Ditching PFAS chemicals requires reality check, scientists argue

An accelerating move by industry to transition off of hazardous “forever chemicals” poses its own dangers, a new paper has found.

But coordination, creative thinking and a proactive approach can help guide a speedy transition to safer materials while avoiding a “regrettable” pivot to equally harmful chemicals, researchers wrote Thursday in Science.

The article focuses on both the urgency and difficulty of replacing per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS), a broad class of 10,000-plus synthetic chemicals with wide and destructive impacts on the human body.

These compounds, which are built on the powerful bond between carbon and fluorine atoms, are both pervasive, impervious to breakdown and almost impossible to entirely escape, as The Hill reported earlier this year.

The health impacts from these chemicals may cost human society as much as $16 trillion per year, based on reporting by the nonprofit International Chemical Secretariat.

Their replacement is also happening on a time scale that is “very, very quick,” Mohamed Ateia Ibrahim of the Environmental Protection Agency told The Hill. 

When it comes to the scale of the job of phasing PFAS out, “a reality check is needed,” Ibrahim said.

“No one is expecting an overnight [replacement] of something that penetrated our life and came, like, very, very invasive over eight decades,” he added.

Instead, Ibrahim called on industry to maintain — and consumers to demand — a focus on distinguishing between places where PFAS can be easily replaced, and the minority of places where it still serves irreplaceable industrial use.

In the “possibly essential” category, there is the microchip industry, for which PFAS offers a critical tool for keeping products stable at high temperatures in the midst of caustic chemicals. 

Under “probably nonessential” are products like stain-resistant carpets, waterproof jackets and nonstick pans. 

“There’s a difference between how easy it is to tolerate, say, getting your eggs stuck in a pan and having to switch to a different material — versus something where, if you take [PFAS] out, a national security application is impacted,” Ibrahim said.

In that first category, the Science authors argued, consumers should be patient, because in many cases, PFAS replacements will not be as effective as the compounds they replace, because it is the particular resistance of those chemicals to break down — the very quality that makes them so dangerous — that also gives them their potent industrial advantage.

There are many applications “where the strong properties of PFAS — water and oil repellency, stability, durability, low surface tension — are not fully matched by alternatives exactly because the alternatives are — have to be! — chemically different,” co-author Martin Scheringer told The Hill.

“In these cases, it may be needed to rethink a process or product more broadly so that a material with less pronounced properties can still ‘do the job.’”

For example, PFAS was a key historic component in the firefighting foams, which relied on the chemicals’ ability to form films that wrap the burning fuel in a smothering layer, blocking its access to the oxygen that fuels it.

While it is difficult for non-PFAS chemicals to produce such a film, engineers were able to replace PFAS-laden foams with nontoxic alternatives by changing their approach: non-PFAS foams now use bubble-forming chemicals, rather than films, to smother flames.

“Both are foams, but one functions one way, and the other relies on totally different properties,” Ibrahim said.

That offers a case study for industry as a whole, Ibrahim said: While “one-to-one” replacements may often not be appropriate, a new approach can offer the same benefits.

That point is important, the authors argued, because the quest for that drop-in replacement is a big component of the risk that PFAS replacements will end up, years or decades down the line, to be dangerous as well.

“When you are taking [PFAS] out and bringing something in with the same functionality — this is where we say, like, maybe we should be more careful,” Ibrahim said. 

In those cases, he said, researchers need to keep in mind that the risks of PFAS aren’t just acute poisoning — but the insidious impacts of chronic, low-dose exposure.

“This is the problem with the original compound that we are trying to take out,” he said. “So there are things that, if done now, can make the situation way, way better, and again, avoid any regrettable substitution.”

In particular, Ibrahim and Scheringer called for “breaking the silos” that corporations, nonprofits and state regulators currently work within — increasing the possibility that a broad breakthroughs that replaces entire classes of PFAS can be shared and scaled.

“We think that these people, if they talk together, they will just like, get that done much, much faster,” Ibrahim said, because at present, “they don’t know that they are going the same direction.”

Overall, he added, it’s important for customers to keep pressing industry to move off PFAS. “Even with with the with the regulations and all of that, that consumer pressure is very, very critical motivation for industry.” 

“If industries are told by the consumer that I will not use that, if you still use PFAs, that’s pure dollars that are talking — and that can make a significant change.”