Teflon in a Sticky Situation

DuPont's Teflon® works wonders at keeping food from sticking to pots and pans. But after 50 years of use, evidence is mounting that Teflon's key ingredient, perfluorooctanoic acid (PFOA), "sticks" in the environment indefinitely. Environmental health advocates are concerned that exposure to environmental PFOA as well as to airborne fumes released when nonstick cookware overheats may be more toxic than realized.

PFOA is a synthetic chemical used to give Teflon its essential non-stickiness. Problem is, the chemical is apparently just as durable an environmental contaminant as it is a finish on pots and pans. That is, PFOA doesn't break down. As a result, there's plenty of PFOA floating around. So much that one study, released by the 3M Company in 2001, found that PFOA was present in the blood of 96 percent of 598 children tested in 23 states and the District of Columbia. (The study can be downloaded on Environmental Working Group's website.)

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has at last initiated a review of the potential health risks and exposure routes of PFOA and its most commonly used salts, including ammonium perfluorooctanoate (commonly referred to as C8), which is used in Teflon production. The EPA based its decision not only on PFOA's persistence in the environment and the likelihood of low-level exposure to the chemical and its salts to the general population, but also because a few studies show that PFOA causes "developmental toxicity and other effects" in laboratory animals.

Was DuPont Hiding Teflon's Dangers?

Last year, 3,000 residents living in the vicinity of DuPont's Washington Works plant in Parkersburg, West Virginia, filed a class action lawsuit, charging that DuPont knowingly discharged C8 into local drinking-water supplies. Concerns arose over C8's potential health hazards when internal DuPont documents became public.

The DuPont document that has raised the most concern dates back to 1981. That year, a study conducted by 3M, then DuPont's primary C8 supplier, found birth defects in rats exposed to C8. The document reports the results of the pregnancies of seven Dupont workers exposed to C8. Two of the women delivered babies with birth defects, one with eye and tear-duct defects and another with nostril and eye defects. However, DuPont did not report this finding of a potential human hazard from C8 exposure, according to an investigation by the Environmental Working Group (EWG), a nonprofit research and advocacy organization. EWG has written a letter asking EPA director Christine Whitman to investigate whether DuPont broke the law by concealing this finding.

Children's Health Environment Coalition