS but six instead of eight carbons, your levels here are almost seven parts per billion, but the US average average is one part per billion. You're higher than 95% of Americans. - It just, like, it shocks me 'cause, like, I was fully walking into this meeting expecting to be, you know, roughly average. - Yeah, to me, it's scary. You know, you live in a normal life thinking that you're taking care of everything, and then you have high levels of a chemical you never heard of. - The combined sum of all the PAS detected in my blood
• 37:30 - 38:00 was 17.92 parts per billion, more than double the US median. I'm just below the level where the National Academies recommend additional screenings for PFAS-related diseases. I had no idea I would come back with such elevated levels. I'd love to get the level, sort of, down a bit to a level where I feel like it's more in line with the general population. - Yeah. - But, like, where could this have come from? There are three main ways we get exposed to forever chemicals, and the one you'll hear the most about in the media
• 38:00 - 38:30 is likely PFAS-containing products. - Shampoo, dental floss, paints, varnishes. - Potentially dangerous chemicals. - Dangerous chemicals, toxic chemicals. - People are throwing out their non-stick cookware. - My wife threw out all our non-stick pans over a year ago, and since then, we've been using stainless steel. She is very good at making it not stick. Me, not so much. But are pans really the problem? The actual coating on the pan is Teflon, which, again, is just a long, inert chain
• 38:30 - 39:00 of carbon-fluorine bonds. So even if you ingest it, it doesn't react with your body. If you have a pan like that at home, you probably don't need to throw it out. The same goes for most other PFAS-containing products. Waterproof clothing, stain-resistant furniture, and sweat-proof watchbands might all release some level of PFAS, but the risk of direct exposure through skin is likely low. So the bigger problem is how easily PFAS from these products can end up in the environment.
• 39:00 - 39:30 And many of the factories that make these products don't have a good track record of keeping the chemicals contained. - People don't understand that the stories that you see, for example, what was happening in the community in West Virginia, this is the same chemical and the same things that we're seeing play out now in Australia and in Japan, in Italy, in Germany, in the UK. I mean, there are a lot of folks that are still not grasping the fact that these are the same chemicals.
• 39:30 - 40:00 - Our second main source of exposure is food. A lot of it comes packaged in PFAS-treated materials, like takeout boxes, microwave popcorn bags, and burger wrappers. It's on a burger wrapper. Is it a tiny amount? Is it a ridiculously tiny amount? - We actually did tests at the lab with stuff that usually contains PFAS. So microwave popcorn, fast food wrappers, paper cups that are waterproof.
• 40:00 - 40:30 So I have tap water here from a house in London. Could we boil some water? Because usually you interact with these products when they're hot and then see if any of the PFAS leaches off and you potentially eat them or drink them. - This is citizen science, right? So it's, like, there might be some error, but with a solid control and then with the same tap water going to all of them, we can at least get something, yeah. - Yeah, and even if we get nothing, we'll know that people are probably safe using these products. All right. - Whisk it around. - Yeah, really get that PFAS
• 40:30 - 41:00 in that water, right. - The juices going. - And get the PFAS juices going. - Well, it's supposed to be safe for human consumption. - Yeah. - That's the wild thing. - We sloshed it around there, hot water, boiling water for around 30 seconds, and then we tested that water to see if any of the PFAS that are used to coat these items would actually make it into the water. So here's what I got. And these are parts per trillion now. So for PFOA, good news. Basically no detection anywhere except for the microwave popcorn. I will say these are very low levels, but hold your horses 'cause microwave popcorn gets worse. - The thing about microwave popcorn,
• 41:00 - 41:30 it's sitting in there wrapped up with the popcorn for months or years before you ever stick it in your microwave. That gives those chemicals plenty of time to, like, leach into the oils, and it's gonna go all over the popcorn, and you're gonna eat it. This could explain some of our own results. The level for PFPeA, which is a shorter variation of PFOA, came back at 10 parts per trillion after the popcorn bag test. And you can see similar results in some of the other PFAS species.
• 41:30 - 42:00 - But then microwave popcorn actually drops for PFOS. Why could that be? We don't actually know. - I was gonna say maybe the PFOS, like, went on that wrapper and found its friends and just hung out there. - Yeah, could be. I know we've only done, like, one test here. No repeat measurements, so we can't conclude much from this, but there's something to be said for when you're using these products, they're gonna leach into your water and leach into your food - And research tends to agree. A 2019 study found that eating fast food
• 42:00 - 42:30 and microwave popcorn especially can increase your PFAS load while eating homecooked meals doesn't. But even something as simple as reheating your food on a plate instead of in the original packaging could prevent PFAS from migrating to your food. Now, you might expect that these part per trillion levels we detected in the London tap water are nothing compared to the parts per billion you'd find in human blood, but the surprising thing is that to have two parts per billion of PFOA in your blood,
• 42:30 - 43:00 you don't need to drink water with two parts per billion of PFOA in it because PFAS accumulate in your body over time. So even water with as little as four parts per trillion of PFOA combined with other exposure can be enough to maintain your blood levels this high. And this is why, in addition to food, water is your biggest source of exposure. This is especially true if you live near a PFAS factory where the local water is often heavily contaminated.
• 43:00 - 43:30 But the same goes for areas near military bases or airports. See, adding chemicals like PFOA or PFOS to water lowers its surface tension so the water gets more slippery, and these chemicals also tend to foam up. So they make for an excellent ingredient in firefighting foams, they spread quicker, and the foam blocks access to oxygen extremely well. And since both military bases and airports frequently do fire drills with these foams, they end up seeping
• 43:30 - 44:00 into the surrounding soil and groundwater. But it doesn't stop there. - Currently, we have reached planetary saturation levels for PFAS, which means that when you look up at that cloud and it rains, it rains unsafe levels of at least four PFAS species. - It turns out that our entire water cycle is contaminated with PFAS. So even when it rains on the Tibetan Plateau, that rain contains PFAS. To check the water levels in your area,
• 44:00 - 44:30 you can use these maps that show PFAS contamination across the US, Europe, and Australia. What about Los Angeles, Encino? That's where I spent, like, 7 of the last 10 years. - Crescenta Valley. - Those are all high. - Yeah. - Santa Clarita, some. PFHxS level is crazy. So maybe you're getting your water from Santa Clarita. - Wow. - There's a calculator. It could give you what an estimate in your blood serum is.
• 44:30 - 45:00 What we can try to do now is put that up in the calculator, see if you get something close to what you have, if you want. - Sure. - PFHxS, so typical value for an adult is one part per billion, and then the Santa Clarita water is around 37 parts per trillion. - If you look after, like, 10 years. - So after roughly 10 years of exposure, you would have to have 6.85 parts per billion in your blood. And then I can tell you that you are at 6.84. - That would explain things. Now, I can't say for sure
• 45:00 - 45:30 where my drinking water was coming from, but if I was consistently drinking water contaminated at similar levels, then that would explain my results. But if you are worried about your own water, you should contact your provider directly for the most relevant information. It's concerning just how unregulated drinking water has been. It was actually only a year ago in April 2024 that the US EPA finally set legal limits for PFAS in drinking water. The safe level for PFOA went down
• 45:30 - 46:00 from DuPont's initial one part per billion to four parts per trillion. - So we're no longer talking about one drop of PFOA in 20 of these tanks, we're talking about one drop in 5,000. That's five Olympic-sized swimming pools. And if there's even a drop of PFOA in there, the EPA is concerned. - The same four parts per trillion limit was also set for PFOS, the sister chemical. And GenX went down from the 70,000 parts per trillion initially proposed by Chemours to just 10.
• 46:00 - 46:30 The same goes for PFHxS. For reference, the EPA's limit for lead in water is 10,000 parts per trillion, and for cyanide, 200,000, - It gives you a pretty clear indication of how concerned the scientific community is. - And just when we got EPA limits, we got a new administration in the US, which might be reversing some of the PFAS bans. So you can't always depend on the regulators, and you seemingly can't depend on the companies
• 46:30 - 47:00 that make this stuff to dispose of it safely. So what can you do? If your water is contaminated, you might want to consider getting a PFAS-certified filter. Reverse osmosis, granulated active carbon, and ion exchange filters are all capable of removing PFAS out of drinking water. But the responsibility to filter drinking water shouldn't come down to the individual. PFAS should be captured at the source, during manufacturing, before they ever reach the environment.
• 47:00 - 47:30 And some companies like Puraffinity are developing custom filters to make that happen. - So very lab-looking lab. - Exactly. Yeah, yeah. So could you walk me through, like, what all these pipes do, and what do you have in here? - So this water is representative of where you've had a big firefighting foam incident. So you wanna filter this water, but basically, the concept is take it from the top through the vessel. As it passes through this material, it basically sticks on to some of the PFAS chemicals in water, and then you run into another part of treatment
• 47:30 - 48:00 and a third one. - To me, it seems like if PFAS are so, like, bioaccumulative and actually persistent and stable, they don't really react with things. So how do you force them to react with stuff in here? - Basically, taking advantage of this long organic tail as well as the polar head, and so you can have some electrostatic interactions with the polar head, and then you can have some hydrophilic and hydrophobic interactions with the tail. And by combining these three binding mechanisms, you increase massively your likelihood of binding PFAS,
• 48:00 - 48:30 even if it's still difficult. - Right, do the levels drop 100% already here, or do you see a gradual decrease in PFAS as you go? - That's the cool question. - Okay. - So in the beginning, it drops 100% after this one. - Oh, so problem solved, or? - Problem solved for the time being. - Okay. Okay. - What we see right now is it will last about 40,000 volumes of this vessel. So a 10-liter vessel would basically provides all of the PFAS treatment for a household. - In a year. - For a year. - You want this to be in factories first,
• 48:30 - 49:00 so it never gets into the water. - Yeah. - Yeah. - We are talking to the fluorochemicals manufacturers, and they're really trying to, yeah, move forward rather than just wait for regulations. (bright music) - Everyone's true risk from PFAS will be different. It depends on dozens of factors, like your water contamination, your lifestyle, what you eat. But how much should you really worry about it? Like, if I'm at 17 or 18 parts per billion, is that the equivalent of drinking a beer a night or going out in the Australian sun without sunscreen?
• 49:00 - 49:30 - So what I like to do is create this hierarchy of risk. And in terms of hierarchy of risk reduction, number one on that is stopping smoking, exercising, consuming a healthy, whole-food diet, and making sure you're getting seven to nine hours of sleep. Then you have medium levels of intervention, seeing your primary care doctor, controlling your cholesterol numbers. And then on the lower tier that you have, PFAS probably falls into that lower tier. - Being preventative about PFAS exposure
• 49:30 - 50:00 is currently our only option because there are no approved medical treatments available. However, if you compare PFAS contamination between the sexes, male levels are consistently higher, at least up until around the age of 50 when menopause usually starts. This is partly because menstruation, birth, and lactation are all ways PFAS can escape the body. PFAS can pass through the placenta and into the fetus during pregnancy,
• 50:00 - 50:30 and then the baby can also get exposed through breast milk. - It's something that pregnant people should be extremely careful about. You know, young children are incredibly susceptible. They're drinking more water, they're growing, they're near surfaces like treated carpets. - Now, not everyone has to change their lifestyle because of PFAS, but if you are in a high-risk group because of pregnancy or because you live or work in a PFAS-contaminated area, you might want to consider it.
• 50:30 - 51:00 (fire roaring) Firefighters have especially high PFAS levels because their gear and foams are laced with them. Remarkably, a 2022 study found that when firefighters donated blood or plasma frequently enough, they reduced their PFAS levels by up to 30% within a year. - And it's kind of ironic that, you know, our health system's coming back to bloodletting. - What do you think about the idea of donating blood as a way to reduce PFAS in the body? - I've never heard of that as a strategy.
• 51:00 - 51:30 That's kind of interesting. Well, I definitely recommend people donate blood more frequently, not because of PFAS exposure, but because of the fact we desperately need blood. What's important to note is that, especially in this current administration, we need to be very careful about shifting budgets away from research agencies because without that research, the guidance that I'm giving is gonna be significantly more flawed. The reason I'm able to talk about what we know and what we don't know comes from that research. So if we're gonna be cutting the budgets to these major agencies and letting scientists go,
• 51:30 - 52:00 we're only gonna get worse and worse information. - We are still a good few years away from proper medical treatment and better PFAS regulations because this is extremely tricky. There are places where we should ban PFAS completely, like hygiene products, cosmetics, and food packaging, and some countries are already doing that. But we also can't ban PFAS altogether, at least not yet, because we still rely on these chemicals for things like medical implants. And it's currently impossible to make semiconductors for our electronics without them
• 52:00 - 52:30 - All the tubing for the vaccine manufacturing is PFAS-based. They take us to space as well, our space suits. But even in these niche applications, we have to be responsible around how we use it. - People are coming together from a lot of different disciplines to create destruction mechanisms, to create novel capture materials, and to create novel replacements. I am excited and inspired by all of the great work that's going on around me. So I think if people want to learn more,
• 52:30 - 53:00 I would advise them to learn about the risk, but then also learn about the new technology that's being developed that will hopefully put us in the right direction. - So to me, you know, one of the most important things we can do is have discussions like what we're doing right here. If the story and the information's out there, people can make informed choices about whether they want to continue purchasing things that have these materials in them. And what we're seeing is consumers, as they do become aware,
• 53:00 - 53:30 are saying, "No, we don't want these chemicals." And companies are voluntarily coming forward and taking these chemicals out of products because the consumers are now demanding it. - We've been here before with lead in gasoline, Freon, and asbestos. And each time, we did the research and made the right decision to phase these chemicals out. With PFAS, we're just starting to understand the problem. But I'm hopeful we'll make the same decision again.
• 53:30 - 54:00 If you want to inform yourself more about PFAS, we've attached all the sources we've used to make this video down in the description. It's actually our longest episode ever, and we couldn't have made it without the help of our sponsor, Ground News. So if you wanna be more informed about the issues around the world that are affecting you and everyone else out there, go to ground.news/ve or use this QR code. I really wanna thank Ground News for sponsoring this video, and I wanna thank you for watching.