Chemours Claims That PFAS Chemical GeneX Protects Climate

Chemours offersA new argument was made in defense of GenX, one of its toxic PFAS chemical compounds: The compound, which causes cancer and other health effects on lab animals, was released by the company into the water supply of hundreds of thousands of people. It is necessary to combat climate change.

Chemours is a chemical company that was spun-off from DuPont 2015 and made the case to GenX as an environment good in response. Toxicity assessmentThe October 2018 Environmental Protection Agency document. The EPA document outlined a safety threshold that GenX should be kept away from based on studies that showed it can cause liver damage in rats and cancerous tumors. In a March 18 Request for correction Chemours’ attorneys asked the agency to weaken its threshold, arguing that GenX is necessary for the country’s transition away from fossil fuels.

“Chemours’s chemistries are critical to achieving the United States’ energy transition and decarbonization ambitions,” attorneys from the firm Arnold & Porter wrote, going on to note that GenX is used in the process of creating compounds called fluoropolymers, which are used to make lithium-ion batteries used in electric cars, membranes used for water purification, and hydrogen from renewable sources.

The company, which makes GenX in its plant in Fayetteville, North Carolina, and uses the chemical at its facilities in New Jersey and West Virginia, also insisted that continued domestic production is important for U.S. energy independence: “There are often no domestically manufactured alternative replacement products available for these mission-critical applications.”

According to Chemours, which reported net sales of $6.3 billion last year, restrictions on GenX are not just a threat to the company’s bottom line. Noting that “fluoropolymers are used in every car, airplane, cellphone, as well as semiconductor and computer chips” and are also used in the production of “the vast majority of prescription drugs,” the company’s attorneys argued that the “EPA’s Toxicity Assessment, unless corrected, has the potential to cause significant harm to Chemours as well as to the broader United States economy.”

As the climate crisis has grown, fossil fuel companies have responded to it with a lot of greenwashing. False promises, Branded contentThis incorrectly absolves oil or gas from responsibility for climate changes. Even in this context, Chemours’ attempt to position its toxic chemical as a solution to energy and water problems has struck some environmental advocates as remarkably cynical. They object to the company’s pitting of one environmental cause against another and scoff at the notion that GenX, one of a class of ChemicalsIt is causing one of the worst and most persistent pollution problems in recent human history. This is helping to end the climate catastrophe.

“Chemours currently manufactures PFAS by using and releasing potent greenhouse gas chemicals such as HCFC-22. They are clearly part of the climate pollution problem, not the solution,” said Laurie Valeriano, executive director of the advocacy group Future that is toxic-free. “A clean energy future includes safer products made without emissions of potent greenhouse gases and hazardous chemicals.”

Toxic History

Veterans of the battle over PFAS contamination find the company’s claims about the environmental and economic benefits of GenX familiar. “This is the same kind of argument we’ve been hearing for several decades now,” said Rob Bilott, an attorney who suedDuPont takes on another toxic PFAS compound PFOA1999. The company had used PFOA for decades to make Teflon and other products — and spent years defending it as an industrial necessity. DuPont only agreed to phase it out in 2006 after Bilott shared voluminous evidence with the EPA showing that exposure to the chemical led to cancers, liver damage, and immune effects — and only after the company had selected a substitute: GenX.

“It’s just remarkable to see how the spin continues, trying to implicate these chemicals with products that will resonate with consumers,” said Bilott. “They’re trying to create fear that by actually regulating these chemicals that present a public health threat, you’re going to force people to make choices about these products.”

Bilott is an expert on such attempts to avoid regulation. He first discovered documents showing that DuPont (along 3MPFOA was first created by. PFOA had been known for decades about the health and environmental effects of PFOA. The evidence was kept secretPublic and regulators. The EPA fined DuPont $10.5 million over its deception — the biggest penalty in the agency’s history at the time. The punishment was too late to protect the environment and health. PFOA had already contaminated the drinking waters of around 80,000 people who lived near a DuPont plant, West Virginia, by the time the fine was imposed. Later, it was discovered that the exposure caused a local rise in testicular and kidney cancers in the exposed population.

GenX emerged from Complex negotiationsDuPont and EPA negotiated the phasing out of PFOA. The environmental agency was harsh with DuPont for withholding evidence about the dangers of PFOA, but it also offered to give the company nearly a decade to replace it. During the back-and-forth between the company and the agency in 2006, DuPont had insisted that the EPA give its substitute compound “timely review and approvals.” By then, the company already had evidence that GenX had some of the same effects as PFOA on lab animals. DuPont’s Your own studiesThe EPA submitted data between 2006 and 2013. It showed that the replacement chemical caused liver damage and kidney damage, developmental effects including delayed genital development and early deliveries, immune suppression, and cancerous tumors in the liver and pancreas. first reported2016

Despite all the evidence of harm, EPA approved GenX in the timeframe requested by DuPont. Consent order in 2009 that acknowledged that the replacement chemical could present the same risks as PFOA — including cancer, systemic toxicity, and reproductive toxicity — while allowing DuPont and, after 2015, Chemours to make GenX at its North Carolina plant. DuPont quietly handed over the product in the years following, while DuPont was releasing the new product into Cape Fear River. Further research to the EPA that showed that the toxicity profile of its new chemical in fact did match that of its old one — and that in some cases, GenX was even more toxic than PFOA. Based on these studies, the January 2022 toxicity evaluation set a safety level that was significantly lower that that of PFOA. According to the EPA, it is currently reviewing the PFOA standards and will issue a drinking water advisory for GenX based upon the assessment this spring.

These regulatory steps were taken 16 years after DuPont submitted its first GenX report to the EPA. They were not enough to protect the public, as was the case with PFOA. Residents of Wilmington, North Carolina have known for decades that they had been drinking water laced by the compound since it was released into their rivers in 2009, when DuPont started producing it. Chemours entered into an agreement with Chemours in 2019 after the news of the contamination spread. Consent orderWith the North Carolina Department of Environmental Quality (N.C. Environmental Group). Cape Fear River WatchIt also agreed to provide replacement drinking water for residents whose water was contaminated by GenX.

Escaping Financial Responsibility

As the company freely admitted in its March request for correction, a change to the safety threshold set in the EPA’s toxicity assessment could relieve the company of some of its legal obligations under that consent order. In the agreement, the level of GenX in drinking water that triggers Chemours’ responsibility to provide clean water “is subject to adjustment based on an ‘applicable EPA health advisory,’” as the lawyers note. “An EPA health advisory for [GenX] could therefore substantially affect Chemours’s obligations under the North Carolina Consent Order.” Because the new level set by the EPA is more protective than the one set by North Carolina, Chemours could face additional financial obligations in North Carolina if its petition fails. The company could spend less if it wins, as it would have to provide clean water for fewer people.

Even if the EPA denies Chemours’ request for correction, drinkers of the contaminated water are already being forced to pick up hundreds of millions of dollars in costs to purify it. Brunswick is one of two counties in North Carolina that recently increased water rates to cover the cost of new systems installed to filter out PFAS. “Brunswick County is a poor, rural county, and people there are now paying to put in a reverse osmosis plant for their water treatment to PFAS specifically because Chemours won’t,” said Johnsie Lang, a scientist who has studied GenX. Lang, who lives in the county, saw her own monthly water bill rise from $130 to $180 in March.

The request for correction comes at an opportune time for Chemours in North Carolina. The consent order requires that the company provides clean water to households with water contaminated above a specific level. “But they had no idea how big their plume was. At first, it looked like there would probably be like 100 or less houses,” said Lang. Now, more than 6,000 are eligible. “And the number is still growing. I think they thought they were done, that they spent the money they wanted to spend.”

Chemours paid over $100 million for technology that reduces air emissions of GenX by 99.99 percent, as the consent order required. But the company has also been fined by the state Department of Environmental Quality for at least 16 violations of the consent order and related regulations, including exceeding the air emissions limit, disposing of waste improperly, and releasing more PFAS into water than allowed. And while the amount of GenX released from the North Carolina plant has clearly been reduced, shorter-chain PFAS have been found in water around the state — including on beaches and in home gutters, some as far as 80 miles from the plant.

Liver and testicular cancer

It is not unusual for companies Challenge EPA scienceThat could result in a decrease in profits. These companies are not afraid to offer a range criticisms in the hope of prevailing on at least one point. In the case of GenX, Chemours has argued not only that the chemical is essential to halt the climate crisis, but also that the science used to calculate the safety threshold is flawed. In the request for correction, the company’s lawyers claimed that the EPA failed to consider epidemiological data released by the North Carolina Department of Health and Human Services in 2017 and that “NCDHHS concluded that rates of liver and other cancers are Generally, lower North Carolina counties with exposures to [GenX]The rates reported in both the U.S. state population and North Carolina counties without alleged exposure. [GenX].”

Asked to confirm this finding, a North Carolina health agency representative said that Chemours’ interpretation of its data was not accurate. “NCDHHS did not conclude that rates of liver and other cancers are generally lower in North Carolina counties with exposures to [GenX] than the rates reported in the U.S. general population, in the state of North Carolina, or in North Carolina counties without alleged exposure” to GenX, Catie Armstrong, a spokesperson for the department, wrote in an email to The Intercept. Armstrong also noted that while overall cancer rates in the four counties studied were similar, in New Hanover County rates of testicular cancer were elevated over a 20-year period and rates of liver cancer were higher over a five-year period. The cancer rates collected by the health department are descriptive, Armstrong said, and “only a comprehensive research study can provide information about whether a specific exposure might be associated with increased rates of cancer.”

Local advocates have asked for such a thorough epidemiological study on people who drank contaminated waters in the area. This was most explicitly requested by a Petition local environmental groups submitted to the EPA in October 2020, the company’s misinterpretation of incomplete data is particularly galling. “One of the big pushes in our petition is for a comprehensive epidemiological study for people in that portion of North Carolina,” said Bob Sussman, an attorney representing the environmental groups that submitted the petition, which also demands health and environmental studies of 54 PFAS compounds that Chemours emitted in the area. “Chemours’ misrepresentation of a study that in fact shows increases in liver tumors in PFAS-impacted areas is disturbing and of a piece with the company’s resistance to conducting the research requested in the petition.”

Another Chemours strategy that is vexing for clean water advocates is its argument that the EPA is incorrectly applying “uncertainty factors” in its calculation of the safety standard for GenX. To compensate for knowledge gaps about the effects of chemicals, the agency uses numbers to make safety thresholds more protective. Chemours says that the EPA has inappropriately inflated the uncertainty factors, resulting in a threshold that’s too low. But Sussman pointed out that the agency used the factors because the company didn’t provide studies that show definitively how the chemical affects people.

“In our petition, we say that we need all this additional testing on GenX. And here’s Chemours coming in and not even addressing the central point — that we don’t have the data we need,” said Sussman. “What I would say to Chemours is, if you don’t like these uncertainty factors, then you better go out and do some testing.”

Locked In

Environmental scientists agree with Chemours on at least one point: that GenX is now used to make fluoropolymers that wind up in a wide range of products, including, as the company’s attorneys pointed out to the EPA, computer chips, light-weight vehicles, and “piping and vessels to protect employees from harsh chemicals.” Such economic facts are irrelevant to the science about the chemical — and have no place in a toxicity assessment, according to Linda Birnbaum, who directed the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences and served as the country’s chief toxicologist until 2019. Still, said Birnbaum, “the issue that they raised — that PFAS are everywhere — that’s absolutely true. The point is that it’s a bad thing.”

The trickier question is how to make these products without using dangerous chemicals. Some manufacturers use these chemicals. already begun to create fluoropolymers without PFAS — one did so back in 2008. Mark Rossi, executive director at Clean Production Action, said that a complete transition away from GenX would take time. “If it’s currently necessary in the moment, I would say it’s not necessary in the long run,” said Rossi. “If you said, from today, you have to be out of all PFAS in manufacturing in five to 10 years, I’d say that’s a reasonable timeline.”

While the No other uses of PFAS could easily be immediately stopped, the gradual phaseout from more critical products will take both commitment and investment as well as time, according to Zhanyun Wang. “Nonfluorinated alternatives exist, but they require innovation,” said Wang, a scientist at the Swiss Federal Laboratories for Materials Science and Technology, known as EMPA. “Until you train the next generation of scientists, they always follow the same chemistry.”

The public has frustratingly little say over whether the production of our cellphones, cars, and allergy medicines involves the contamination of the environment. “The companies always say that they are customer-driven,” said Wang. “But if you think about it, it’s actually the companies deciding for us.”

Climate activists refer to the phenomenon of a polluting industry doubling down on nonsustainable practices that are profitable in the short term — and catastrophic in the long term — as “lock-in.” Ironically, with its challenge to the EPA, Chemours is using the promise of helping fight the lock-in of fossil fuels to justify further locking in the use of PFAS, arguing that its own environmental contaminants are essential and immutable.

Chemours refused to answer a question regarding the relevance of economic arguments to the toxic assessment. Instead, it provided The Intercept with an emailed statement that said, in part, “We support science-based regulation that is protective of public health and the environment, and we are committed to manufacturing our advanced chemistries responsibly — including by working to achieve our ambitious corporate responsibility goals.”