BY: DEENA WINTER - DECEMBER 15, 2022 6:01 AM
This is part 2 of 2. Read part 1, about East Metro residents who wonder if 3M chemicals made them sick.
3M toxicologist Richard Purdy did a study in 1998 to see whether any of the company’s perfluorochemicals showed up in the blood of eagles and albatrosses.
That seemed unlikely, given the birds’ diet consists mostly of fish. So Purdy was surprised and disturbed when he found levels in their blood similar to those found in human blood. It even showed up in bald eagle nestlings whose only food was fish their parents fed them from remote lakes.
That indicated what Purdy later called “widespread environmental contamination” — the likelihood the manmade, toxic chemicals were moving through the food chain and accumulating in animals.
Purdy warned 3M that if wild birds’ blood contained the chemicals, then fish-eating mammals — like otters, mink, porpoise and seals — could have it, too. A study of rats found they had significant levels of a 3M chemical in their livers, likely from eating fishmeal.
He told company officials in an email there was a significant risk of ecological harm, which should be reported to the EPA.
In response, 3M managers dispersed the team collecting the data, Purdy alleged.
Purdy resigned in 1999 and sent his resignation letter to the EPA, informing them that while 3M had disclosed to the EPA that a chemical called PFOS “had been found in the blood of animals,” it didn’t mention that it was found in the blood of eaglets.
The EPA began investigating the chemicals that year. But by then, 3M had reaped billions of dollars in profits from chemicals that the company had been warned were harming the environment and risking human health.
The per-and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) had spread — through groundwater and products like Scotchgard stain repellent, Teflon cookware, food wrapping and fire retardant — and were showing up in the blood of people and animals in every corner of the world. They were in nearly every living thing, from house dust to human blood, in wildlife in the Arctic circle and drinking water, rivers, streams and breast milk.
Purdy’s warnings were clear, as revealed by former Attorney General Attorney General Lori Swanson, who sued 3M in 2010, alleging the company failed for decades to report that its chemicals could be toxic to humans, animals and the environment, keeping information from regulators and scientists to protect its lucrative revenue stream.
The morning the case was set to go to trial in 2018, after 22 hours of negotiation, 3M and the state settled. 3M agreed to pay $850 million to help provide Minnesotans clean drinking water.
The settlement with Minnesota is the third largest natural resource damage settlement in U.S. history, behind the Deepwater Horizon and Exxon Valdez oil spills.
But it amounted to just 2.6% of 3M’s nearly $33 billion in revenue in 2018.
The company admitted nothing, and maintains to this day that its chemicals have no adverse health or environmental consequences.
3M spokesman Grant Thompson said in an email that 3M’s position reflects the weight of scientific evidence from decades of research showing exposure to PFOA and PFOS at current and historical levels found in people and the environment has not been shown to cause adverse health effects.
Still, 3M’s settlement with the state of Minnesota is likely the beginning — not the end — of the company’s legal, regulatory and political challenges stemming from both the invention and dumping of the chemicals. 3M and other companies that made the chemicals may have to pay out billions for the damage they caused the environment and people.
During a 2019 congressional hearing, U.S. Rep. Harley Rouda of California called the contamination of Americans’ drinking water, groundwater, air and food supplies a national emergency.
“These companies got away with poisoning people for more than a half century,” Rouda said.
In August, the EPA proposed designating two perfluorochemicals as hazardous substances under the Superfund law, which would spark federal cleanup standards and could put chemical companies on the hook for billions in cleanup costs.
The EPA also published new drinking water health advisory levels for several perfluorochemical compounds and plans to propose a national drinking water perfluorochemical regulation soon.
A federal judge in Charleston, S.C., also dealt the company a blow in September, denying 3M’s request for government contractor immunity in a mass tort case alleging 3M and other companies’ firefighting foam are linked to health problems.
Judge Richard Gergel said 3M conducted over 1,000 studies of perfluorochemicals’ effect on human health and the environment, the results of which should have been disclosed to the EPA.
He wrote that 3M and other chemical manufacturers “had significantly greater knowledge than the government about the properties and risks associated with their products and knowingly withheld highly material information from the government.”
Closer to 3M’s Minnesota headquarters, some sickened residents in the East Metro — where groundwater was contaminated with 3M chemicals — say they’re working with attorneys on a lawsuit.
David Sunding, a University of California Berkeley professor, published a 2017 report saying Washington County residents who lived in areas where groundwater was contaminated with 3M chemicals had elevated rates of bladder, breast, kidney and prostate cancers, as well as leukemia and non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma.
3M disputes that, pointing to a 2018 Minnesota health department report showing that the overall cancer rate in Washington County was “virtually identical” to the statewide average, despite chemical contamination.
Given the stakes of the litigation, the future of the company — which employs 7,000 people at its massive Maplewood campus and about 13,500 statewide — will hinge in part on how it confronts its own history with these toxic chemicals.
A recent Bloomberg analysis estimated 3M liabilities for the mass torts case and another over defective earplugs could reach $30 billion, or nearly half of market cap.
What they knew, when they knew it
A key problem in any 3M defense: Despite the flurry of recent legal, regulatory and political activity, the chemicals’ dangers have been known — and known to 3M — for decades.
As early as the 1950s, 3M and DuPont scientists began discovering that the chemicals were accumulating in the bodies of humans and animals.
After compiling 27 million pages of documents and deposing about 200 witnesses in seven years, Minnesota’s former attorney general, Swanson, didn’t just walk away after settling with 3M. She released thousands of internal 3M documents.
The Reformer reviewed the documents, which show that company officials were repeatedly warned that the chemicals were accumulating in the environment and detected in the blood of humans and animals, while showing worrisome signs of toxicity.
Time and again, the company found reasons to delay a full accounting to government regulators, Minnesota communities, and even its own workers. Like tobacco companies’ tardy admission about its cancer-causing drug and the NFL’s approach to concussions, 3M ignored, delayed, minimized and obscured research that raised red flags about the chemicals.
Internal 3M documents show:
- In the 1950s, 3M animal studies consistently found its PFAS chemicals were toxic.
- By the early 1960s, 3M knew the chemicals didn’t degrade in the environment.
- 3M knew by the 1970s its chemicals were widely present in the blood of the general U.S. population.
- A 1970 study of fish had to be abandoned “to avoid severe stream pollution” and because all the fish died. After being exposed to a chemical, the fish couldn’t stay upright and kept crashing into the fish tank and dying.
- By 1976, 3M knew the chemicals were in its plant workers’ blood at higher levels than normal.
- A study of a chemical’s effect on 20 rhesus monkeys in 1978 had to be aborted after 20 days because all the exposed monkeys died.
- In 1979, a 3M scientist warned that perfluorochemicals posed a cancer risk because they are “known to persist for a long time in the body and thereby give long-term chronic exposure.”
- In 1979, 3M lawyers advised the company to conceal a 3M chemical compound found in human blood.
- In 1983, 3M scientists concluded that concerns about its chemicals “give rise to legitimate questions about the persistence, accumulation potential, and ecotoxicity of fluorochemicals in the environment.”
- Purdy wrote in his resignation letter that in the 1990s, 3M told researchers not to write down their thoughts or have email discussions because of how their “speculations” might be viewed in legal discovery.
- 3M told employees to mark documents as “attorney-client privileged” regardless of whether attorneys were involved, the state alleged, and minutes of meetings were edited to omit references to health hazards.
- In 1997, 3M gave DuPont a “material safety data sheet” — which lays out potential hazards — for a chemical. It read, “Warning: contains a chemical which can cause cancer,” citing 1983 and 1993 studies by 3M and DuPont. But 3M removed the label that same year and continued to sell the products for decades without warning.
Thompson, the 3M spokesman, said the documents released by Swanson portray an “incomplete and misleading story that distorts the full record regarding 3M’s PFAS stewardship and who we are as a company.”
He said 3M disclosed many studies to the EPA over the course of decades, including on the chemicals’ toxicity and “the materials produced and discussed with EPA addressed relevant information and issues.”
