Teflon
Decade Long History of Chemical Pollution
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We surround ourselves with fancy things, trying to ease our lives and make the most use of the products that companies produce and give it a fancy name and we think it's cool and un-knowingly we fall in the trap and use the things to make our life easy. Like all of the products, we surround ourselves with things that we want to be water-repellent, like a raincoat, clothing, carpets, non-stick pans and so on. Today most of the household uses Non-Stick Pans to cook their food, we use it because it makes the food test better and repels water, oil, and other minerals which helps in cook the food simplers. However, we never wonder why it does so, what's the reason behind all this, is this safe for health and environment? Let's uncover the truth.
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The product which is used in most of the water repellent items is known as Teflon. And to know whether it is good or bad for the health, you need to know the story behind this and the history of Teflon. This history includes its invention, the production, the betrayal to people, health effects and Rob Billot. It all started at West Virginia, Parkersburg.
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Robert Billot: The environment lawyer, a corporate defence attorney who got promoted to be a partner at Taft, Stettinius & Hollister received a call from a cattle farmer, Welber Tennant, after a week of the promotion. Welber Tennant had lost over 190 cows on his farm and believed that DuPont Chemical Company was responsible for it. Tennant tried to get the local help, feds, state, lawyers but no one responded because no one could stand against the biggest conglomerate of that time and they owned their entire town. He had been spurned not only by Parkersburg’s lawyers but also by its politicians, journalists, doctors and veterinarians. He was angry and Billit was struggling with making sense with him, he might have hung up had Tennant not blurted out the name of Bilott’s grandmother, Alma Holland White. Billot remembered the Tennant's place had his childhood memories while growing up in Vienna. They did not understand, however, that Bilott was not the right kind of environmental lawyer. He did not represent plaintiffs or private citizens. Like the other 200 lawyers at Taft, a firm founded in 1885 and tied historically to the family of President William Howard Taft, Bilott worked almost exclusively for large corporate clients. His speciality was defending chemical companies. Several times, Bilott had even worked on cases with DuPont lawyers.
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After that Billot visited Tennant's place and he saw the videotapes, photographs, visceral organs of cows, he saw gall bladder with size bigger than the heart, teeth black as night, deformed hooves, tumours, guts and so on that Tennant had cut off his dead cows himself. Outside, the rocks on the creek were as white as old man's hairs. Tennant explained that it must be bleach that comes from the chemical factory. This was the water that his animal was drinking, he himself was feeding his family on this water too. He said the animals went crazy and sometimes charged him out of nothing and he had to shot them down. The property was over 600 hilly acres, the property would have been even larger had his brother Jim and Jim’s wife, Della, not sold 66 acres in the early ’80s to DuPont. The company wanted to use the plot for a landfill for waste from its factory near Parkersburg, called Washington Works, where Jim was employed as a labourer. Jim and Della did not want to sell, but Jim had been in poor health for years, mysterious ailments that doctors couldn’t diagnose, and they needed the money. DuPont bought the land and renamed it to Dry Run Field.
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After his cows started dying one by one, he tried calling all the authorities and no one responded, finally EPA (Environmental Protection Agency, US) showed up, did some research and went without letting him know anything about the result. At that time Phil Donnelly was the attorney for DuPont who said he was not aware of this Dry Run Field case and will help Billot in every way possible.
In an attorney function, Rob asks Phil if he can take a look at the report that EPA had made on Dry Run which he wanted to show Tennant to settle him down. In the report, it was mentioned that the cows were dying due to improper care, deficiency in herd management, inadequate veterinary care, malnutrition and lack of fly control, which makes Tennant furious after seeing the fraud report. He had recorded few VCR tapes in which he had showed the autopsy of the cows he had done by himself and verifying that the veterinarians have never seen anything like these in their life. The tapes were no less than a horror film, only it was real. After watching the tapes, he was convinced that something was seriously wrong with that place, so he showed them to the Taft head Thomas Trep and asked to help him to file a claim and trigger discovery and find out what's in that landfill. Taft was charging $275 per hour but Billot decided to do it with no charge. Recently Taft was in partnership with DuPont but Billot was persistent and made his mind to sue DuPont.
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Bilott filed a federal suit against DuPont in the summer of 1999 in the Southern District of West Virginia. In response, DuPont’s in-house lawyer, Bernard Reilly, informed him that DuPont and the E.P.A. would commission a study of the property, conducted by three veterinarians chosen by DuPont and three chosen by the E.P.A. Their report did not find DuPont responsible for the cattle’s health problems. Billot started pulling permits, studying land deeds and requesting from DuPont all documentation related to Dry Run Landfill — but he could find no evidence that explained what was happening to the cattle. With the search, Billot stumbles upon a few things that didn't add up like 55-gallon steel drums, a repeated cryptic name "PFOA". In all his years working with chemical companies, Bilott had never heard of PFOA. It did not appear on any list of regulated materials, nor could he find it in Taft’s in-house library. Billot mentioned that EPA was not even aware of it either, The EPA only started regulating chemicals in '76, they grandfather in every existing chemical nonhazardous unless they knew it was hazardous or a company told them it was, but what if a company didn't and kept it a secret. What is the reason Phil Donnelly agreed to discovery on hazardous is because he knows whatever's in that landfill isn't even regulated.
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As he got no information about PFOA, he went to Ohio Chemical Alliance and extract information and in a dinner party, he confronted Phil and gave him the ultimatum of getting every record DuPont has on that landfill, as being denied he got took the matter to the court single-handedly and got the local council in West Virginia and sued DuPont officially. He got the discovery as a load of files full of a truck, more than 110,000 pages in all and he started working on them. There he stumbled upon a few repeated terms like PFOA/C-8, which then he took the matter to a chemistry expert Gillespie to ask him about the PFOA. He vaguely recalled something similar PFOS, a long chain fluorocarbon, synthetic, a soaplike agent used by the technology conglomerate 3M in the fabrication of Scotchgard. After hunting through the files he came to know that PFOA stands for "Perfluorooctanoic acid", an unbreakable chain of carbon atoms, biochemically, used for industrial uses.
He learned that if you would drink it, it would be like swallowing a tire, he also learnt that as it had fluoride in it, it will harden your teeth and it will even stain them, could turn them black. In the year 2000, Tennant and his wife got diagnosed with Cancer. Billot researched went through all the documents he had received and here is what he concluded.
"There is a man-made chemical, it was invented during the Manhattan Project, it repelled the elements, especially water, so they used it to make first-ever waterproof coating for tanks, which was indestructible. In the year 1951, DuPont thought of not just battlefield but to the American Homes, so they started purchasing PFOA and named it as C-8, from 3M to manufacture Teflon. They made their own impenetrable coating but not for tanks, for pans. 3M invented PFOA just four years earlier and was not classified by the government as a hazardous substance and 3M sent DuPont recommendations on how to dispose of it. It was to be incinerated or sent to chemical-waste facilities. But right from the start, something wasn't right, the men and workers who made Teflon were coming down with nausea, fevers. DuPont wanted to know why so they laced cigarettes with Teflon and told a group of workers to smoke them. Almost all those men were hospitalized. It was 1962, one year after DuPont launched Teflon. They released the dust into the air, tossed the sludge into Ohio or packed into drums and chucked it into the Chesapeake. When the drums started washing up, DuPont starts digging ditches on the grounds of the Washington Works plant and in those ditches they dumped thousands of tons of toxic C-8 sludge and dust. One of the men they hired to dig those ditches was Wilber Tennant's brother Jim. 3M who pioneered these chemicals, they were testing them on monkeys and most of the monkeys died. DuPont knew this because they were doing their own tests on rats. They watched their organs balloon, rats got cancer, pregnant rats giving birth to pups with deformed eyes, so they pulled off all the young women on the Teflon line.
Sue Bailey's job was scrubbing huge steel vats where they held liquid C-8, she was pregnant. She gave birth to a baby, Bucky Bailey, with one nostril and a deformed eye. After that, all her records from DuPont disappeared. One year later they put all women back on Teflon and never said a thing. DuPont knew that the C-8 they put into the air and buried into the ground was causing Cancers, their own workers were getting cancers, the consumers were too getting exposed and not just in Frying Pan, but in Paints, Fabrics, Raincoats, Boots, Carpets, Cars, Contact lenses etc. For 40 years they knew C-8 was poison, the Happy Pan was a ticking time bomb because C-8 stays in us forever, our bodies are incapable of breaking it down. But knowingly they did nothing because it would have put the long-term viability of this product segment on the line. They were making $1 billion a year just in profit, just in Teflon. So they pumped millions of more pounds of toxic C-8 into the air and water. When there was no place left to contaminate, they came to Jim, Tennant's ill brother, he was sick and needed money and they needed his land, they got it, they dug up all the C-8, nearly 14 million pounds of toxic C-8 sludge and they dumped it again in Dry Run Field, near Tennant's place which his cows and his family were drinking and feeding upon."
Now Billot started writing exhibits to ESA, Dept. of Justice, Dept. of Health & Human Services about the DuPont's cheat. DuPont gave the Tennants all the money and treatment they needed. Billot signed up to testify against DuPont in Washington D.C., DuPont had filed a gad order which was rejected so Billot was able to fly out to D.C. This is what happened in Washington: "The Material PFOA, or FC-143 or Ammonium perfluorooctanoate or C-8 is possibly life-threatening to human health which was shown by DuPont's own science and asked for Medical Monitoring." and asked the agency to take appropriate actions. So a notice was given to Kiger family who represented 70,000 local residents "PFOA is a persistent chemical that is slow to be eliminated from the bloodstream of people who have been exposed to it. The DuPont Company has advised the Lubeck water district that low concentrations have been found in the district wells, DuPont has advised the district that it is confident these levels are safe." which in fact were not and water was exposed to 6x times of Normal level which is 1 part / Billion which is like one drop in Olympic sized swimming pool, and now to file a suit the Taft needed to do it within a month because DuPont's
the guideline says you've got one year to file the class action suit after you know your water bodies are contaminated and the letter was sent 11 months ago.
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In 1979 DuPont files the human trials were conducted, they named humans as receptors so they remain hidden and they found that "significantly higher incidents of allergic endocrine and metabolic disorders, the excess risk of developing liver disease, infertility, occurrences of Leukemia, excess of cancers in bladder, kidney, oral, pharynx. In 1981 3M notified DuPont that it had conducted studies on rats and it showed sustained C-8 exposure can cause facial deformities which were also found by DuPont scientists" which DuPont had denied that any of these specific studies ever took place. After the suit, DuPont paid a $16.5 million as a fine to EPA. so EPA proposed a Medical Monitoring by an independent science panel at DuPont's cost $235 million. So Taft started a survey for $400 each to give their blood sample to get tested for trace level of C-8 and 69,000 people got tested.
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In 2009, eleven years since the start of the Tennant case, Wilber died due to cancer, Billot had a Transient Ischemic Attack(TIA), a stroke. In 2012, Rob finally received the call from Dr Karen Frank from Science Panel after seven years of taking the blood samples. This study was the largest epidemiological study in human history and had an unprecedented amount of data. It linked sustained exposure to C-8 to 6 categories of serious illness, Kidney Cancer, Testicular Cancer, Thyroid Disease, Preeclampsia, High Cholesterol, Ulcerative colitis. 3535 people already had these diseases and many more were going to develop them. The entire class was monitored and those who got sick, seek restitution. After that DuPont choose to re-negotiate, rejected the science panel and choose to fight every claim in court, a total of 3535 plaintiffs. Since 2015, in Columbus, Ohio, DuPont chooses to fight the case until 2890 at rates of 4 to 5 cases a year. This is considered to be the longest-running case in human history. In the first of these cases, Rob won a jury award of $1.6 million, in the second $5.6 million and in the third $12.5 million. DuPont finally settled all 3535 cases for $670.7 million. PFOA is believed to be in the blood of virtually every living creature on the planet including 99% humans. Today, as a result of Rob's work there are growing movements around the world to ban PFOA and to investigate over 600 related "forever chemicals" nearly all unregulated.
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It is being stated that today Teflon is made up of Polytetrafluoroethylene which is (C2F4)n, while the Pans are made in local areas, can we be sure that there is no use of PFOA or PFOS like chemicals, and even if there's no use, if the current Teflon safe and healthy for health because we still say the pan is not non-stick anymore. After cooking the upper coating melts and mix up with the food we eat and directly goes into our bloodstream. We see increase cases of high-cholesterol and cancer diseases around, not less, so is it still checked and my question is "Is it worth it?"
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Every year Rob Bilott writes a letter to the E.P.A. and the West Virginia D.E.P., urging the regulation of PFOA in drinking water. In 2009, the E.P.A. set a ‘‘provisional’’ limit of 0.4 parts per billion for short-term exposure but has never finalized that figure. This means that local water districts are under no obligation to tell customers whether PFOA is in their water. Bilott is currently prosecuting Wolf v. DuPont, the second of the personal injury cases filed by the members of his class. The plaintiff, John M. Wolf of Parkersburg, claims that PFOA in his drinking water caused him to develop ulcerative colitis. That trial begins in March. When it concludes, there will be 3,533 cases left to try.
