Minnesota Led the World into Global PFAS Contamination - Now We are Leading the Resolution

Can Minnesota’s legislative ban on PFAS in commercial products provide a path towards resolution on this Global Contaminant? (a canoe navigates a cove in the Kawishiwi River, BWCA - photo by Carl Bohacek)

In early May, the MN state legislature passed the toughest PFAS restrictions in the country, banning the use of intentionally added PFAS compounds in at least ten categories of commercial products.  The wide ranging PFAS ban will go into effect Jan 1, 2025; by 2032 the ban will prohibit the addition of PFAS to any commercial product sold or distributed in the state of Minnesota.  Although Minnesota’s PFAS ban is decried by the chemical industry as too fast, too harsh and too confusing, the 2025 ban will be activated over 50 years after PFAS compounds were first identified as uninvited interlopers in the blood of the general population.

Fifty years.  

That’s a very long time to continually expose the global community to chemicals that essentially never degrade, accumulate in humans, have been linked to several cancers, and pass from mother to child both in-utero and via breast milk.  The 50 year slog from discovery of PFAS contamination in humans to Minnesota’s proposed ban started with a concerning lack of transparency from 3M and others and continued when industry leaders justified inaction with overly hopeful interpretation of inadequate toxicological and epidemiological data.  After all that time and all that misdirection, it’s hard to consider the chemical industry as a reasonable voice in the discussion about the legitimacy of PFAS controls.

Although I would never call it “justice”, it does feel appropriate that, when enacted, Minnesota’s PFAS restrictions will be the most comprehensive in the country.  3M, formerly Minnesota Mining & Manufacturing, is headquartered in Maplewood, MN and is the company that developed the virtually indestructible “forever chemicals” in the 1940s. 3M was one of the world’s main producers and distributors for decades, including in 2023.  

Certainly Minnesotans have paid the price for 3M’s fluorochemical-based profits.  My community, for example, is one of many located east of 3M headquarters making and implementing plans to mitigate broad PFAS contamination in our drinking water…contamination that we are addressing now but that has likely been present in our water since the 1970s.  A 2018 legal settlement negotiated between the state and 3M provides $850,000,000 which should finance nearly 2 decades of clean water for me and the other 150,000 citizens living in the contaminated region between  3M’s former PFAS landfills and the St. Croix and Mississippi Rivers.  

After 2 decades, the settlement money will be gone; the chemicals will remain in the aquifers that source our drinking water. 

Some estimates indicate that 12,000-5,000 individual PFAS compounds are added, intentionally or not, to the PFAS-treated products we use.  This number is well over an order of magnitude more compounds than most labs are prepared to analyze.  Critics of Minnesota’s proposed restrictions argue that the mismatch between what’s contaminating our environment and what a lab can measure is a reason to limit regulation.  Truly misguided logic (“we know they make people sick but since we cant conveniently measure them, we’d like to go ahead and just keep making people sick”), but luckily, thanks to the progress of science, critics’ concerns can be addressed with more advances in “total PFAS” methods that measure all PFAS compounds together without specifically differentiating between them.  Although there are nearly infinite iterations of PFAS compounds, they all eventually end up as indestructible, fluorinated nuggets that move through the environment and into our bodies.

The House and Senate’s passage of Minnesota’s PFAS ban is widely credited to Amara Strande, a young activist from Oakdale, MN who recently died from a rare form of liver cancer she believes was caused by a childhood spent drinking PFAS-contaminated water.  The work of this 20 year old woman advocating for more accountability from chemical companies, who died days before her 21st birthday, helped to silence critics who argued that more time was needed to study the effects of PFAS on humans.

Although Minnesota does not have the economic might to match a state like California, by setting the bar for PFAS regulation in commercial products, Minnesota becomes a leader that other states will follow.  Maine, Colorado, California have all played important roles in rolling out legislation and bans, each state learning and revising their own plans based on the development in other states.  

Through 3M, Minnesota led the way into the morass that is global PFAS contamination; with this legislation, hopefully our state will have a role in leading our way towards PFAS resolution, too.