Mitigating PFAS Exposure is a Team Sport

Photo by Carl Bohacek

Avoiding PFAS exposure is not as simple as reading labels or choosing PFAS-free products.  The only truly effective strategy for reducing PFAS levels in our bodies and the environment is to support legislation that prohibits the use of these “forever” and “everywhere” chemicals.  As you work to avoid personal exposure to PFAS-containing products when you shop, consider investing some energy in lobbying your state government for comprehensive PFAS controls.  Minimizing PFAS exposure will work best if we work together. Large-scale legislative action is the best strategy we have to manage chemicals that have become truly ubiquitous.  

You cant escape PFAS these days: it’s everywhere in the news primarily because there’s new data demonstrating that PFAS is everywhere in our lives. In the last several months, previously unreported sources of PFAS include the presence of “forever chemicals” in toilet paper, contact lenses, and pesticides.  These new discoveries add to a long list of PFAS-containing products that has been building for years, such as carpets, clothing, food packaging, cookware, and cosmetics.  The stability, availability and versatility of PFAS compounds has made them the go-to solution for product development chemists and manufacturing engineers for decades.  

Recently, 3M published a database of all their products that contain PFAS; the list included more than 20,000 entries. 

While there may be a handful of truly critical applications for PFAS, most uses are a matter of convenience and economics.  A different chemical could perform the same function as PFAS but may cost more, require more frequent application, or reduce manufacturing efficiency so, despite concerns about the health and environmental effects of PFAS, manufacturers and product developers still choose PFAS. 

Whether created for their criticality or their convenience, PFAS-containing products are so ubiquitous, even the hyper-conscious consumer would struggle to avoid them all.  The chemical stability of PFAS compounds ensures that these chemicals long outlive essentially all of the products they support, making the PFAS moniker “forever chemicals” quite apt.  An equally accurate descriptor for PFAS would be “everywhere chemicals”.  Because they last forever, they are truly everywhere; this perspective is useful as we consider how to minimize our PFAS exposure as individuals and ultimately control what enters the environment.

Take toilet paper for example.  

Your personal risk of PFAS exposure from using toilet paper is not really about those few moments of use in the privacy of your own home.  Exposure is more about what happens after you flush.  Because most PFAS compounds are not readily absorbed through the skin, touching toilet paper is unlikely to increase your personal exposure.  However, once the toilet paper is flushed, any PFAS present in the paper is on its way to drinking fountains and dinner tables via wastewater treatment plants (WWTP).  

There are nearly 15,000 wastewater treatment plants in the US, most of which use a combination of physical filtration techniques, aerobic digestion, and chemical disinfection to treat everything that goes down the drain (or toilet!).  While the toilet paper hosting the PFAS will be “treated” and destroyed almost immediately, none of the steps utilized in traditional WWTPs have any effect on the integrity of the exceptionally durable PFAS.  Between 24-36 hours after your *flush* enters the WWTP, the resulting effluent is dubbed clean for discharge into a river, lake, or even directly back into your home for drinking.   The water that just a day earlier swirled away down your toilet meets our definition of clean : it contains no harmful bacteria or organic material.  

But the PFAS is still there.

So, too, with the PFAS in your shampoo.  It’s likely that the amount of PFAS absorbed through the skin while washing your hair is very low.  But, like the toilet paper, as your shampoo bubbles down the drain, the PFAS does too, headed for that same WWTP:  a WWTP that works well destroying the other components of shampoo but that is not designed to remove some of the most stable, versatile chemicals ever created by humans.   

Upon discharge from the WWTP, PFAS that may have started out on toilet paper or in a shampoo bottle is now free in our surface- or groundwater. At that point, it may be piped back into your home for you to drink, to cook, to bathe.  It may be used for hydrating livestock (an adult cow drinks about 12 gallons a day) or watering crops , applications which may result in PFAS uptake by something that could be sold in a grocery store.  Perhaps the WWTP effluent from your community enters an aquatic ecosystem where it accumulates in fish, oysters or mussels. So, when you eat a meal, the steak, eggs, milk, potatoes, carrots and seafood on your plate can actually represent a bigger PFAS exposure risk than what you experienced from your use of PFAS in toilet paper or shampoo. 

Certainly there are PFAS-treated consumer products that can make significant contributions to personal exposure in humans beyond background levels in food and water.  For example, PFAS-treated carpet can be a source of PFAS-laden dust that may be consumed or respired by household residents.  Infants or small children may interact with treated carpets, directly transferring PFAS onto their hands or skin and then into their mouths.  It’s been known for decades that PFAS-treated paper used to package hot, greasy food, transfers PFAS from the package to the food and then into the belly of the consumer.  Avoiding these PFAS products can definitely help to mitigate personal exposure.  

Another source of exposure may exist if you live in a community like mine, where improperly stored PFAS industrial waste has leached from landfills into the groundwater.  Or you may live near a manufacturing facility that produces PFAS, or near a factory that uses PFAS in their products, or near an airport or military base that uses PFAS-laced fire fighting foam - any of which may directly discharge PFAS into local waterways that, like the effluent from the WWTP, may ultimately source local drinking water or be incorporated into food.  

Because PFAS chemicals are both FOREVER and EVERYWHERE, truly minimizing personal exposure is a team sport that requires solutions much more comprehensive than what’s possible for a PFAS-savvy consumer.  Legislative action that bans the use of PFAS is the best way to remove these chemicals from our daily lives.  Kudos to states like Minnesota, Maine and California that are leading the way in enacting PFAS bans.  Hopefully more states will join the team soon.