New York, NY — Today, environmental and community groups sued the Department of Defense (DOD) over its contracts to burn millions of gallons of unused firefighting foam containing PFAS in incinerators across the country. The DOD is the nation’s largest user of firefighting foam containing PFAS, a class of highly persistent and toxic chemicals that are known to cause cancer, liver disease, infertility, and other serious health effects.
According to government documents Earthjustice obtained via Freedom of Information Act requests, PFAS burning already took place, or is taking place, in the towns of East Liverpool, Ohio; Arkadelphia and El Dorado, Arkansas; and Cohoes, New York. The contracts also authorize PFAS incineration in other locations, including Port Arthur, Texas, and Sauget, Illinois. Incineration may already be underway in those and other locations, too, but DOD has not fully responded to FOIA requests seeking a full list of incineration locations.
I guess it's not a problem if the fire is hot enough to fully break up the carbon chains, but it's good to ask questions and not trust the government at it's word, because it doesn't always do the right thing.
Lab-based studies show that when both contaminants are in water, PFAS will stick to the surface of microplastics. John Scott, an analytical chemist at the University of Illinois, wondered if the same thing happens in a real lake.
“I haven’t seen anybody else look at this in the natural environment,” he said.
Scott’s study showed that not only does it happen, the effect is magnified. More PFAS sticks to microplastics in lake water than in the lab, where researchers use simulated lake water. This simulated water is deionized water to which researchers have added the calcium, sodium and chloride that would normally be found in lake water. But unlike real lake water, it does not include organic matter and polluting compounds.
A PFAS molecule consists of a chain of carbons with fluorine atoms attached, with some additional specialized atom group thrown in for flavor, called functional groups. There are many iterations of this structure, but they all fall under the PFASs family umbrella because they heavily rely on the carbon-fluorine (C-F) bond.
The C-F bond is one of the strongest bonds in chemistry, and it renders powerless an arsenal of chemical and environmental mechanisms that degrade other pollutants. The basic PFAS structure is so stable that many degradable versions of PFASs, with fewer C-F bonds, get together in the environment to re-form structures with more C-F bonds, making them more stable — and much more toxic. It’s like the chemical equivalent of Gremlins, as “friendly” molecules turn ugly under the right conditions.
This characteristic structure also makes PFASs two-faced: The carbon chain doesn’t like to associate with water, but various functional groups are quite chummy with it. This means that PFASs are both water and oil repellant, an extremely valuable quality that has made them extremely popular in consumer, industrial, and military applications.
There is an object in the British Museum that was bought from Benjamin Franklin. A small asbestos “purse.” With only these details, the modern mind imagines the elder statesman ambling up to Montague House, the museum’s home in Bloomsbury from 1759, on the same site as the modern museum. Perhaps the most well known American in the world, the Franklin in our imagination gains entry to the museum and marvels at the collections before offering up a curiosity of his own. In reality, it was a much younger Franklin who was invited to the home of Sir Hans Sloane in 1725 – almost thirty years before George II gave his Royal Assent to establish a public museum founded in large part on Sloane’s collections.