Poisoning Consumers with Teflon

DuPont, Now in the Frying Pan

by AMY CORTES, The New York Times, August 8, 2004

TEFLON has been hugely successful for DuPont, which over the last
half-century has made the material almost ubiquitous, putting it not just on
frying pans but also on carpets, fast-food packaging, clothing, eyeglasses
and electrical wires - even the fabric roofs covering football stadiums.

Now DuPont has to worry that Teflon and the materials used to make it have
perhaps become a bit too ubiquitous. Teflon constituents have found their
way into rivers, soil, wild animals and humans, the company, government
environmental officials and others say. Evidence suggests that some of the
materials, known to cause cancer and other problems in animals, may be
making people sick.

While it remains one of DuPont's most valuable assets, Teflon has also
become a potentially huge liability. The Environmental Protection Agency
filed a complaint last month charging the company with withholding evidence
of its own health and environmental concerns about an important chemical
used to manufacture Teflon. That would be a violation of federal
environmental law, compounded by the possibility that DuPont covered up the
evidence for two decades.

DuPont contends that it met its legal reporting obligations, and said that
it plans to file a formal response this week.

If an E.P.A. administrative judge does not agree, the agency could fine the
company up to $25,000 a day from the time DuPont learned of potential
problems with the chemical two decades ago until Jan. 30, 1997, when the
agency's fines were raised, and $27,500 a day since then. The total penalty
could reach $300 million. The agency is also investigating whether the
suspect chemical, a detergentlike substance called perfluorooctanoic acid,
is harmful to human health, and how it has become so pervasive in the
environment. The chemical - which is more commonly known as PFOA or C-8, for
the number of carbon atoms in its molecular structure - has turned up in the
blood of more than 90 percent of Americans, according to samples taken from
blood banks by the 3M Company beginning in the mid-90's. Until it got out of
the business in 2000, 3M was the biggest supplier of PFOA. DuPont promptly
announced it would begin making the substance itself.

The E.P.A. is auditing 3M to determine if there were any civil violations of
environmental law involving its chemically related products, Cynthia
Bergman, a spokeswoman for the agency, said. The E.P.A.'s action on July 8
prompted the Chinese government to begin its own study on the safety of
Teflon, and some stores there pulled Teflon-coated pans from their shelves,
the government-run China Daily newspaper reported.

SOME people who live in or near Parkersburg, W.Va., where DuPont has
manufactured Teflon for 50 years, are not waiting for more studies.
Thousands of them have joined in a class-action suit filed in Wood County,
W.Va., Circuit Court against the chemical maker, which they charge knowingly
contaminated the air, land and water around the plant for decades without
informing the community. The chemical has been found in the public drinking
water at levels exceeding a longtime internal guideline considered safe by
DuPont. The trial is scheduled to begin next month.

DuPont is contesting the accusations, and insists that neither PFOA nor
Teflon poses risks to humans. "The evidence from over 50 years of experience
and extensive scientific studies supports our conclusion that PFOA does not
harm human health or the environment," said Stacey J. Mobley, general
counsel of DuPont, in a statement responding to the E.P.A. ruling.

Critics say they will press their fight against the company because PFOA
does not break down in the environment or in the human body, so the material
that has been released could pose a health threat for many years. "This is
an issue that won't go away for DuPont, because this chemical will not go
away," said Jane Houlihan, vice president for research at the Environmental
Working Group, an organization in Washington that is DuPont's most vocal
critic.

For that reason, some critics said they think that PFOA, and the family of
perfluorochemicals known as PFC's to which it belongs, are potentially a
bigger problem than many chemicals that have been banned.

That could have implications for hundreds of companies that use the
materials, including the makers of popular brands like Gore-Tex, Stainmaster
and SilverStone. "There's a huge ripple effect throughout the industry,"
says Rich Purdy, a toxicologist who was at 3M until 2000.

FOR DuPont, the controversy could hamper plans by its chairman and chief
executive, Charles O. Holliday Jr., to shed the company's slow-growing
businesses - including the unit that makes nylon and Lycra, both of which it
invented - and focus instead on faster-growing businesses like genetically
engineered seeds, soy-based products and electronics. While the company
invests in those areas, it is banking on steady profits from products like
Teflon.

Teflon-related products contribute at least $100 million in profit annually,
according to company reports and court documents - almost 10 percent of the
company's 2003 total. DuPont has been pushing its Teflon-branded materials
(known as fluoroproducts) for new uses - such as a built-in stain repellent
for fabrics and a spray-on cleaning product - and has identified new
markets, including China, for expansion. The company has invested $50
million to expand Teflon production and $20 million on an advertising
campaign in the United States.

DuPont has reported revenue increases for both quarters of 2004, and
earnings increased 57 percent in the first quarter of 2004. Frank Mitsch, an
analyst with Fulcrum Global Partners, said he thought the E.P.A. action
would not have an immediate effect on DuPont. "This will be tied up in the
courts for a while," he said.

Still, in announcing its second-quarter results on July 23, DuPont disclosed
that it had set aside $45 million as "a reserve for settlement in connection
with the PFOA class-action suit." Gene Pisasale, an analyst with Wilmington
Trust, a bank that was founded in 1903 by T. Coleman du Pont and is now one
of DuPont's biggest shareholders, said that while "it's not a huge charge" -
the company spent more than $1 billion on litigation over the fungicide
Benlate - "if this were to be a continuing thing, I would have to take a
second look."

At the very least, the Teflon flap could damage DuPont's well-polished
image. The 200-year-old company, based in Wilmington, Del., prides itself on
its corporate values, and Mr. Holliday is a high-profile advocate of
socially responsible business. "In the chemical industry, the critical thing
is not only investor perception, but consumer trust," Mr. Pisasale said.
"That can be very hard to build back."

In a preliminary risk assessment report released last spring, the E.P.A.
said PFOA was a possible carcinogen, but did not advise that consumers stop
using Teflon products. PFOA is used as a processing aid in making many
Teflon products and and is not present in end products, such as cookware.
But some researchers assert that some Teflon products can release PFC's,
including PFOA, in the environment and in the human body. They contend that
this could account for its wide presence in the environment and in the
population.

A spokesman for W. L. Gore & Associates, which makes Gore-Tex, said the
material it gets from DuPont does not break down into PFOA, but he conceded
that the material could contain trace amounts and that there was still an
open question about safety. "Are the downstream folks involved? Sure. We all
want to find the sources and pathways here," the spokesman, Ed Schneider,
said.

A study that appeared this month in Environmental Science & Technology,
published by the American Chemical Society, found varying levels of PFC's,
including PFOA, in the blood of people living on four continents. The
researchers postulated that prolonged use of products containing PFC's -
like paper products, packaging, carpet treatments and stain-resistant
textiles and cleaners - could be a major source of human exposure. DuPont
dismisses such reports as speculation, and says it is working with the
E.P.A. to study the sources of PFOA in the environment. Because PFC's do not
occur naturally, the most likely sources are thought to be manufacturing
releases or breakdown from products. The company acknowledges that fumes
from Teflon pans subjected to high heat can release gasses unrelated to
PFOA, which can kill pet birds and cause a flulike condition in humans known
as polymer fume fever. PFOA is known to cause cancer in some animals, and
has been linked to liver damage and other problems in animals. Its effects
on human health have been little studied.

In the 1980's, a DuPont study of female workers exposed to the substance
found that two out of seven women gave birth to babies with facial defects
similar to those observed in the offspring of rats that had been exposed to
PFOA in another study. In its complaint, the E.P.A. charged that DuPont had
also detected PFOA in the blood of at least one of the fetuses and in public
drinking water in communities near DuPont plants, but did not report that it
had done the tests.

THERE is no federal requirement for companies to test unregulated chemicals
like PFOA, but if companies have reason to believe a substance poses a
threat, they are required by the Toxic Substances Control Act to notify the
E.P.A. The agency also said DuPont was in violation of another federal
environmental law for not providing all of the toxicological data it had
gathered about the chemical after a 1997 request from the agency.

The class-action lawsuit, filed in Wood County, W.Va., the home of the
Washington Works plant where DuPont has made Teflon for decades, has turned
up a series of documents that DuPont had sought to shield as proprietary
information. The latest came to light in May, when the West Virginia Supreme
Court voted unanimously to unseal several DuPont memorandums from 2000 in
which John R. Bowman, a company lawyer, warned two of his superiors - Thomas
L. Sager, a vice president and assistant general counsel, and Martha L.
Rees, an associate general counsel - that the company would "spend millions
to defend these lawsuits and have the additional threat of punitive damages
hanging over our head."

He added that other companies that had polluted drinking water supplies near
their factories had warned him that it was cheaper and easier to replace
those supplies and settle claims than to try to fight them in court. And
those companies, he noted, had spilled chemicals that did not persist in the
environment the way that PFOA does. "Our story is not a good one," he wrote
in one memorandum. "We continued to increase our emissions into the river in
spite of internal commitments to reduce or eliminate the release of this
chemical into the community and environment because of our concern about the
biopersistence of this chemical."

Another document summarizes the company's strategy for deflecting the PFOA
issue and litigation. It offers various suggestions for improving
credibility with employees, the community and regulators, such as "keep
issue out of press as much as possible" and "do not create impression that
DuPont did harm to the environment."

Local officials said the memorandums - with the E.P.A.'s action and recent
tests that found increasing PFOA levels in their water - confirmed their
fears.

"We've been exposed since at least 1984," said Robert Griffin, general
manager of the Little Hocking Water Association, which serves about 4,000
homes in rural Washington County, Ohio, directly across the Ohio River from
DuPont's Washington Works plant. "The community could have dealt with it
back then, but DuPont saw fit not to inform us."

In June, Mr. Griffin included a warning in his annual water quality report
to customers. It stated, in bold capital letters, that until the issue was
resolved, "You are drinking this water at your own risk."

Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company