Just outside of Bangor, Maine — the hometown of renowned horror creator Stephen King — greater than 500 students, faculty and staff arrive at Hermon High School every day.
But since November, they’ll now not drink the water. All of the fountains are taped off with plastic bags. Bottles of water are stacked nearby. A water filtration system is ready to be installed over the summer.
A fountain at Hermon High School in Maine is taped shut after the water tested over the state’s safety limit for PFAS chemicals.
CNBC
“We’re very concerned,” Hermon School District Superintendent Micah Grant told CNBC.
The explanation? The varsity’s water recently tested above the state’s safety limit for PFAS, or per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, also known as “without end chemicals.”
In line with the Environmental Protection Agency, even tiny exposure to PFAS in drinking water could pose a serious health risk.
“We’re not fully understanding why it’s in our water and it’s at the extent we’re at,” Grant said.
Hermon High School is only one example of PFAS contamination currently affecting the community, in accordance with Maine’s attorney general, Aaron Frey. The chemicals have also been identified in groundwater in towns and municipalities throughout the state including several military facilities and farms, in accordance with Frey.
“There are farmers who needed to euthanize their livestock due to chemical contamination,” Frey told CNBC.
Farmer Adam Nordell looks on the remnants of his once-thriving Songbird Farm, now shut down after its soil and crops tested positive for toxic “without end chemicals.”
CNBC
Maine recently joined a growing list of states — which now includes Latest Mexico, Maryland, and Rhode Island — in filing litigation against several chemical manufacturers claiming they’ve caused significant harm to the state’s residents and natural resources.
“We’re alleging that 3M and DuPont [and other manufacturers] created these chemicals … had the science that showed just how dangerous they were, how toxic they were, how they were going to last without end,” Frey said. “It’s my responsibility to do whatever I can to carry accountable those corporations that profited off of this chemical.”
Greater than a dozen other states — including Alaska, California, Colorado, Delaware, Florida, Illinois, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Latest Hampshire, Latest Jersey, Latest York, North Carolina, Ohio, Vermont and Wisconsin — have filed litigation against PFAS manufacturers over time.
Some have already reached settlements. Minnesota, for instance, settled with 3M for $850 million, and Delaware settled with DuPont and its spinoffs for $50 million, resolving the businesses’ responsibility for damage in those states.
Wall Street is now awaiting a bellwether trial in federal court, set to start Monday, by which the town of Stuart, Florida, alleges that firefighting foam chemicals manufactured by 3M contaminated its water supply.
What are PFAS?
In line with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, PFAS are a bunch of chemicals used to make coatings and products that resist heat, oil, stains, grease and water.
The human-made substances date back to the Nineteen Forties, and over the a long time, they have been utilized in a wide selection of applications, including nonstick cookware, waterproof fabrics, carpeting, food packaging and cosmetics along with firefighting foam like that at the middle of the lawsuit in Stuart.
But over time, concerns began to rise. CDC officials say the synthetic chemicals don’t break down within the environment and are tied to serious health risks.
“We have seen correlations with thyroid disease, certain sorts of cancer, kidney disease, liver dysfunction, it becomes concentrated within the liver … they’re called ‘without end chemicals’ because they stay in your body,” former FDA Commissioner Dr. Scott Gottlieb told CNBC. “I feel what the federal government must do is step up testing, ensure that now we have a greater picture of where these chemicals are stepping into food sources [and] within the water supply.”
While testing of PFAS is predicted to turn out to be more prevalent within the years to come back, Gottlieb said there are steps consumers can take now to evaluate their exposure. Residents who live near a military base or an industrial plant that is understood for making these chemicals should ask their local water utility if it has tested PFAS levels, he said.
“There was a giant evaluation done quite a few years ago of various water municipalities that found that about 1% of all municipal water sources did contain some level of PFAS,” Gottlieb said.
Greater than 64 million persons are affected by drinking water contaminated with PFAS — represented by a reading of 4 parts per trillion or above — in accordance with an EPA report released in March.
Manufacturers respond
Several manufacturers have announced plans to cut back or discontinue the production of PFAS in the approaching years.
“Because the science and technology of PFAS, societal and regulatory expectations, and our expectations of ourselves have evolved, so has how we manage PFAS,” a 3M spokesperson said in a press release to CNBC, adding the corporate plans to finish production of the chemicals by 2025.
The corporate also expressed a commitment to remediate PFAS contamination, spend money on water treatment and collaborate with communities.
DuPont, then again, said it has “never manufactured” the harmful chemicals and believes the legal complaints are “without merit.”
The corporate, formerly E.I. du Pont de Nemours, separated its chemical businesses in 2015, forming Chemours Company. It then merged with Dow in 2017 to create DowDuPont, after which subsequently split into three separate entities in 2019: Corteva Agriscience, Dow and the brand new DuPont.
All these corporations, together with others, are named as defendants in Maine’s lawsuit. DuPont and Chemours have been severed from the bellwether trial where the town of Stuart, Florida is the fundamental plaintiff.
On Friday, DuPont, Chemours and Corteva announced a $1.19 billion fund that might be used to resolve “PFAS-related drinking water claims.” Nevertheless an addendum to a joint statement announcing the fund adds that it “doesn’t include claims of private injury as a result of alleged exposure to PFAS or claims by State Attorneys General that alleged PFAS contamination has damaged the State’s natural resources.”
Chemours pledged in 2018 to cut back PFAS emissions at its manufacturing sites by not less than 99% by 2030. A spokesperson said in a press release it has made significant progress in implementing advanced technologies to reduce emissions of fluorinated organic compounds.
Dow denied manufacturing PFAS and said it shouldn’t be accused of causing any environmental contamination.
A Corteva spokesperson told CNBC it “doesn’t comment on ongoing legal matters.”
Mounting liabilities for 3M
RBC Capital Markets Managing Director Deane Dray sees the lawsuits as a specific financial risk to 3M.
“At this stage, given valuation and what we all know concerning the PFAS litigation, we do consider 3M to be uninvestable at this point,” Dray told CNBC.
3M Global Headquarters in Maplewood, Minnesota, US, on Thursday, Jan. 26, 2023.
Ben Brewer | Bloomberg | Getty Images
Shares of 3M have been under pressure this 12 months, down 20% over the past six months, trading at their lowest level in over 10 years.
“I expect PFAS to be a front-page news item for the following couple of years,” Dray said, adding that the substances are used straight away in lots of semiconductor applications and military weapons systems.
In line with RBC Capital, 3M’s PFAS liability risk amounts to an estimated $20 billion to $25 billion.
3M is showing signs it could be feeling the pressure: In its latest earnings report it revealed a restructuring plan that included layoffs affecting 6,000 employees world wide that the corporate says will save as much as $900 million a 12 months. It is also planning to spin off its health-care business in early 2024, which analysts say will generate billions of dollars in capital.
The commercial giant is already facing separate lawsuits over its military Combat Arms earplugs. Those suits are being brought by greater than 200,000 military service members and veterans who claim 3M’s earplugs were defective and did not protect them from hearing loss during combat and training.
3M’s Combat Arms CAEv2 earplugs
CNBC
3M attorney Eric Rucker told CNBC in March that the earplugs worked when used in accordance with their instructions and that any liabilities estimate was “purely speculative.”
PFAS and politics
Last 12 months, the Biden administration announced that $10 billion from the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law can be used toward addressing PFAS contamination.
That very same month, the EPA introduced for the primary time recent standards on drinking water that address the quantity of PFAS allowable for consumption.
The industry is awaiting word on whether the EPA will move forward with designating PFAS compounds as hazardous chemicals, which experts say could open the door to further litigation and push water utilities to make needed upgrades to their filtration systems.
While the agency has publicly acknowledged its intent to accomplish that, experts including Capstone energy analyst Gianna Kinsman says a proper designation could come by the top of this 12 months.
Kinsman added that the 2024 presidential election could also influence the timeline: “I feel it is probably going that if a Republican takes office we could see a slowdown in PFAS regulation, whereas if Biden wins a second term I think his PFAS regulatory agenda might be much more ambitious, potentially tackling PFAS by larger categories somewhat than individually.”
RBC’s Dray added that there’s national security interest in extending the usage of PFAS as a result of a scarcity of other options in the marketplace.
“[It will take] a decade to develop one other molecule after which have all of the testing done,” he said.
Within the meantime, scientists and industrial experts are in an arms race to develop a safer substitute to PFAS. Others are researching technologies that use electrification and warmth to interrupt down synthetic chemicals in addition to treatment options for exposed areas.
Grassroots motion
Nearly 30 miles away from Hermon High School, in the agricultural farming town of Unity, Maine, sits the remnants of the once-thriving Songbird Farm.
Nine years ago, Adam Nordell — who’s now an advocate for nonprofit Defend Our Health — and his wife, Johanna Davis, got here to this property to grow healthy and fresh produce to sell to their community.
On the time, Songbird was thriving and luxurious, and over time the couple grew a mixture of grains and vegetables, including tomatoes, peppers, garlic, onions, sweet potatoes and cantaloupe.
But that each one modified two years ago when Nordell and Davis had their soil tested after a customer called about a neighborhood news report she saw detailing a farm contaminated with PFAS.
When the test results got here back, their worst fears were realized.
“We learned our land was severely contaminated with without end chemicals,” Nordell said. “As soon as we learned, we shut down.”
The family has since learned the land was spread with municipal wastewater treatment sludge within the early Nineteen Nineties. Nordell said on the time it was marketed to farmers as a free or low-cost source of fertilization.
“The farmers were told they were fertilizing their crops. Unfortunately, that wastewater is laden with all types of industrial chemicals which might be leaching out of consumer products,” he said.
The mission of the nonprofit he now works for is to cut back people’s exposure to toxic chemicals, to boost awareness amongst farmers across the country and to carry chemical manufacturers accountable.
“They should step as much as the plate and pay for the impact that they’ve had on the world,” Nordell said.