Abstract
The threat to public health from man-made chemicals is not new but dates back at least as far as the origins of industrial chemistry in the early decades of the 19th century. Foremost among them was the Brunner Mond alkali producing plant at Widnes, formed as a partnership between John Brunner and Ludwig Mond in 1873, which over time acquired soap and fat manufacturing interests and the palm oil plantations in West Africa; this latter development was to become absorbed into Unilever at Port Sunlight, on the Wirral, while Brunner Mond evolved into Imperial Chemical Industries, one of the largest and most successful chemical companies in the world, now owned by the Indian global conglomerate Tata.
The public health impact and legacy of these developments, set against their human benefits, could have been prefigured from one of the antecedents of Brunner’s Hutchinson’s alkali works. One personal account claims that an early alkali factory had relocated from the banks of the river Mersey in north Liverpool to Widnes as a result of the disastrous pollution it had caused in the slums, including the very visible impact on the brass plate of a local general practitioner. 1
Whatever the veracity of this claim, the widespread combination of sewage and chemical discharges to estuaries and discharges to the air over many years resulted in environmental impacts on nature and on humans that have yet to be completely understood or remediated.
Despite the considerable methodological difficulties of any retrospective investigation of the long-term effects on human health of prolonged historic exposure to environmental pollution, one study of industrial atmospheric pollution in the Mersey River basin in 1996 concluded that ‘a greater proportion of industrial land in a ward is associated with a higher mortality of the ward residents, even after controlling for the level of socio-economic deprivation of the residents’. 2
Since those early days of large-scale production of man-made chemicals, the globalisation of the chemical industry has proceeded apace, and together with it the global consequences both in the scale of the potential adverse impacts on humans and the extension of impacts from local to global environments, including the world’s lands, skies and oceans. It is against this historic background of essentially local impacts that the advent of a new and enduring chemical threat should be considered.
Known now generically as PFAs, perfluorooctanoic acid and related synthetic organofluorine compounds, with their eight carbon chain structures, are used extensively worldwide as industrial surfactants with a wide range of applications. These include domestic upholstery and textiles, firefighting foams and sealants. Although they have been manufactured since the 1940s, they first came to widespread attention through their use in spacecraft and later in Teflon coatings for cooking utensils produced by the DuPont corporation in the United States. One of the antecedents of the DuPont corporation, Monsanto, was responsible for the chemical Agent Orange, which became notorious during the Vietnam war through its wholesale use by the American forces as a toxic herbicide used to clear jungle foliage in order to expose the North Vietnamese Vietcong guerrillas for lethal attack. Exposure to the herbicide causes cancers and congenital malformations in addition to other medical conditions.
PFAs were initially developed by 3M (the Minnesota Mining and Manufacturing Company) in 1947 but was bought out by DuPont in 1951 for use in the manufacture of fluoropolymers, commercially to be known as Teflon (otherwise known as C8). Although organofluorines first began to be detected in human blood in 1968, it took the scandal of a DuPont-built plant in Fayetteville, North Carolina leading to the dumping of 1.7 million pounds of C8 into the environment from Dupont’s Parkersburg, West Virginia plant between 1951 and 2003 to elicit an effective response.
After local people began to notice clusters of congenital abnormalities and other medical conditions in those potentially exposed to the pollution, a fight began to force the company to reveal what it had known about PFAs from many years of confidential studies.
The fight for justice from the community affected by this illegal activity and the campaign waged by local lawyer, Robert Bilott, has since been made into the film Dark Waters in 2020, starring Mark Ruffalo and Anne Hathaway, including in its cast local people who had been affected by the chemical pollution. 3 In the year 2000, Bilott’s law firm, Taft Stettinius and Hollister forced DuPont to release 110,000 files which clearly demonstrated that they had known since 1993 that PFAs are able to cause testicular, pancreatic and liver malignancy in laboratory animals but such were the profits from the chemicals that DuPont had seen fit to keep their knowledge secret.
The resulting record financial settlement paid by DuPont to those affected by their actions reached $4b. 4
Despite the longstanding knowledge of the toxic effects of PFAs and the DuPont scandal, international action has been slow to follow. The use of these chemicals has remained ubiquitous with extensive use not only in domestic products but by the military and Fire and Rescue Services in firefighting foams. PFAs are persistent and highly resistant to physical, chemical and biological degradation; over time, they have worked their way into and through soil to contaminate surface and ground water and adjacent agricultural land, waste streams, landfill sites, wastewater treatment facilities and the wider environment. 5 Not for nothing have they earned the sobriquet ‘Forever Chemicals’.
One of the few initiatives that appears to have adequately attempted to rise to the challenge posed by these Forever Chemicals has been that by the National Chemicals Working Group of the Heads of EPAs Australia and New Zealand, whose comprehensive report covers most aspects of a systematic response grounded in international obligations, communication and engagement, monitoring and remediation together with many associated issues. 5
In contrast, closer to home, the experience of Jersey appears to have been one of denial and vacillation. Having first become aware of an issue in relation to the use of firefighting foams in relation to the airport and the contamination of proximal private water supplies, only local remediation was taken and it took the concerted efforts of local residents raising concerns of wider impact and until 2018 before these seem to have been taken seriously. Although reports on the matter were presented to the States of Jersey in 2019 and 2020, which recognised the wider scope of the threat to public health, a panel to oversee action is only now being convened over three years later. 6
In the United Kingdom, PFAs seem to be finally making it into the mainstream media, having recently featured in The Times ‘Clean it up’ water campaign and as a lead story in The Guardian.7,8 Reporting on Environmental Agency data, they draw attention to the finding that 81 out of 105 rivers tested for the chemicals exceeded a proposed EU standard expected to become law in 2023, with the worst affected rivers being the Roding in East London, the Avon in Somerset, the Mersey in Cheshire and the Ouse in Bedfordshire – a picture reflected across Europe with its implications not only for humans but for the viability of other species both directly and through the concentration of PFAs in food.
One hundred and fifty years after John Brunner and Ludwig Mond formed their ground-breaking partnership based on the production of alkali, science has moved on and we are in a position to protect our habitat based on live knowledge of our impacts on it. In this age of eco awareness are we still stuck in our Victorian ways?