This shit is everywhere and I've lately observed that the big outdoor brands aren't even close to doing what they can to stop using them. It's even in childrens clothes, all in the name of keeping us dry.
I actually recently tried Greenland wax on a cotton canvas anorak, and so far it's working out great. Perhaps it's not as effective as Gore-Tex. I think we should try to remember that people somehow survived outside before these materials were introduced.
I suspect many of the buyers of Gortex clothing are quite environmentally aware. This could be bad for them if the news spreads. I was completely unaware of the link between Gortex and PFAS
The Goretex membrane itself is PTFE, which as long as you don't overheat/burn it, is a long chain polymer that does not seem to be anywhere near as much of a concern as small-molecule PFAS are. The bigger issue is likely the water repellent treatment of the shell fabric, which at least in the existing technology is necessary for breathability -- the garment can't breathe if the outer fabric layer is waterlogged.
Maybe I'm not looking as much, but I don't see things branded as GoreTex at all anymore. I attributed to something like the patent running out on it. Either way, I see almost no jackets or boots including the GoreTex logo. I assumed everyone moved on to cheaper DWR type stuff, which is probably just as much if not more harmful & full of PFAS.
All the A-list mountain brands' top-of-the-line shells are currently made with Gore-Tex. I just did a quick scan and Arc'teryx, Black Diamond, Haglöfs, Marmot, Norrøna, Outdoor Research, Patagonia, and Rab all do. I can't find a single brand that I'd consider buying a technical shell from that doesn't. The same holds for boots: Asolo, La Sportiva, Lowa, Scarpa, Vasque, and Zamberlan all use Gore-Tex.
I'm not sure what the condescending "uh" is about. All of the brands I listed do have websites so you can trivially confirm their premium shells use Gore-Tex. Here are the ones you tried to fact-check:
TNF still uses Gore-Tex as well, but I didn't include them in my original list - they went mass market about 20 years ago and while less experienced people still buy it based on name recognition, you'll rarely see TNF worn by unsponsored people in the backcountry.
I see plenty of people wearing North Face in the backcountry, all of whom paid for it.
My North Face gear is just as nice as my Marmot gear, both of which are slightly higher in quality than the REI-brand gear. None of them are as good as my Arcteryx jacket, but for the price of that one jacket I could buy a jacket, midlayer, base layer, rain shell, and hiking pants from any or all of the first 3 brands.
The fungi Phanerochaete chrysosporium and Aspergillus niger apparently can degrade PFAS chemicals. Though I'm not sure how you concentrate them enough to for bioremediation, especially in tap water, unless you can do it at the point sources.
Seems like kind of weird timing for this article - FIS has banned fluoros, and their grip over the nordic ski racing world is pretty much absolute. by next season, any waxes with fluoros will not be viable consumer products.
They call out the american birkie for not having banned fluoros yet - that's because the FIS ban hasn't gone into effect yet. American Birkie is a FIS worldloppet race and subject to FIS rules.
It’s in almost all chain lubes for bikes also. There is one brand I found called Green Oil that doesn’t use it, but it takes a week or so to ship from the UK and they only make a wet lube. Not thrilled with using a wet lube year round, but still much better than having Teflon dust in my apartment.
No, lubricants such as Krytox and the various spray and wet machine lubes used for bikes and such contain only polymerized fluoropolymers such as PTFE (trade name Teflon). PTFE has a long established safety record, and is completely different from the unpolymerized PFCs that are showing up in ground water and in people's blood.
Green Oil is fear mongering. Their website calls PTFE "carcinogenic". This is a lie. The manufacture of PTFE is nasty business, no doubt, but the finished product is safe. Safe enough that it has been widely used in medical implants for the past 50 years.
>PTFE has a long established safety record, and is completely different from the unpolymerized PFCs that are showing up in ground water and in people's blood.
Teflon is mentioned in the article as a PFAS based chemical that has had legal trouble due to health hazards in the past..
"A just-released film, Dark Waters, stars Mark Ruffalo as an intrepid lawyer battling DuPont in the early 2000s after the chemical giant began making a PFAS-based product, Teflon, at its factory in Parkersburg, West Virginia, where chronic illness and untimely deaths spiked among nearby residents. Several states, New York and Ohio among them, have filed lawsuits that seek compensation for health problems caused by drinking water polluted by PFAS. DuPont and 3M are frequently defendants in these suits."
The difference is between polymers such as PTFE and PVDF, and the feedstock monomers used to make them. They are completely different materials. PTFE is inert and immortal. It's dead to the world. You can scrape the non-stick coatings off of all your pans and eat it, and there will be no detectable fluorinated chemicals in your blood. PTFE is widely used for medical implants, and has been for over 50 years. Its track record is well established.
The chemicals discussed in the article and in the movie you mention are the feedstocks used to make the polymers, and the surfactants used to form coatings. Those chemicals -- referred to collectively as PFAS -- might be a big fucking problem. They are also inert in a chemical sense, but they're monomeric so they live their whole lives as single molecules, free to pass through biological tissues, where they apparently cause problems. PTFE has no such freedom at any scale; even the finest PTFE dust cannot be absorbed in your gut, and evidence of respiratory hazard of PTFE is pretty much nil until it's burnt, in which case the problem isn't the PTFE but rather the pyrolysis products.
PTFE and PFAS... completely different materials with completely different chemical, biological, and environmental behaviors.
In my comment above, I said that PFAS's are chemically inert, but that's not really true. Some of them enjoy limited but vigorous activity. For example, the big baddie PFOS is a very effective insecticide because it interferes with ATP production. I don't know why it doesn't poison humans with equal ferocity, but I sure am happy it's not being sprayed on clothes and furnishings any more.
>You can scrape the non-stick coatings off of all your pans and eat it, and there will be no detectable fluorinated chemicals in your blood. PTFE is widely used for medical implants, and has been for over 50 years. Its track record is well established.
You fail to mention it's track record for straight up killing birds if you overheat it. Which, to be clear, we're talking about cookware. The odds of it getting left too long on the heat once in a while are very high.
It will kill your pet bird in seconds. Damage to humans? Unclear.
Birds are easily killed by any kind of smoke. Everything from overheated cooking oil to second hand cigarette smoke can quickly kill your bird. Non-stick cookware is hardly unique in that regard.
PTFE does emit some uniquely nasty chemicals when overheated, but in mercifully small quantities, and the effects seem to be temporary. If you read up on fluorinated polymer fume exposure, you'll find exactly zero known deaths, only a handful of known injuries, and no firm evidence of long term health effects. Considering that there are millions of amateur cooks out there abusing non-stick pans every day since the 1960's, I'd say that's a pretty fucking good track record.
As someone who has waxed with HF wax several dozen times in the past (collegiate nordic ski racer) with no face mask and mediocre room ventilation, how worried should I be about long-term side effects?
The average US citizen has a large load of PFAS in their blood[1] from clothing, carpet, water and other sources. The levels have dropped a great deal in the last 20 years but it's unlikely you've increased your levels much beyond what you already had from other sources.
The blood serum levels reported by CDC are staggering. As an example, I have a well and it's in a contamination plume of PFOS and PFOA. The EPA certified laboratory measured level two years ago was 11 ppt (parts per trillion.) The CDC measured 2.1 ug/L of PFOA (only) in the blood of over 2000 people in 2014. That's 2,100,000 ppt; 5 orders of magnitude higher than my 'contaminated' water.
> In 2018 a draft report from an office of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services said the risk level for exposure to the chemicals should be up to 10 times lower than the 70 PPT threshold the EPA recommends. The White House and the EPA had tried to stop the report from being published.
If it makes you feel any better, we're all in the same boat with you. Like really, all of us. We're all swimining in the stuff. Almost all water-repellent outdoor clothing, and all clothing, furniture, and carpeting that's marketed as "stain repellent" is coated with PFAS's. Those of us grew up in the 70's, 80's, or 90's crawled, played and slept on rugs and carpets that were coated with the original formula of ScotchGard, which was pretty much straight PFOS.
For everyone concerned about the damage this crap is doing to the environment and humans should watch "The Devil We Know"[1]. This film covers a time frame, starting in the 50's up to the current day.
The company manufacturing Teflon has been disposing of chemicals used during the manufacture of Teflon in such a way that those chemicals end up in the drinking water supply of communities surrounding factories.
Also, the U.S. military deliberately dumps tons of this shit right on the ground every year. They use it in firefighting foam, and spray it freely in regular fire fighting exercises at dozens of military bases around the country.
If you're concerned about goretex and dwrs, everything made by Nikwax uses different technology and is PFA free. Goretex might be safe for end user (or might not) but the manufacturing process is probably environmentally risky ... I wouldn't buy goretex for non-critical uses. So use it for mountaineering but not in the ski resort or on the way to work
Considering the permanence and longevity of comments and submissions, I propose that direct canonical URLs are preferable to something Google will eventually sunset. Apologies if this slightly degrades the near term browsing experience.
Teflon is entirely different from the PFAS chemicals that the article is talking about. There is no evidence that fluoropolymers like PTFE are a health risk. PTFE and PVDF in particular have been widely used for over 50 years in applications that bring us into intimate contact with them on a daily basis, like cookware and medical implants. They have been heavily studied, and have never been shown to be a risk to human health in any way, so long as they aren't burned.
That is one big caveat, Teflon is in cookware, under direct flames, is there more precise info on what being "burned" actually means temperature-wise in Celsius?
Depends on the specific coating, but even the cheapest non-stick cookware is good for 200 deg C. Higher quality coatings are guaranteed for pretty darned high temperatures. For example, Calphalon guarantees their top-end non-stick up to 260 deg C.
I am personally a total baby about the few non-stick pieces I own. The only things they cook are eggs, and I don't let anyone else use them. But that's just because I'm precious about their condition, not because I fear fumes. As I said in an other comment downthread:
> PTFE does emit some uniquely nasty chemicals when overheated, but in mercifully small quantities, and the effects seem to be temporary. If you read up on fluorinated polymer fume exposure, you'll find exactly zero known deaths, only a handful of known injuries, and no firm evidence of long term health effects. Considering that there are millions of amateur cooks out there abusing non-stick pans every day since the 1960's, I'd say that's a pretty fucking good track record.
Those are all valid points but a butane flame can go from anywhere between 400°C to 1000°C.
To my knowledge no manufacturer has ever disclaimed that their product should be used below 200°C or else fluorinated polymer fumes are released into your kitchen.
Downplaying the health impact of those fumes is distracting from the manufacturers' omission.
Also we shouldn't defend this with the safety of PTFE in implants, this is misleading because they are completely inert at body temperatures it does not help any discussion regarding the safety a pervasive cookware.
Nobody is downplaying the health impact of overheated non-stick cookware. There just doesn't seem to be much of an impact. Think about this for just a minute. Millions of idiots crank the heat on their cheapo non-stick pans every day. I know people who sear steaks in their nonstick for fucks sake. This has been happening since the 1960's. If there was a significant hazard in this activity, don't you think someone would be able to find it?
The fact that cookware makers aren't overly concerned with temperature warnings should tell you something about the health risk here. There is little liability risk to them because apparently there is no demonstrable health risk. At the risk of repeating myself endlessly:
> read up on fluorinated polymer fume exposure, you'll find exactly zero known deaths, only a handful of known injuries, and no firm evidence of long term health effects.
If you can find any evidence of negative health impacts from nonstick cookware, there are thousands of ambulance-chasing personal injury lawyers who would love to see your work.
I’d bet most people don’t read the directions for their pan, and if they do, they’re probably not measuring the temperature of their pan during use. They’re probably just trying not to burn their butter or smoke their oil, which happens around 200c anyway.
And you might have another reason to worry about that food fried at 200c+: many foods cooked at high temperatures themselves form carcinogenic substances.
ScanPan uses Teflon in all of their pans. They try to distract from this fact with bullshit marketing about "embedded teflon", but they have always used PTFE. For example, here's an clip from their FAQ page at https://scanpancookware.com/faq/:
> I raise exotic birds and have heard that fumes from Teflon will them. Is this true?
> We have heard of this before. In the Scanpan manufacturing process, the non-stick compound is actually embedded into the material that makes up the cooking surface, unlike cheaper cookware where the Teflon coats the Aluminum base. The only way that fumes will be released from this material will be if the non-stick compound actually breaks down from excessive heat. (e.g. the pan is left empty on full flame for extended periods). If used within its normal operational boundaries, no damage should result. Obviously we cannot warrant that no damage will arise but have no reported cases of this happening. In fact since 2007, Scanpan GreenTEK is made with no PFOA, the primary harmful components for exotic birds. Once should be aware that the fumes from burning margarine are more intense than that from cookware and may cause more damage to exotic birds.
The part about PFOA being the primary harmful component for birds is utter bullshit. But the bit about margarine is interesting.
the "CH" line of waxes (CH4/6/7/8/10) are not fluorinated. The waxes that start with LF or HF (low-fluoro and high-fluoro, respectively) are the fluorinated products.
you probably don't need to worry about handling LF or HF with gloves, it's not that toxic. but if you're waxing with them you should be wearing a respirator.
Yeah ... about that. The CH wax dust isn't good respiratory-wise either. As an avid Alpine skier I used to hot wax, scrape then use the drill mounted rotary brushes pretty much every weekend until I discovered wax "dust" in my coffee! (early morning tuning!). I'd usually tune late at night I guess I never noticed the wax in my beer can/bottle! That was the last time I used them.
Now I use the Pro-Glide from SkiMD, rather than hot-waxing, scraping and brushing, you crayon the wax on cold then use it as a friction device to "melt" the wax in with some very light brushing. Much much quicker, uses far less wax and produces very little dust, highly recommended:
I never really used Fluro-based waxes because it doesn't last long and the guidance was that you needed to "get it out of your base" after racing as it supposedly did long term damage to the ski.
CH doesn't have fluoro, but the correlation between C6/C8 and LF/HF is unclear to me. Does LF use C6 and HF uses C8, or can both wax types be made with C6/C8, but in different concentrations?
I am a childless person living in the biggest nordic skiing area in North America. I wax with LF/HF every morning. I don't think my impact on the environment is that big.
I actually recently tried Greenland wax on a cotton canvas anorak, and so far it's working out great. Perhaps it's not as effective as Gore-Tex. I think we should try to remember that people somehow survived outside before these materials were introduced.