Could its decisive moves on PFOA mean DuPont really has a heart?

Wilmington News Journal, Al Mascitti
Published January 26, 2006

If it wasn't obvious before, the DuPont Co. must have realized earlier this month that defending its continued use of Teflon-related chemicals was an impossible proposition. I figure it became clear right after the incident in Ohio with bottled drinking water. Readers who like to follow the news about perfluorooctanoic acid (PFOA), also known as C-8 in DuPont circles, might recall that last year the company, rather than fight a costly lawsuit that would have dragged the Teflon brand name through the mud, acknowledged that PFOA had contaminated the public drinking water supply downstream from one of its plants in West Virginia. As part of its settlement, the company agreed to supply residents of the affected areas, including southeastern Ohio, with bottled drinking water, and it's been doing so for months. Unfortunately, a problem -- at least a public relations problem -- has come to light. Some of the water DuPont purchased for them also contained about 80 times the amount of PFOA normally found in drinking water. Advertisement The contaminated water was purchased from a Marietta, Ohio-based company called Crystal Spring, whose president said it had been getting water from the same source for 84 years. Investigators think that source was tainted by releases of PFOA by DuPont. Granted, testing didn't find all that much of the chemical -- 13 to 17 parts per trillion, well below the 150 parts per billion that some scientists guess would be a safe amount. The truth is that nobody knows what, if any, health risks the chemical poses, or what a safe amount might be. But PFOA shows up almost everywhere and in everybody on earth and persists for incredibly long periods in both the environment and the body. Even nomads in Mongolia have been found with measurable amounts in their blood, so government regulators have decided to take no chances. The Environmental Protection Agency has called for cutting the use of PFOA 95 percent by 2010 and eliminating it entirely by 2015. DuPont officials, to their credit, quickly assented. The company isn't the only international chemical giant still using the stuff, but it's the last in the United States, so it's good news that the company already has cut production to the level the EPA suggested. Even the Web site of the Environmental Working Group, a generally implacable industry watchdog, gushed with praise for the company: "We discern in this agreement the DuPont Co. at its best: forward looking, environmentally sensitive, setting the pace for a cleaner chemical industry, and committed to applying its formidable powers of invention to eliminate pollution from this family of chemicals." The most encouraging part of this story is that the EPA and DuPont acted to curtail PFOA before its danger to humans has been proved. Since the 1970s, government regulators usually have waited until safe exposure levels were established before acting to ban chemicals. In short, the public had to show it was being harmed. This case shifted the burden of proof to the company -- prove that it's harmless, the EPA said, or stop using and producing it. If every company had to do that with every chemical compound, an awful lot of environmental activists would retire happy.