Stanton told the senators that her son, who developed brain cancer at 6 and is disabled, was born in 1980. In 1981, 3M scientists recommended removing female employees of childbearing age from PFAS production jobs, a move 3M said was precautionary, not because the chemicals were harmful to employees.
Stanton chose to educate rather than sue. Like many whose circumstances suggest PFAS-related injuries, she cannot prove the specific time or incident where the chemicals hurt her son. That does not mean she buys 3M’s claims of innocence.
“To find out that somebody knew, and there was pain and suffering that could have been prevented, it’s just overwhelming,” said Stanton, who co-founded the Buxmont Coalition for Safe Water, a PFAS awareness group, with Hope Grosse, a cancer survivor whose family and friends also battled a variety of cancers. “It really crushes your trust in humanity.”
No one denies the suffering of Stanton and others. But 3M maintains it does not bear the responsibility.
Denise Rutherford, the company’s chief corporate affairs officer, testified under oath at a 2019 congressional hearing that PFAS, including PFOA and PFOS, have harmed no one at the levels they exist in the environment. The contention drew outraged rebukes from members of Congress who had heard from several people such as Stanton with lives turned upside down by inexplicable medical conditions.
Although 3M agreed to stop making PFOA and PFOS in 2000, the company said in a June statement to the Star Tribune that it is not “necessary or appropriate” to declare them — or any other PFAS — hazardous.
The company opposed the PFAS Action Act of 2021 that passed the U.S. House in July. The bill mandates hazardous designations for PFOS and PFOA and orders the EPA to establish limits in drinking water. It would allow federal, state and local governments to sue 3M and other PFAS makers to pay for cleanups.
3M said the law circumvents the environmental rule-making process and is not based on the “best available science.” Likewise, 3M sued New Jersey and Michigan for passing laws setting low limits on PFOS and PFOA in drinking water.
Court records, including a brief seeking punitive damages filed in November 2017 by then-Minnesota Attorney General Lori Swanson reveal that:
• In the 1950s, 3M knew that some fluorochemicals accumulated in humans and animals.
• In the 1960s, it knew the chemicals did not degrade in the environment.
• In the 1970s, the company knew certain PFAS were present in the blood of the general population, including people in rural China the company tested who lived nowhere near any production facility.
• In the 1980s, 3M scientists reported to management that there were “legitimate questions about the persistence, accumulation potential, and ecotoxicity of fluorochemicals in the environment.”
Critics say that if 3M, DuPont, Chemours and other PFAS producers had reported and reacted to these and other PFAS health risks as they should have, the fluorochemical industry could have helped control a burgeoning public health crisis.
Linda Birnbaum, who directed the government’s National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences and National Toxicology Program from 2009 to 2019, said PFAS makers “might have instituted pollution controls better and stopped dumping things directly.” Birnbaum likened 3M’s “lack of transparency, where people within the company knew that there was a problem and didn’t communicate,” to the tobacco industry.
‘This was nobody’s choice’
“At least with the tobacco industry, it was a smoker’s choice at some point to continue to smoke,” said lawyer Michael London, who represents people who say they have been hurt by PFAS pollution. “This was nobody’s choice.”
To date, the federal government’s major PFAS enforcement effort against 3M began in 1999. 3M agreed to a self-audit after a former 3M scientist, Richard Purdy, told the EPA the company was not revealing PFAS problems. Among the violations cited by the EPA was a 3M manager’s decision to overrule a 1998 scientific committee decision to disclose buildups of PFAS in non-employees. The company also failed to report to the EPA a 1999 assessment of PFAS in workers at a 3M chemical plant in Alabama, as well as a 1999 analysis of PFAS in children’s blood. The company eventually paid penalties of roughly $1.5 million to resolve self-disclosed violations of the Toxic Substances Control Act (TSCA). About $222,000 of those penalties included 34 TSCA violations involving PFAS, according to an October 2001 letter from the EPA to 3M.
3M paid the penalties, but the government did not require the company to admit wrongdoing.
“Their attempt to command the science was part and parcel of their efforts to conceal knowledge of the risks of these chemicals to human health and the environment,” Swanson told the Star Tribune.
3M denies Swanson’s allegation, saying its research actually increased public knowledge of PFAS.
Depositions in lawsuits quote at least one 3M official who talks about protecting the company’s reputation.
Federal records show the company and a trade group to which it belongs lobbied on laws to create more regulation of PFAS.
Birnbaum said both were aggressive in their opposition. When she ran the country’s toxicology program, the chemical industry’s political clout led her bosses to prohibit her from saying that PFAS “causes” harm. She could say only “linked.”
In 2007, when widespread PFAS pollution of east metro water systems came to light, then-state Sen. Sieben sponsored legislation to designate PFOA, PFOS and one other chemical hazardous. “The amount of opposition and strength that 3M threw at trying to defeat that bill was unlike anything I had ever seen,” Sieben told the Star Tribune.
Her bill died, but the PFAS crisis is far from over.
Hundreds of PFAS hot spots stretch across the country, from a Wolverine shoe factory in Michigan that used 3M-made fluorochemicals to the 3M PFAS production plant in Alabama that polluted the Tennessee River.
3M paid $55 million in settlement for the Wolverine pollution and $35 million in Alabama, small fractions of the billions that current federal, state, and local budgets ask taxpayers to pay.
Experts expect cleanup costs to rise as public health officials discover more polluted sites and companies continue putting fluorochemicals into products and the environment.”
Manufacturers can say, ‘Well, there’s only a small number of the 5,000 or so members of this group of complex chemicals associated with problems,’ ” Birnbaum said. “But the point is: When you look at other types of PFAS, you find the same kind of effect. The question is: Why in the heck are we making chemicals that will be with us forever?”
