By Dave Gammon

In just the past year, chemical industries 3M, Dupont, Chemours and Corteva paid out billions of dollars to settle lawsuits over the PFAS chemicals used in their products. PFAS is an umbrella term that includes Teflon, Gen-X, PFOA and other synthetic fluorinated chemicals, mostly unregulated. You can expect more lawsuits, given that these persistent industrial substances have been linked to cancer, thyroid disease and other maladies and are found in the blood of nearly everyone tested.

The public would be better served, however, if we took a more proactive approach to managing these harmful, but useful, chemicals. An optimal PFAS strategy begins with a nationwide surveillance system, and includes roles for industry, government and ordinary citizens.

The fundamental problem with lawsuits is they simplify gray issues into black-and-white issues. PFAS chemicals can harm human health, but they also have amazing properties, such as resisting water, grease and heat. Lawsuits replace this intrinsic tradeoff with a power struggle that can lead to volatile outcomes.

A more proactive approach would prioritize finding credible information on where PFAS pollution is concentrated nationwide. Most municipal water systems are not equipped to monitor PFAS levels. Adequate surveillance requires costly equipment and well-trained chemists.

The challenge then is how to optimize surveillance, given limited funding. To maximize the benefits to public health, surveillance should be nationwide and prioritize sites just upstream and downstream of major chemical industries. PFAS contamination can result from other sources, including landfills and municipal wastewater, but recent lawsuits suggest chemical industries represent the largest PFAS threats to public safety, especially when heavily populated areas are downstream of industry.

Current surveillance systems provide a patchwork of misleading information. For example, in Virginia the available data suggest PFAS contamination is concentrated at military bases, but that is only because the rest of Virginia is scarcely monitored.

Surveillance systems might prove most effective if they are run by the private sector. That is because government often faces legal restrictions on who can collect samples and which of the 12,000 PFAS derivatives they can measure.

Regardless of whether surveillance is performed privately or publicly, innovation will be needed to cut costs, perhaps through outsourcing how water samples are collected, and perhaps through developing new protocols for chemical analysis. Systems also must adapt as we learn which locations and which PFAS derivatives represent the greatest threats to public safety.

Industry can contribute by monitoring PFAS levels throughout their production lines and taking steps to separate, concentrate and remove PFAS components from their waste stream. Given the environmental persistence of these “forever chemicals,” the best industrial strategy is not to release PFAS waste in the first place.

Chemical industries such as Elevate Textiles are now implementing closed-loop waste management procedures, and experimenting with PFAS-free alternatives in their production. Forward-thinking chemical industries that adopt strategies like these will experience higher upfront costs but will also avoid future lawsuits and adapt more easily to the coming regulatory curve. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s recent announcement of nationwide regulations for six PFAS derivatives shows that curve is already here.

Government has an important role to play beyond just regulation. Given the ephemeral nature of some private funding, federal funding for PFAS surveillance might be justified. Governmental regulations could also be smarter than previous regulations. For example, they might introduce incentives for industry to minimize pollution, not just to achieve mere ‘compliance,’ and they might require industries to share PFAS solutions rather than treating successful solutions as proprietary secrets

Ordinary citizens can contribute by educating themselves on both the benefits and problems of PFAS chemicals. They should seek to understand multiple viewpoints at a deep level, which will help them to identify oversimplified arguments and avoid manipulation by lawmakers, industry, and environmental advocacy groups.

Democratic societies function best when they take proactive steps to manage themselves. Let’s not wait for lawyers and judges to order us around. PFAS chemicals are here to stay, and we already know the next steps we should take.

Dave Gammon is a professor of biology at Elon University in Elon.