Toxic Chemicals in Food Packaging and Makeup with Rob Bilott
Rob Bilott discusses toxic chemicals in food packaging and cosmetics and what these chemicals do to humans. PFAS chemicals are found in our blood, water, food, and across the planet.
Mark Ruffalo played Rob Bilott in Dark Waters, a movie that tells this story. To learn more and where to watch the important film click here: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt9071322/
For more info on Rob Bilott and to purchase his book, Exposure, visit: https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Exposure/Robert-Bilott/9781501172823
Hey everybody, my guest today is my old friend and colleague Rob Lott, who is an American environmental attorney from Cincinnati, Ohio.
Lott is known for the lawsuits against DuPont on behalf of plaintiffs from West Virginia, and those were the lawsuits.
I was co-counseling on that case, and those were what we call the CA to the Teflon cases.
Mark Ruffalo was in the movie Dark Waters about that case playing Rob Palat.
And Rob had several decades of his life.
He went from being a corporate attorney to being an unlikely and kicking and screaming into the plaintiff's attorney bar.
And tried an amazing case and exposed for the first time to the American public the dangers of these chemicals that are called BFOAs or PFASs.
They are also called forever chemicals.
I'm going to let Rob explain why.
Basically, they last forever in the environment, but also they constantly re-cycle in your body once you consume them.
And I've had Rob on this show before, and it was a very, very popular podcast.
And I want to get an update on what's happened recently with PFO. One of the reasons I wanted to get you on is that Consumer Reports just published a white paper that shows that BFOAs are now widely used in food packaging.
And particularly the containers of food that you get from fast food suppliers like McDonald's or Wendy's and they're the containers that kind of look like plastic or cardboard, but they have the advantage for those companies and for consumers.
That salad dressing and other liquids in your food will not leak through them.
The problem is that the chemicals, the PFOAs, from that packaging material migrate into the food.
And they are endocrine disruptors.
They cause low birth weight babies.
They are associated with lower IQ in children.
I think most recently the EPA has...
I don't know if they've classified them, but they have published reports that indicate that they're a potential carcinogenic.
Let's start by talking about the packaging issue, Rob.
What do you know about that?
Yeah, first of all, thanks so much for having me back.
It's a real pleasure.
I appreciate having the opportunity to speak on these issues again.
You know, we're seeing now a lot of attention on the presence of these chemicals, these PFAS, completely man-made toxins, forever chemicals, being used in fast food packaging and all kinds of food packaging, not just fast food, but all kinds of things that are used to keep oils and greases from seeping through the packaging You know, pizza boxes, hamburger wrappers, microwave popcorn bags, that kind of thing.
And, you know, it's amazing.
It looks like a regular cardboard package, but it has a kind of shiny surface on it a little bit.
Yeah.
Yeah, there's those, you know, that are coding of certain types of cardboards, but then it's even on paper, you know, types of paper wrappings that you have on fast food wrappers, for example, or in plastic packaging.
And, you know, there's a lot of press that's been paid just recently.
Particularly, as you mentioned, Consumer Reports came out with a recent report that was able to detect some of this stuff on these materials.
A lot of the big fast food retailers, for example, in response have come out and pledged to start phasing out these chemicals from their products that they use on wrappings.
But this information, unfortunately, goes back decades.
You know, 3M actually started testing food for these chemicals as far back as at least 2001.
They went out to supermarkets and were sampling, taking samples of produce and milk and things of that nature.
And we're finding these chemicals back then.
Information was provided to the FDA, to other agencies, you know, alerting them to this, but it's just now starting to come out to the public that this stuff's out there.
It's really frustrating for those consumers that are just becoming aware that these chemicals are out there.
there.
They've been out there for 70, 80 years in our environment, getting into our water, our soil, our air, into all of us.
They tend, as you indicated, they tend to get into our blood and stay there.
People are just now beginning to become aware of that and are trying to figure out how do we avoid these things?
How do I make a choice if I want to, to try to avoid this stuff?
Because up to now, none of us had that choice.
None of us even knew we were being exposed because the information about the existence of the chemicals and what products they were used in was withheld from all of us.
So as that information is finally coming out, people are learning this and are filing petitions, are sending letters to these companies.
As the media reports on the widespread presence, this is now being picked up worldwide.
So it's become a real concern.
Particularly as the more we learn about these chemicals, the more scientists and regulators are becoming concerned at lower and lower exposure levels.
So even though some of these materials may just have what they call trace or minor amounts of the stuff, the problem is these chemicals are so potent, so toxic, that the tiniest amounts That we're exposed to, over time, build up to higher and higher levels.
So everybody's trying to, right now, grasp how are we getting exposed?
Where are the different sources of these things?
You know, some places we know it's actually in the drinking water, and we can filter that out.
Other places, we're finding it's in the blood of people all over the planet, people that are nowhere near the Manufacturing sites or places where it's being dumped into the water.
So we're trying to find out how is it getting into everyone's blood.
And things like this, food packaging, start to help us piece that together.
And so the more we find out about this, the more steps that can be taken to try to phase those out of those products.
We're seeing this too in other types of products like cosmetics.
There was a recent report about the fact that these same types of chemicals historically have been used in a lot of different cosmetics, particularly things that are waterproof.
The same types of properties that these things were used for in food packaging have been used in a lot of cosmetics.
And so it's just different categories of products that we keep learning about almost on a daily basis.
And again, it's because these things have been used for so long, for decades and decades, without us having any idea they were out there.
And the companies that made these, that made these chemicals, knowing that if they put them out in these products, they're going to get into us.
They did it anyway.
And we're unfortunately just now all becoming aware of it.
Yeah, the chemical was used probably most famously in Teflon.
DuPont invented a non-stick pan that your bacon and your cakes would not stick to.
And it was a miracle pan when I was growing up.
But people started getting what they call Teflon headaches.
When the pan heated up, you would inhale it and I'm going to talk about exactly why it does not leave the bloodstream, because most toxic chemicals, even really bad stuff like dioxin and mercury and aluminum, are able to bind to other materials in your blood and then are excreted by the kidneys or excreted as fecal material or in sweat or your air.
That does not happen as efficiently as this family of chemicals explained by.
Exactly.
These are odd chemicals.
Again, they don't exist in nature.
They were invented by man right around the time of World War II. And the one that you were referring to called PFOA is one that's got eight carbons attached to fluorine.
It's this chemical structure, again, that's man-created that, makes it really strong, makes it difficult for it to break down in manufacturing processes, which made it very useful for things like making Teflon.
It was used as a surfactant in the Teflon process.
But it also, that chemical structure, made it so it doesn't break down when it gets out into the environment.
We've heard the testimony, it takes thousands, if not millions of years for that chemical bond to start to break apart out in the natural world.
And what we've also found, though, is our bodies don't know how to process this stuff, that unique chemical structure when it gets into us, unlike other chemicals, as you mentioned, that our bodies can rapidly flush out, or tend to deposit that our bodies can rapidly flush out, or tend to deposit to fat or stay in one spot where they don't cause a lot of
This stuff, this PFOA and the related chemical called PFOS, Which also has eight carbons, but PFOS was used in things like Scotchgard, firefighting foams, computer chip manufacturing.
Well, these C8s, PFOA and PFOS, when humans are exposed, they get into the blood and they stick in the blood and they tend to mimic something that basically allows them to then flow through the blood and stay there and then coat all of our organs over time as the blood circulates over and over.
It stays there and it builds up.
And our bodies just don't know how to excrete it and don't know how to get rid of it.
So it tends to stay in the blood.
And, you know, remarkably, what we see happening is if you go back and look at some of the historic documents, DuPont and 3M recognized What that meant, which is they told people early on when they first started finding out about the real toxicity of this stuff in the 80s, don't donate blood because, you know, this stuff sticks in the blood.
And we just saw some recent studies that came out, I think it was in Australia, with firemen.
You know, firemen have been exposed to these chemicals particularly because they were used in firefighting foams.
They've been used to coat the waterproofing, stain-resistant type materials that were coating the And used as coatings on turnout gear.
So they've been exposed to these chemicals for years and years.
And they actually did a study and looked at how much of this chemical would finally start to leave their blood, and it improved if they donated blood.
Which was great for the firemen, but the concern, of course, becomes who's getting that blood?
Because unfortunately, this stuff can be passed along in the blood.
In fact, we see that babies are born pre-polluted with these chemicals because it passes from the mother to the child through the placenta in the womb.
So this stuff is just odd.
It just behaves strangely.
It stays in us.
It builds up in the blood.
It circulates throughout the body.
And it really, it'll go away as women.
You know, in certain years, women tend to lose blood.
That will reduce the body burden.
But there are people that are right now trying to figure out, how do we reduce these levels in people?
We can put filters on to clean it out of the water.
We can try to dig it up if it's in the soil.
But what about the millions, if not billions, of people that have this stuff in their blood?
At levels that scientists are saying are really troubling and concerning for health impacts.
What are the direct health impacts that we know are associated with C8s?
Well, with the C8s, we have some of the most comprehensive human health studies that have ever been done on any chemical.
And those were done specifically because you made DuPont do them.
Under our settlement, yeah, in West Virginia, we were able to use tens of millions, if not over $100 million of DuPont's money to have independent scientists finally do the comprehensive, big enough human health studies to confirm What the company's own animal studies and worker studies had been showing for decades, that the chemical was associated with increased cancers and other health effects.
So those studies were done.
Particularly kidney cancers.
Exactly.
So we did these studies.
It took seven years to do all these additional studies.
And at the end of that process, PFOA, the C8, PFOA, was confirmed confirmed.
To cause kidney cancer, testicular cancer, ulcerative colitis, thyroid disease, preeclampsia, high cholesterol.
And you may look at that and say, that's a weird mix of different stuff.
But again, it's because of the way this stuff behaves in the body.
All these different organ systems are affected.
That was on PFOA. And that was the science as of 2012.
Since that time.
Worldwide, scientists have been studying not only PFOA, but this closely related one, PFOS, the one that's in the firefighting foams in the Scotchgard.
And what they're finding is these chemicals not only have those effects we just talked about, but they tend to also impact the immune system, which leads to a whole cascade of potential events.
And as you mentioned, they're linked with possibly reducing baby birth weight and all kinds of different effects.
And most recently, looking at all this data, when the new administration came in, we had new assessments of PFOA and PFOS by the US Environmental Protection Agency.
And those assessments showed that they are much more concerned about these chemicals than they had been in the past.
And in particular, with PFOA, the US EPA's draft assessment says that this chemical should now be viewed as a likely human carcinogen.
And that has dramatic potential impact on safe drinking water standards and levels going forward, because you're essentially finding that there's no acceptable level for this stuff now in water.
And obviously what ends up being in the final drinking water standard has to take in economic considerations and all that kind of thing.
But from a pure scientific standpoint, there's a concern now that there may not be a safe level for these chemicals in drinking water.
And that's a real concern when you stop and look at the data that's been collected.
The Environmental Working Group has a great interactive map that they've been updating for years showing what I think they estimate over 200 million people just in the U.S. have these chemicals in their drinking water.
And now we're starting to find out that this stuff is in drinking water all over the world.
It's in Italy.
It's in Germany.
It's in Australia.
So the potential health impacts here are truly global.
And when you stop and think about, well, wait a minute, how do you even assess this when you've got these man-made chemicals in everyone's blood worldwide?
And they have these kinds of impacts, including cancer.
How do you even find a clean or unexposed group to compare those folks to?
To be able to show that this chemical is what's actually causing those problems.
So I think you've got a lot of scientists and regulators now worldwide that are very concerned that we're dealing with a worldwide health threat here.
That, you know, essentially has gone unrecognized For 50, 60, 70 years.
And we're now at the point where this stuff is in everyone's veins, everyone's blood.
And what do we do about it now?
And how do we handle this?
And that's been part of the problem because what we now see is this narrative developing.
As regulators and legislators start to say we need to regulate this stuff, we need to adopt laws to actually address this, we see pushback now saying it's too big.
It's in so many products.
It's so pervasive.
That if you begin to actually regulate and crack down on this, you're going to shut the economy down.
Or all computer chip manufacturing will end as we know it.
Or you won't have your cell phones or COVID masks because the stuff is used in so many different products.
It's almost like we've contaminated so much and so many people that it's now too big to address.
Is it in the COVID masks?
There was actually a recent report that came out that looked at that and unfortunately found that there are some of these masks have these types of coatings on them.
In fact, I believe that the most recent article that I saw showed that the one that had the highest levels was actually a type of masks that the firefighters use.
So again, once again, our poor firefighters, our emergency responders have been dosed with this stuff without ever being told that there was a potential threat here.
That the foam they were using and being told to spray all over the place had these chemicals in them.
That their gear might be coated with them, that the masks they were wearing.
So that's just one community.
That's one subset of our population that's only just now becoming aware of this and saying, hey, wait a minute.
This stuff shouldn't be in these products.
At a minimum, there should be warnings or labeling or something to let people know.
And up to now, it hasn't happened.
People should know that there are water supplies, water systems, all over North America, probably other continents as well, that are heavily contaminated with BFOAs, BFOSs, particularly water systems that are near airports,
small regional airports, where they're testing out these firefighting foams, and if it's gotten into the local aquifer, contaminated the water system, And my firm, Kennedy and Madonna, is working with Rob around the country,
representing these systems, these local municipalities who have this terrible contamination problem, and we are representing them in litigation against 3M, against DuPont, against the other manufacturers, and getting those companies.
You can clean up these water systems.
But obviously it should be the manufacturer who is paying for that and not the local rate player.
Exactly.
As you mentioned, we're working together representing water providers, states all over the United States that are facing the costs now that have been forced on all of us.
By this contamination, you know, that we're the ones now having to deal with the fact that it's in our water, in our soil, in our fish, in our natural resources.
And unfortunately, the companies, you know, again, man-made chemicals.
So it's almost a fingerprint back to a very small group of companies who made this stuff.
Yet it's those companies that are refusing to accept responsibility and accountability.
You know, we saw the President of the United States just recently get up and talk about the need to address the national PFAS problem, something I thought I would never see in my lifetime.
The discussion has finally been elevated to that level.
Billions of dollars We're good to go.
That made billions and billions of dollars for decades, pumping these things out into our world, knowing this was going to happen.
So we're working hard, as you indicated, to try to make sure that the right people pay these costs.
Not all of us, not the taxpayers, not the cities and municipalities and states, but the people who did this knowing this would happen.
And it's increasingly frustrating, too, to see as all of this finally comes out, as the story finally gets revealed through things like the movie, Dark Waters, or the documentary, The Devil We Know, or the book that we did, that story finally comes out.
And we see that this actually has happened.
And people see the science that exists, that the science is there showing these harmful health effects.
We still have these folks standing up.
No science has ever been done showing any link between these chemicals and any harm.
It's just mind-boggling that it continues to exist.
And one of the things I've done just recently was try to figure out, if you're going to take that argument that there's not enough science yet, Particularly as we know, it's not just PFOA and PFOS now.
It's not just these C8s.
We've got C6s, C4s, C9s, C10s, hundreds if not thousands of these.
And the companies are saying, though, well, all the science was done on just one, PFOA. You don't have any science showing these others are causing harm.
Yet they're not doing the science, and they're not paying for it.
And our government doesn't have the money to do those studies.
So I filed a new case, I think we may have talked about this last time, back in 2018.
We want to bring a nationwide class action.
Where we're seeking not money, but to set up independent scientists in a scientific panel to look at what will this combination of PFAS do to us.
And if there's new science or new studies that have to be done, the companies have to fund the independent scientists to do it.
And we fought over that for quite some time.
The companies first said, you can't do that.
There's no injury here.
Mere presence in the blood is not an injury.
We won that battle.
And just a couple of weeks ago, we finally got a decision out of the federal court in Ohio saying that we could proceed as a class action on behalf of millions of people who have these chemicals in their blood.
Unfortunately, before we could really begin, the companies immediately filed petitions to try to appeal that to the appellate court.
So we're dealing with that now.
But again, it's all focusing on accountability, making sure the people who caused this ought to be paying for it, not us.
Rob, tell us about your book.
Back as all of this science was rolling out and confirming these health effects and all the science was finally in, and I was still seeing these companies stand up and say, no, this never happened.
There is no science.
I thought, you know what?
I've got to find a way to combine Bring all this information together about what really happened, what is out there, what science does exist, and put it together in a way that people can access it for themselves.
They can learn it for themselves.
They can see what the facts are, draw their own conclusions about what the science says.
So I sat down and wrote a book called Exposure.
It came out in 2019.
And it sort of gives you this history of how this happened.
How does a chemical get into the blood of every person on the planet during our lifetimes?
And none of us really knew what was happening.
How does that happen?
And how, even when you find out it's happening, How is it that we're unable to stop it from continuing?
I try to put my thoughts together on that in the book, Exposure, and hopefully that's helpful for folks trying to figure out how in the world that we get into this situation.
And one of the tricks that these companies, and we call the scientists, you know, these companies, we call them biostitutes because they, because they, They give you science for the science that the corporation will want to hear from money.
One of the things these companies do is that as soon as the facts are in, the studies are done about one structure of these chemical compounds, they simply change a molecule, create a new chemical that's essentially identical to the old chemical create a new chemical that's essentially identical to the old chemical and is going to behave the same way, but it doesn't have the indictment against it And then they'll use that for a decade until that, when it is proven dangerous.
And the taxpayer pays the bill.
And that's exactly what we saw happen here.
As the information came out about PFOA, the chemical that DuPont was using to make Teflon, In fact, DuPont had actually started making it when 3M finally pulled out of the market in 2000.
Well, DuPont, when it finally agreed to stop making PFOA, it was under a deal with EPA that gave them 10 years to phase that out.
Well, during that 10-year period, they simply went to their production line where they were making PFOA down in North Carolina and switched it over to a new chemical.
And this was simply taking essentially C8 and knocking two carbons off, calling it a C6 and renaming it Gen X, and then putting that same chemical into the same products.
It being shipped up to Parkersburg, West Virginia, to the same DuPont plant where now the new Gen X was being used to make Teflon and then being pumped into the air, into the river.
And what did we see?
The same stuff starts showing up in drinking water.
All along the Ohio River, all the way down to Louisville, it starts showing up in the drinking water in North Carolina.
And then when people stop and say, hey, isn't this Gen X stuff just as bad as PFOA? What we heard is that same argument I mentioned earlier.
Oh, wait a minute.
There's no evidence that Gen X causes any harm.
All of the studies were on PFOA. This is a new, different chemical.
And so it took years for people to finally start getting, what do we know about Gen X? And when the first cancer study finally came out, it showed the exact same three tumors in Gen X we have with PFOA. There had been a study on PFOA that showed a tumor triad, liver, pancreatic, and testicular tumors.
When the first cancer study came out in Gen X, liver, pancreatic, and testicular tumors.
The same cancer effects.
Yet, for whatever reason, it's taking forever.
For that data to filter out and for the regulatory agencies to be able to catch up and begin regulating that one.
So it becomes this whack-a-mole game you hear just mentioned, you know, where it takes 20 years to get the information out about how harmful PFOA is, and you finally start to phase it out and regulate it.
And so the companies just knock a carbon off or they tweak a couple of molecules, call it something new.
And we're told, the exposed people are told, we have to prove that new one's harmful.
They don't have to do anything.
We have to prove it.
And, you know, we don't have enough data.
So it's really, this whole story has been a catalyst for people to say, we got to do something different here.
Maybe we need to approach chemical regulation in a very different way.
Where we look at a whole class of chemicals or we try to do something in a much more comprehensive way.
Otherwise, we're all used as guinea pigs.
But while these new chemicals roll out, we're told we have to wait and see how many people actually get cancer, how many people actually drop dead, before we have enough evidence to begin the steps necessary to regulate and protect people.
I think a lot of folks have said that's not the way we ought to do it.
Rob Lott, thank you so much for joining us and thank you for being such a great warrior.
People who want to get more of Rob Lott, you should go see the movie Dark Waters because Mark Ruffalo portrays him precisely and Rob, you're really truly a hero and I'm really proud to be your colleague and your partner on so many of these cases.
Thank you for what you're doing.
Well, thank you so much.
It was great having a chance to talk with you and great working with you.
