
Cancer-Linked Chemicals Manufactured by 3M Are Turning Up in Drinking Water - smacktoward
https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2018-3M-groundwater-pollution-problem/
======
RaceWon
15 years I ago I worked on the construction phase of a microchip manufacturing
facility, well actually they were adding another separate plant to make gaming
chips.

The computer giant that owned the land and had done so much ecological damage
to the water table they had to supply the town with city water. Dead birds
could be found all over the rooftops, no worms or insects were in any of the
soil near the plant.

At the time I had no idea of the chemicals used to make chips but I do now,
and it's TERRIFING. Here's a few off the top of my head: 100% ultra high
purity Sulphuric acid, Hydrochloric Acid, Hydrofluoric Acid, Potassium
Hydroxide, Arsine, Arsenic, Silane gas (my personal fav, it's deadly to
breathe but that won't kill you because it typically explodes when it mixes
with air), and also a patented chemical that the company named J1000... but we
all called it 2 step because if you got even One drop on you--you'd take 2
steps and be dead.

I worked there for just a few months... I was involved with the testing of the
gasses some inert most were deadly though and could fuck you up just by
touching your skin; one night I had a dream that a valve cabinet failed, and I
tasted pink bubble gum--I woke up before I died in that dream. The next day I
quit.

~~~
ianai
Did anyone die while you worked there?

~~~
onetimemanytime
Not the OP but all those things can't be good for you at all. The worst part
is that it may happen 22 years later and just blame second hand smoke or
something.

~~~
ianai
Very true. My skin harshly reacts to many things that are just common place
today. Don’t want to go near stuff like that. I fully back leaving a workplace
like that. It’s sad our field relies on such harmful compounds.

~~~
onetimemanytime
Chemistry /physics are such maybe that we have no way out? Don't know.

Maybe robots can make both sides happy?

------
brohoolio
There’s an auto supplier upstream of my town that was dumping PFAs into the
drain. It’s containminated the whole river and all the lakes. The river is
where my town gets our drinking water.

They are installing carbon filters which should help. I use a carbon filter
for all our water.

The thing is we have a dixione plume approaching our water intake too.

The parts per trillion is kinda mind blowing too. Take a large pool, let’s say
40,000 gallons. There’s 90,000 drops per gallon. So your pool is made of 3.6
billion drops of water.

It takes .0036 drops of this stuff to raise your pools concentration to 1 part
per trillion. That means a quarter of a drop of this stuff will turn the pool
into something that is above EPA limits.

It’s insane and mind blowing.

~~~
nooron
Ann Arbor?

~~~
brohoolio
Yup.

------
resters
It's nice to see the local officials concerned and doing something about the
problem, but in many municipalities the local officials are part of the
problem.

I think that the mayor of every city should be required to eat a fish caught
in the most polluted stream that runs through the city, and state governors
should be required to eat a fish caught from the most polluted stream in the
state.

To wash it down, each should be required to drink a glass of water from the
tap of the area of their jurisdiction with the dirtiest tap water.

This should happen weekly so that the toxins create a real health concern for
the officials ingesting them.

We live in a world where most officials allow our natural resources and
infrastructure to fail with impunity. This has to change. That we don't see
local "watchdog" groups staging these sorts of tastings for television
illustrates that the corruption spreads beyond the officials and into the
media as well.

~~~
kodablah
Although surely not serious, lots of naivete here. This assumes everyone
values personal health over financial health. This prevents anyone from
wanting to get elected to fix an existing problem. This places guilt even on
the innocent if they are subjected to upstream or state-level pollution. On
and on and on.

You either have a problem with existing laws not being enforced or there not
being laws to enforce concerning the issue. This happens in many other areas
of concern too. It's going to require a citizenry that cares, though PR stunts
always feel good on paper.

~~~
rsync
"Although surely not serious ..."

Not your parent but I took it seriously and I think "skin in the game"
structures like this should be taken very seriously - they are likely the best
mechanisms for aligning interests.

"This assumes everyone values personal health over financial health."

Very easy to solve this one - the elected official doesn't eat the fish and
drink the water, _their children do_.

"This prevents anyone from wanting to get elected to fix an existing problem."

This is a good and important point - you would scare away potential candidates
for office if existing systems are already broken/unsafe. I don't know how to
arrange a neat solution to this.

~~~
resters
Very well put. Newly elected officials could be given a six month grace period
to get any remediation efforts underway before their first tasting. Incumbents
would not be eligible for a grace period.

One other point to add to rsync's comment:

One other point to mention is that rational choices cannot be made about
things like pollution when measurement methods can be fudged and the health
effects of specific pollutants are not necessarily well studied. Bottom line,
putting it in one's own body is the best way to determine whether a sensible
person would feel comfortable with the environmental exposure being forced
upon citizens due to lax or imperfect regulation, or even imperfect science.
Do I want to drink this discolored, foul smelling water just because it does
not test positive for known carcinogens? Common sense is actually a
surprisingly helpful guide here.

All that would happen is that regulations would begin to be enforced or
modified to match the _improved perception of reality_ informed by the
tasting.

Think about it this way, climate change is a fairly abstract concept that is
much easier to ignore than the fish dinner sitting in front of you that was
caught in water your administration declared safe.

~~~
woolvalley
Thats not really fair if you have a superfund lake from the 1950s that nobody
uses water from, eats fish in it or has the budget to fix. And is in the
middle of nowhere at some desert.

~~~
resters
The notion of an appropriate budget to fix these kinds of things usually omits
the full cost of neglect.

The article linked above describes a massive plume of cancer-causing pollution
spreading through underground waterways. All we need to do to find and justify
the budget is accurately quantify the human cost.

------
alexandercrohde
"Last November, she announced that areas around the Cottage Grove plant had
elevated levels of some cancers including childhood cancers , and lower
fertility. And, she said in court filings, 3M was to blame."

\- I wonder if chemicals are the cause of the 50% drop in male sperm count in
developed countries [over the last 30 years].

~~~
hammock
The answer is almost definitely yes, at least in great part. Furthermore, the
top two killers in America are heart disease and cancer. 80% of heart disease
is preventable by diet - avoiding foods that cause insulin resistance (sugar)
and gut dysfunction (chemicals). The top cancer and many others are triggered
by environmental variables (chemicals).

And I know I am going to be downvoted for not citing, maybe someone who agrees
can help back me up, and also for saying "chemicals" and there are people here
who cringe because everything is chemicals and most chemicals are good, I want
to be clear I'm talking about the bad chemicals here- PFCs like the ones in
the article, heavy metals, other petroleum-derived baddies, and some others.

~~~
village-idiot
Don’t forget seed oils!

~~~
mr_toad
And oxygen. That stuff can be lethal.

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oxidative_stress](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oxidative_stress)

~~~
onetimemanytime
A lot of dead people--not to say 100% because I have no source--had been using
oxygen before they died.

------
flashman
I'm following this story because our local air force base (in Australia) used
3M firefighting foam for decades, and the run-off has contaminated residential
properties, including creeks where people used to fish. The Australian
government and Defence Force have basically tried to rely on 3M's health
advice to tell everyone that their cancers aren't related to the chemicals,
but nobody really trusts them.

------
atombender
There was an excellent article in the NYT a couple of years ago about the
fight against the PFAS industry (PFOA, etc.) [1].

The legal fight against DuPont, 3M and others has been going on for decades,
and their environmental abuses have been going on since the 1950s. PFAS are
scary, and they're absolutely everywhere. And every time a much-maligned
pollutant such as PFOA or PFOS gets phased out or banned, a new fluorochemical
takes it place that has more or less the same properties; same story all over
again.

[1] [https://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/10/magazine/the-lawyer-
who-b...](https://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/10/magazine/the-lawyer-who-became-
duponts-worst-nightmare.html)

~~~
hnmonkey
I came here to post the exact same link. It was a fantastic and well
researched article with tons of details and left me feeling sad at the
situation but happy that there was someone who fought for helping people out.

Here's another that's in a very similar vein that had some solid research
behind it. It'll probably leave you in the same state the NY Times article
above will but it's a must-read. I don't think enough people will see it or
your link unfortunately. [https://theintercept.com/2015/08/11/dupont-
chemistry-decepti...](https://theintercept.com/2015/08/11/dupont-chemistry-
deception/)

~~~
atombender
I've been meaning to read that series, thanks for reminding me!

~~~
hnmonkey
It's a great read. It really goes super quickly and flows well. It's just a
shame that the subject is so unfortunate. When I finished the whole series I
was honestly amazed at how much I'd read through because I didn't even notice
it. Almost like a thriller that you just can't put down. Enjoy!

------
Canadauni
I find this interesting as in my undergrad I was working with a 3M supplied
poly-fluorinated ether which was said to be a highly stable compound. We were
breaking it apart with all manner of amine compounds producing various levels
of HF and and HF2 along with poly-fluorinated amides that had a small amount
of research mostly pointing to negative environmental impacts. Nothing really
came of it as my reactions had no applications relevant to the goals of the
lab I was working in.

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BitterSweets
Is there anywhere in the US that you can live without fear or worry of having
contaminated water or air?

~~~
amelius
What kind of equipment would you need to check your drinking water for any
kind of contamination? What would it cost?

Just curious.

~~~
rsync
"What kind of equipment would you need to check your drinking water for any
kind of contamination? What would it cost?"

You need to send it away for testing - it would be impractical to home test
for all of the things you'd want to test for.

It's likely that your local municipality has a testing service that you can
send water into for $50 or $100 and have rough testing done for lead and
e-coli and crypto and so on.

A more extensive (and expensive) test will test for essentially _everything_ ,
including VOCs and chemicals and all manner of manufacturing byproducts,
plastics, phthalates, etc.

That would cost you $600 or $800 ...

~~~
LeifCarrotson
The appropriate local municipality is probably your county health department,
who almost certainly has results from the last time your home was sold on
file. Here, it's $15 to retest, or a couple bucks and a FOIA request to get
all previous records.

I do have 65 ppt of PFAS in my well water (one of the gray dots in West
Michigan, where Wolverine operated a tannery that dumped Scotchguard-treated
leather scrap in local swamps). The test for that (and various other
contaminants) ran $650. Yeah, Wolverine is paying for that and the carbon
filters in my basement, but it kinda sucks to have been drinking it for 30
years. At least they caught it when my kid was onky exposed in the womb and
his formula until he was 1...

------
cjensen
Note that much of the background on this issue appears to be provided by the
Environmental Working Group (EWG). They are an organization which frequently
promotes their agenda through scaremongering scientific claims which are
frequently flat-out wrong or misrepresented.

The valid stuff in the article is the stuff where the Minnesota department of
health altered their allowable limits based on published scientific concerns,
and the town was over the limit. The other stuff... I can't tell the wheat
from the chaff.

~~~
OnlineCourage
I'm from Cottage Grove area, in fact my childhood dentist was there. None of
this is news, it is a terrible legacy, Cottage Grove was not the only area
contaminated, much of the entire Eastern Twin Cities suburbs have problems in
the water with ongoing cleanup efforts. 3M is a chemical company, in essence.
How much cancer did it cause? I don't know...some. While many Americans don't
agree that climate change is an important issue, I think it's well accepted
that just dumping chemicals is bad. I think the issue is whether it's in one's
own back yard or not.

------
ksec
What are the current best Home Water Filter we could get? Are the Brita
MAXTRA+ any good? And which one is the most affordable?

( We now need to paid extra money to get drinking water, in many ways I think
this is backward as a society )

~~~
Jaepa
Brita's are pretty much unless unfortunately. As are most pitcher style filter
systems. Faucet mounted systems are probably the easiest way to go (eg Pur),
but better under the counter or household water filters do exist.

Its also worth mentioning that there good chance that a water filter won't
actually filter this out. Water treatment plants will often treat the water
through multiple levels of filtration, reverse osmosis, UV treatment, ozone
treatment, etc.

~~~
driverdan
> Brita's are pretty much unless unfortunately.

How do you figure that? They're the same carbon filters as found in the faucet
systems.

~~~
Jaepa
They are both carbon filters, but they are not the same.

I got concerned about water quality (specifically lead) right before the Flint
after doing some plumbing work in my apartment. After some digging I found a
report detailing PPM before and after filtration. Brita's generally filtered
less than 20 percent of containment with the exception of things like chlorine
which naturally off gas. The faucet systems generally removed 80-90%.

------
post_break
Chemicals in the drinking water, plastic in the salt. It's either you embrace
ignorance or live in fear of what is in your food, drink, air. Kind of
depressing.

~~~
expectsomuch
Um, I believe there is another alternative, wherein we use that information to
regulate the use and release of those chemicals and microplastics....

~~~
post_break
My point isn't that we should just accept this, just that it's already in the
food supply.

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tomatotomato37
I'm having a hard time following this. Is this cancerous like asbestos is
cancerous, or is this cancerous in the same way California says coffee is
cancerous?

~~~
maxton
It's cancerous in the sense that a consultant for 3M called it "one of the
strongest cancer promoters I’ve ever seen." (quote from TFA)

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andreygrehov
Curious, is there an easy way to test the water quality at home?

~~~
alexandercrohde
I've looked into this myself. Unfortunately it's not practical.

Firstly, there are a number of different chemicals you might test for.
Secondly, for chemicals that are dangerous at 1ppb only gas-chemotography /
mass-spectrometry can detect that, which would cost upward of $500 per test
per chemical and be done at a university lab.

Might be more practical to only drink filtered or distilled water. Normal
water filters do a shockingly good job with most chemicals, not sure about
PFAs.

~~~
tshannon
Carbon filters clean up "some" of them, but not all. Reverse Osmosis is better
if you can afford it.

The filtering really should be done by the city / government on an industrial
scale (like CG did in the article) where it's not only more cost efficient,
but also their responsibility.

~~~
smolder
Reverse osmosis also wastes a certain amount of water as it filters, doesn't
it? I remember there being a drain line on kits I looked at.

~~~
nwellinghoff
I run the drain line to my garden.

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artursapek
Is this something a reverse-osmosis system can filter out at home?

~~~
jxramos
I'm curious about that too. We use a RO system, and so far I've only replaced
the carbon sediment filters. I'm a year or two away from replacing the RO
membrane cartridge. I cut them open when I replace them, I always wanted to do
some kind of chemical analyses of the filters. Visibly they're just brown and
saturated with rust from old galvanized pipes our building uses.

~~~
ohthanks
I think it's actually pretty hard to tell much from the membrane itself, my
understanding is that most of the process is based in the membrane preferring
the smaller water-only molecules and allowing the waste run off to carry away
anything else. So they shouldn't really be catching much in the element.

They fail either from the chlorine degrading the membrane film which will
start allowing larger dissolved solids through (your TDS will increase) or by
having the pores scale and plug over time which will slowly decrease the
output.

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blablabla123
I wonder if you had been living in an area with production plants as a child
for a while exposed to this whether this still has an effect in adulthood.

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agumonkey
I believe we will need a great deal of nanoscale filters.

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viburnum
I'm a libertarian, and I believe in the free market above all else, so it's
important to not regulate this, because whatever else happens will inevitably
be worse.

~~~
zkomp
Did you forget the sarcasm tag, or do you really equate free markets with the
made up "freedom" of polluting the environment and give cancer to everyone who
in turn will have to pay for health care or just die? That is not what free
markets means...

