The chemicals in question are of type PFAS and believe it or not, they're still legal to use today, though they're being phased out and banned in a few years.
The problem is 3M scientists have know toxicity to human and have withheld the information to the public and regulators. Since 1970s.
They are used in all kinds of products that I personaly use everyday from pans to dental floss. And the replacements are not better, they just dont have studies yet that prove they are toxic...
I feel compelled to back you up on this one. You mention your experience with cast iron, and 20 semi-pro internet chefs jump all over you to gaslight you with "you just didn't season it properly bro"
No. I polymerized it with the grapeseed oil. I tried it with sunflower oil. I polymerized until my apartment swirled with smoke. I wiped it down with nothing besides a paper towel and water. I followed youtube guides.
Nothing worked, and that goddamn pan would lose slickness in the heavily-used center every other day. Plus, I'd leave it unused for a few weeks while traveling, and upon returning, it'd be covered in rust! This happened with at least 3 different pans from 2 different manufacturers.
You almost certainly left way too much oil on it. If your apartment is "swirling with smoke" you're doing it wrong. Most youtube videos and online tutorials fail to make this point clearly (or are outright wrong, debating what kind of oil to incinerate half a bottle of in their pans).
You oil it (with any cooking oil) and then wipe it all off. It needs to look and feel like it hasn't been oiled. Any visible oil or stickiness will burn to black shit that isn't seasoning. There is still oil there. The invisible, microscopic residue is what you want. When you heat it (in the oven around 180C) it will generate a faint smell around the cooker, not fill your home with burning oil smoke. Do the whole thing 3-5 times.
But for a skillet this is just a kick start. It is neither necessary nor sufficient. The real seasoning comes from use and is way better than anything you can do by explicit seasoning. Use it frequently. Fry in it. FREQUENTLY. And when you do use use oil, ffs. While it's
newish, clean it promptly, dry it thoroughly and give it a thin wipe of oil before you put it away to prevent rust and help it season.
(If you're the sort that thinks never letting a single fat molecule enter your digestive system is a virtue, don't buy cast iron. It won't work for you. It'll rust and stick. Use teflon. It's the only thing you'll ever be able make a "fried" egg on. It might give you cancer but at least you won't accidentally ingest some butter. Also, if you cook once every 6 months, don't use cast iron. It needs use. Weekly at least, if not daily.)
One of our four cast skillets spent last night in the sink, full of water (see my other comment). We treat them how we please, scrubbing and washing them with detergent if needed, leaving them dirty if we want. They cook wonderfully, don't stick and will probably survive the death of the sun.
Welp the method that doesn’t slowly poison our environment or kill our parrots is less convenient, guess we have no choice but to layer on the forever Chemicals.
Stainless steel doesn't poison the environment, easily fries sunny-side-up eggs without sticking if you let it get hot first, and can go in the dishwasher.
once cast iron is properly seasoned it maintains very well, and can last for generations! and they are dirt cheap to boot. but yes there is a little learning curve. they are heavy, so use two hands when handling. it must be seasoned (many come preseasoned) and never put it in a dishwasher for example -- but when properly seasoned the nonstick properties are so effective food just rinses off. i encourage everyone who cooks to try one!
You know it is REALLY HARD to figure out if a non-stick coating is free of teflon-and-friends. Lots of things called "ceramic" might not be free of pfoa/pfte/etc
(this is a pain when you have parrots, because one overheated pan, and all birds in the house - big and small - will die)
As one example, I bought some hexclad pans. They had very strong wording about their use of teflon:
A: Our pans are PFOA free but contain some PTFE. PTFE is in over 95% of all nonstick cookware including our ceramic-based nonstick. PTFE is safe and inert. In fact, it is used in surgical matches meshes, dental implants and heart stents which are all implanted in the body. We do not use PFOA chemicals and other chemicals that gave many other nonstick pans a bad name. Why do we use some PTFE? Sadly, non-PTFE nonstick cookware does not work well for long periods of time. In fact, in our tests, the largest non-PTFE nonstick in the world only held up for 45 minutes of consecutive use.
What's especially ridiculous is that the "good" hexclad sets you can get at costco also put this coating on the BOTTOM of the pan, against the flame or burner! High temperature is the achilles heel for these chemicals.
Carbon steel pans aren't as much work as cast iron, but still extremely durable. They're lighter, often come pre-seasoned but are easier to season than cast iron, are naturally non-stick, heats very quickly, and cleans easy.
The only downside is that you have to wash them right away, dry them thoroughly. Cooking with a lot of acidic sauces will mean you'll likely have season them again.
If you’re cooking pancakes, you just wipe it off with some soap and rinse while it’s still warm, and don’t need to do anything else. For other cooking you sometimes need a quick pass with a nylon scraper or something, but it’s still pretty quick and easy.
People mostly really get into trouble when they try to stew tomatoes or something like that (I just keep a steel pan around for really acidic stuff).
Cast iron skillets just take a bit of getting used and are then zero maintenance and last for ever. The problems people have with them are usually due to trying to season them and doing it so badly (due to abundant online misinformation) they'd have been better off not doing it at all.
The typical cooking uses to which a skillet is put season it automatically, because it spends its life being oily. The polymer coating known as "seasoning" forms naturally from long contact with oil (even without heat). So the idea of seasoning being something you have to put on the pan and then maintain is wrong. You can explicitly "season the pan" as a sort of bootstrapping to get that layer started off quicker and protect it from rust in the early days, but it's optional and doesn't need maintaining afterwards. An alternative to protect it from rust (and encourage the formation of the polymer) when it's new is to brush it with oil before putting it away. Once it's broken in (you'll know) it doesn't require special care. You can scrub it, use washing up liquid, whatever.
If you do season the pan, the most important thing is to wipe off all the oil after applying it. You brush the oil on and then wipe it completely dry. It should be dry to the touch and matt, not shiny. You should not be able to see ANY oil. The microscopic invisible bit of oil left is all you want. Only then do you heat it. The temperature doesn't matter much. 180 C or so in an oven is what I've used. The kind of oil used also doesn't matter. For best results do the whole thing 3 or more times. If you bake a visible layer of oil onto your pan you're not seasoning it, you're just covering it in burnt crap.
And it's optional!
Note that the above is for skillets, which self-season because they're used for frying. (Hence "seasoning" - i.e. using them for a while.) The story is very different for some other things. For example, we have a dutch oven used for baking bread, which is not an oily process. For that you really do have to season. Ours came pre-seasoned but it rusted after an unfortunate baking mishap and I had to electrolyse it and then give it 5 rounds of oven seasoning (as described above), after which it has been a zero-maintenance workhorse.
Griddles are absolute fucking bastards and will ruin your life.
If you ever do electrolyse any cast iron (it's great fun and will restore anything), A) pay a few quid for graphite electrodes (overgrown pencil leads, available on Amazon), rather than using an old stainless steel knife and producing hexavalent chromium (Erin Brockovich's favourite chemical) and B) use a bench power supply because nobody sells the kind of car battery charger all the online tutorials tell you to use any more (they're all pulsed ones now, completely useless for electrolysis).
I have several now in various sizes that are in a great place now, seasoning-wise. After each use, I rinse the pan with warm water and a small amount of soap. I use a Lodge scrubbing tool if there are things stuck on.
I then dry it with a towel, heat up the pan with Avocado or Bacon grease until it almost starts smoking. I then use a paper towel to wipe out the pan and it stays on the stove until the next use.
Of the pans I have now (bought over the past 2 years), 3 are seasoned well enough that they’re effectively non-stick.
Literally just cook with it. The main thing with everything except for teflon pans is you need to bring them up to temp before cooking, and you need to use some fat of some kind (olive oil, butter, whatever). The oil itself will provide the "non stick" until it's seasoned, and it'll also do the seasoning. You can waste a bunch of time doing seasoning as a separate step (light coating of oil, bring up to smoke point, let cool, repeat) but this is mostly just a giant waste of time. Just cook on the dang thing, and don't be afraid to toss in a chunk of butter or some oil. It won't kill ya :-)
Lmao. Hapless beginner follows your advice, decides to scramble some eggs on day 1 with his badly-factory-seasoned Lodge pan. Egg glue now encrusts his shiny new pan. What do? Wash with soap? BAD NOOB - that's bad for the seasoning. Scrape it off with steel wool? BAD NOOB - that's even worse for the seasoning.
(If you do this, fellow noob, I think oil + a scrubber sponge got me out of the predicament)
Sigh... I don't know how the internet has convinced people this shit requires some magic incantation to cook eggs. I promise you I can cook eggs in any brand new lodge pan you hand me without issue. In fact if you sand blast the factory seasoning off it first and give it to me shiny I can still do it. And so can you. It requires the exact same skills as cooking with stainless steel which won't take a season no matter how hard you try. Step 1: Bring it up to temp (confirm by tossing some flecks of water in it, if they bead, it's up to temp). Step 2, throw a knob of butter in it and coat the damn pan. Fat is your friend, don't be shy with it. Step 3: Cook the eggs. If a little bit sticks that's fine. You probably should have used more butter - but no worries - just go wash it off in the sink the same way you'd wash anything else. It's a giant piece of iron - you aren't going to hurt it with a little soap, water and elbow grease. When you are done dry it off on the stove and hit it with a little grease/oil/fat to keep it from rusting. If you forget and it rusts... still no big deal - scrub off the rust, give it a little grease and bobs your uncle. This shit is only hard if you decide it is.
Source: Been cooking exclusively on carbon steel, cast iron and stainless for years.
Yes, scrambled eggs works wonderfully in a cast iron skillet but it needs to be well worn in. On a new pan you'll end up with an awful mess. But feel free to go to town on that with washing up liquid, steel wool and a sandblaster if you want. There isn't some magical pixie dust on it you need to worry about rubbing off. Just dry it properly after and oil it before you put it away. Keep frying in it regularly and it'll be fine. A brief hiccup in your skillet's breaking-in process.
Edit: In fact we had scrambled eggs as part of dinner this evening (with rice, chilli crisp, garlic mushrooms and bak choi) and the pan is currently in the sink full of water, where it will remain until tomorrow morning because it's Friday night, dammit, and it will be fine.
Thinking about buying one. Would I be wrong in assuming it was just a matter of the order: (really) heat the pan, add the oil, and then whatever you need to cook?
Care is a big component as well. The real power of cast iron is that you can renew the coating when it wears off by re-seasoning the pan. Using a drying oil like flax, you coat the pan and heat the oil until it starts smoking, then wait for it to stop smoking. Repeat this process a couple of times and you have a durable non-stick surface again.
If you ever have the surface roughen up you can also strip the old seasoning by covering it in oven cleaner and heating it to cleaning temperature. The easiest way to do this is to stick it in an oven on high.
I’ve had the same frying pan for 10 years now and this is how I keep it non-stick.
It's kind of funny that heating up the oil to the point of smoking is considered a healthy alternative to teflon coated pans. When oil is heated up to the point of smoking it produces carcinogenic compounds.
Comparing the misc acrylamide and other byproducts of seasoning a cast iron skillet to the PFAS and other byproducts of teflon production is nonsense.
Yes, complex hydrocarbons are not good for you, but PFOAs and their ilk are really really really bad for you and the environment. It's like comparing spent nuclear rods with brazil nuts. Yes, both are radioactive, but there is zero equivalence.
Not significant. You aren't burning the oil or keeping it at high temp for a long time, you are just getting hot enough to smoke, then you cut the heat. That polymerizes the oil into a non-polar coating. Can't get non-stick without some kind of polymer that things don't stick to.
Consider butter instead of oil for pancakes. The water content of the butter boils between the pancake and the pan. The escaping water vapor pushes them apart, which helps prevent the pancake from sticking.
Don't overthink it. Look up America's Test Kitchen videos on cast iron pans. They probably have one to recommend the best one for the $$ and how to take care of it.
I have an old school cast iron skillet and pot. I wish I'd watched videos because newer types of cast iron apparently has a smooth finish and is thinner and lighter. When new, I washed it with soap and water, dried it, added a nice and thin layer of olive oil all around wiped it with a kitchen towel to take off the excess, then baked it for half an hour. Let it cool. Repeated that once or twice. You can even just heat it on a stove top.
Once I'm done cooking something, I rinse scrub and rinse with warm water to get all the food off and add a touch of oil. A little goes a long way.
That's all, really. It isn't complicated or particularly laborious. It just weighs a fair bit - it'll take your hands a couple of weeks to get stronger and then you won't care.
You don't want to get it super hot (the oil/butter should not smoke). Medium heat is fine. They do take a long time to warm up to a uniform steady state temperature though (this is both an advantage and a disadvantage, since it means the temperature stays stable as you cook).
For instance, when making pancakes, my first step is putting the griddle on the range. Next, I start making the batter.
Of course, you can set the range to high and heat it up really fast, but then you end up risking overheating it.
Animal fats. Not vegetable oils. Vegetable oils polymerize to a sticky substance. Animal fats carbonize and protect the metal. Also using a metal spatula is a must in cast iron. The metal spatula keeps the surface smooth which enhances the non-stick property. Also wash after use and spread a little fat in it to prevent rusting. Don't scour. Just wash with soap and water.
You can use vegetable oils but it will be difficult to clean. Deglazing doesn't work well on polymerized oil. Baking soda will dissolve the sticky goo.
I switched to carbon steel a few years ago. There's a definite learning curve when it comes to getting them seasoned properly and a lot of people give up. But once they are seasoned, nothing sticks to them, and they need almost no maintenance. I'm never giving them up!
Honest question: Why do you try to replace Tupperware?
Plastic has a bad reputation because of its longevity, but that also makes it a good material for containers. That - in turn - makes it bad for throwaway packaging of course. I might have missed something, that's why I ask.
There's definite leaching of plastic compounds into food, which gets exacerbated when heated. My concern is the number of unknown unknowns. BPA became a big part of the consciousness a few years ago, and now it's PFAs, but what else?
My general view is that glass is super-durable, microwave-safe (I would never microwave Tupperware), and the cost tradeoff is minor, so it seems worthwhile. That said, if I order takeout and it comes in a plastic container that's hot ... I still eat it :).
> There's definite leaching of plastic compounds into food, which gets exacerbated when heated. My concern is the number of unknown unknowns. BPA became a big part of the consciousness a few years ago, and now it's PFAs, but what else?
PFAS and BPA are not used for (multi-use) food containers I think. Don't get me wrong! Avoiding throwaway packaging, where possible, absolutely makes sense. I specifically mean to find the culprit with Tupperware (or multi-use plastic food containers in general).
> My general view is that glass is super-durable, microwave-safe (I would never microwave Tupperware), and the cost tradeoff is minor, so it seems worthwhile.
Glass breaks faster than plastic containers (usually). I still use glass containers, but I am always aware that they break relatively easily.
Regarding microwave-use I am with you. Not a fan of microwaving plastic, even if it is safe for many plastic materials (the term plastic is vague I admit).
> Glass breaks faster than plastic containers (usually). I still use glass containers, but I am always aware that they break relatively easily.
I have maybe 60-70 or so glass food containers that get very regular use from being used for leftovers, to being put in the deep freezer for 6mo and then warmed up.
We handle at least half a dozen of these a day on average from filling/cleaning/removing portions and putting back into the fridge.
I've broken dozens of the plastic lids for them. I can't remember a single case (although I'm sure it's happened) of breaking a glass container in the past decade. They have survived more than a few rather large drops. These are the Pyrex brand glassware with the new glass that is more drop but less heat shock resistant.
Luckily Snapware also sells lids, since the glass containers far outlast the plastic lids and we end up replacing 3-4 of those a year as wear items. That doesn't bother me much since very little food gets in contact with them.
I expect my Snapware/Pyrex food storage sets to largely outlast my lifetime, but without lids to match once they stop manufacturing them.
> Glass breaks faster than plastic containers (usually)
The plastic lids always break way more quickly than the glass containers IME. Can't remember the last time I broke a glass one, actually. Plus, they actually stay in good condition. An abused plastic container will cloud, warp, gouge, and release god knows what into your food the whole time.
Also, "microwave safe" does not mean it's safe for people... it only means the container won't melt in the microwave. If you're going to reheat leftovers, definitely don't keep it inside a plastic container.
I also switched to glass containers and stainless steel everything, about 20 years ago, out of distrust for reasons like in this article.
Same here, additionally reducing plastic packaging in our food purchases has been a constant effort. Glass milk jugs, baby bottles, etc. It's probably only touching the margins, but we're trying.
Dental floss is easy - the widely available/cheap waxed Reach floss tested negative for PFAs[1], and it does a better job of cleaning too. The non-stick flosses miss stuff for me.
Oh thank goodness. When I started looking at the prices of the silk flosses and whatnot, I thought I'd had to take a second mortgage. I've been using Reach for years, due to the price, but also because it works so well for me. Thanks for posting this!
There are plenty of pans you can use that don't have these chemicals -- cast iron, carbon steel, stainless steel, clay, etc. I agree about the floss and other plastics though. I just try to use other types of materials whenever possible.
I'm not sure why people keep talking about teflon pans and dental floss. There are PFAS in products that necessarily release them into human bodies and the environment, in dispersed form rather than flakes that would usually pass the digestive system.
A few examples:
- food containers coated with PFAS (usually single use, often cardboard)
- water-repellent PFAS spray for clothes, shoes, cars/whatever
- surface PFAS treatment of clothes/shoes/whatever (better but still rubs off)
- PFAS bike-chain lube
Why are any of these things legal? They cause much more exposure, by design cannot be contained and spread PFAS everywhere you go. They are the reason there are PFAS in snow on Mt. Everest.
Pans, medical tubes and maybe even inner layers in clothes can at least theoretically be responsibly disposed of, e.g. by reasonably contained incineration. I don't want to support unneeded PFAS, but pans seem a whole different category than spray-on PFAS for "weather-proofing" that people use because shrug "it helps I get less wet".
You are referring to Teflon, there's some confusion with the differences in toxicity between the chemical used in the final products (today at least) and the chemical used in manufacturing. Although the human impact is only subtly different (that in theory it makes no personal difference whether or not you buy such products, which is a worse position to be in than it sounds)...
As a non-chemist I don't claim to have a comprehensive understanding, but as far as I can tell: PTFE (Teflon) is found in consumer products today, and has not been directly linked to cancer yet, i.e if you eat teflon (and you have) it will supposedly just pass through your gut in an inert fashion. PFOA and more generally PFAS are used to manufacture PTFE, these are known carcinogens according to independent studies and (allegedly) internally by 3Ms own research, unfortunately PFOA is also in your blood and my blood, not because you ate teflon from a frying pan, but because once it's in the environment it doesn't get broken down, and so inevitably we end up ingesting it.
The reason we have to generalise to the group of chemicals "PFAS", is because once PFOA specifically was found to be problematic companies looked for similar alternatives, but these have also found to cause similar issues.
To complicate matters the PTFE in your non-stick frying pan can also releases PFOA if heated high enough, supposedly the threshold is around 300 degrees C, however it has been found that this threshold varies between products and can be realistically reached under in "normal" cooking scenarios, but usually when someone accidentally dry heated a frying pan too much, or is just plain cooking on too high a temperature. The side effects of being exposed to PFOA in this way are supposed to feel similar to catching a cold that disappears fairly quickly, and is often mistaken as such, I presume this is because it's vaporised.
Even knowing all this (that provided you don't nuke your cookware it likely makes no personal difference) I've still decided to personally go down the stainless steel route, it's not very scientific, but the relationship between PTFE and PFOAs is close enough, and it flakes off my frying pans frequently enough that I've decided I don't want to keep on ingesting it only to find out later that it's also a problem. Although stainless is not hazard free, because you can get problems with metals leaching into the food and have to be careful with acidity, and also make sure you buy high quality pans. They also require more skill to cook with without destroying them, but ultimately last indefinitely if you can take care of them.
The main problem with continuing to use PTFE in products is the indirect cost to the environment and human health through the "externalities" of manufacturing.
The difference between teflon and PFAS is in the hydrophilic "head".
Basically, teflon consists just of long chains of carbon atoms saturated with fluorine. They are extremely chemically resistant, and they appear to be biologically inert. Even if you heat the teflon past its decomposition temperature, you simply get pieces of the hydrocarbon chain as a result. They are nasty, but they are not persistent pollutants.
PFAS are different. They also consist of a chain of carbons with fluorine atoms attached to them. But they also have a hydrophilic "head" attached to them at the beginning of the chain. This hydrophilic head allows PFAS to function as surfactants, and it also makes them biologically active. The body can't do anything with the hydrocarbons saturated with fluorine, but the head provides a "handle" that can be used to absorb the PFAS into cell membranes where it can stay and cause all kinds of issues.
I am also a big fan of carbon steel cookware, I've replaced everything with cast iron where that is necessary or carbon steel everywhere else. It really is a minor adjustment to workflow, non stick coatings can be pretty easily avoided.
What does "toxic" mean in this case. AFAIK "toxic" can mean that you will get a headache if you eat a gram, but it can also mean that it will kill you if it touches your skin.
For example I do not mind drinking a beer or two, which includes 5% of toxic ethanol, but I prefer not having lead in my drinking water.
That's a pretty shitty response to an actual problem.
Companies don't need to prove the safety of things like this.
Look at bpa free. Most people don't even know that bpa free plastic tends to be just as bad, or potentially worse than bpa. The press doesn't give a shit I guess. Society went through its giant bpa panic and now it's tired of dealing with this so let's just ignore it and move onto the next thing. Ignorance is bliss.
You're okay with companies not being responsible, but you want the press to help you out here? I feel the opposite. Companies should be responsible for poisoning us, and the press has zero to do with it.
I don’t think that the problem some posters are alluding to is the kind where we should be placing blame.
The problem is:
- Humans invent something useful and cool.
- Humans discover that the cool and useful thing is toxic as fuck, but only after years go by. It takes years for the awareness of the toxicity to become widespread enough for everyone to concur it’s a problem. Often, we only find out about the toxicity as a result of the cool chemical becoming hella widespread.
- Humans invent alternatives that are different enough to obviously not have the same exact problem.
But: what toxic nonsense or buttcancer risks will we discover about the alternatives? No way to know immediately since it takes years to find out. And it’s only when the alternatives become widespread that we can even do the science to figure out what’s up. And by the time they become widespread, some folks got buttcancer.
That’s the problem: just because there’s an alternative that is different from the thing we found out to be toxic doesn’t meant that the alternative isn’t toxic. And we find out it’s toxic because people get hurt.
It’s not that the press is bad… it’s just a fundamental problem in science and engineering. You need scale to discover the really bad issues.
- Humans who discovered the toxicity lie, bribe, bully, and cheat to stop anyone else from finding out. The solution is delayed by decades and deaths go through the roof.
But we have seen that movie many times, haven’t we? It’s a given that if someone builds a business on a thing and that thing turns out to cause buttcancer, they gonna cover that shit up.
Sometimes covering it up is easy if you just rely on scientific ground truths, like “the dose is the poison”. Even water is a poison if you chug too much of it, so just the discovery that something is poisonous at some dose is almost like tautological. I wouldn’t be surprised if part of the “cover up” was based on that kind of science.
Basically, if there’s utility to something, then there’s money to be made, careers to be made, legacies at stake, etc - and that will bias folks towards covering shit up.
I bet you the folks involved in the cover up were good people who just failed to check their biases.
> Humans discover that the cool and useful thing is toxic as fuck, but only after years go by. It takes years for the awareness of the toxicity to become widespread enough for everyone to concur it’s a problem.
There's no reason for there to be years between discovery and action. It doesn't matter how quickly the discovery ripples through lay society. Once it's known that something is harming and/or killing people, it should be stopped.
What if the alternatives are the kind of thing that could possibly be worse but we don’t have enough experience with them yet to know that they are worse?
Often the known bad thing is better than the thing you don’t know to be bad yet.
Greed is always part of it. It’s a part of everything.
Thats why I don’t usually use greed as an explanation for stuff. Of course greed is part of the system and sometimes it causes bad things to happen. Sometimes it also causes good things to happen. So, if you want to prevent the bad, it’s useful to look for some explanation that isn’t just “greed”.
Case in point: new refrigerants with lower global-warming-potential were adopted after the hue-and-cry about CFCs. Many of the new refrigerants are now also source of concern due to PFAS. The CFC refrigerants themselves were introduced as superior and safer alternatives to things like ammonia and chloromethane.
Genuinely curious, would any money be extracted from the personal accounts of any executive employee that made these decisions, current or past, from any of these thousands of lawsuits?
Unless the decision-making folks have their personal wealth destroyed, they really haven’t anything to lose. I would expect the worst-case scenario is that their stock portfolios will need to be adjusted, by tax-loss harvesting their losses in 3m stocks as an opportunity to divest and rebalance their portfolios.
Considering Purdue Pharma, the Sackler family has so far had to pay out $10.5 billion (estimates of their net worth including those settlements have it dropping $8b during this time period) and despite trying quite hard have not managed to gain legal immunity or protection regarding civil and criminal liability. That means they'll very likely be hit with more lawsuits going forward and possibly even criminal charges.
Looking at it, I think thats pretty good and hope the possibility for future lawsuits means they continue to pay, but knowing that case is an unusual outlier and that none of the other people involved like the CEO or other executives have had any consequences makes it feel a little underwhelming.
I'm glad government is going after bad companies more and I hope they continue, but it does seem like our legal system is just not equipped to correctly hold people responsible in these cases.
The point isn't to undo the past, it is to make it clear to other companies that if they lie about safety they will face an existential threat too.
Who are you people who feel compelled to defend mega corporations that screw people over? What is your psychology? What do you value in life? My goodness.
> The point isn't to undo the past, it is to make it clear to other companies that if they lie about safety they will face an existential threat too.
DuPont, while removed from the threat of this lawsuit, is guilty on plenty of counts of the same behavior with other chemicals.
I believe I've read articles about GE and Monsanto also knowing the health risks to their own employees and doing nothing about it. Let alone the dumping into public waterways.
$143 billion is hopefully the judgement which is levied, and hopefully the first of many.
There are millions of people all over the earth that genuinely believe "might makes right", or "greed is good", or "capitalism inherently results in meritocratic and technocratic allocation of resources so nothing that happens under capitalism can possibly be bad".
That's not even the least liberal worldviews widely held. Love thy neighbor and the golden rule and accountability are not universal
I would say that billions of people believe that "might makes right".
Its been seen across the centuries and countries alike. Colonialism, MegaCorps, Hague Invasion Act and countless examples that prove that morals matter very less in the long run.
or mabye we should be more honest and consider that maybe this is a way for the USA government to fill its coffers back up?
(rapping on another comment saying that there's a chance this is a way for the USA government to sell the 'manufacture capacity' that 3M is to other "greener" owners)
now that I type this out, I realize that this is perfectly consistent with the behavior of empires. the realization that the alleged 'pax romana' (stability and 'peace' for the roman empire) was built on stealing from 'barbaric' tribes and selling stuff to more 'civilized' owners in Rome.
As long as the laws and their enforcement are just, a theoretical government profit motive doesn't seem like a bad thing.
But it's hard to see how the particular people who brought this case to bear would be motivated by the small slice of the increase in federal funding that would redound to them. And it's not consistent with most of the government's behavior -- it doesn't spend as many resources extracting judgments from big corporations as would be likely if its profit motive loomed large.
no, you gotta be much more deep in your reasoning this "high" up
philosophically, at this height, the principle of "justice" is to not so simple... what does it even mean "to be just"? may as well say "be good" but the point is that the issue is good for whom?
the concept is "Empire"... USA government is the empire? aside question: can there ever exist multiple "empires"? monotheistic~ally speaking?
uff... My English prose is answering its own questions... I am no longer deeply disturbed by this phenomenon... but it's not something scientifically real so it still shakes me.
Philosophers seem to delight in the idea that the common good is hard to define. I'm an economist. I don't see much wiggle room. The wiggle room that exists is:
(1) How much do you care about whom? In particular, do you care equally about everyone, or are you a jerk?
(2) How do you weight the relative value of things like money, health, longevity, entertainment?
(3) At what rate does the marginal utility of such things diminish?
Okay maybe that's a lot of wiggle room. Still, under any reasonable set of weights, making millions of people sick is not worth the money 3M made.
It is imperative to control material incentives for all entities, both individuals and organizations. Entities will pursue incentives; money is no exception. Therefore, if we have designed a government so that it profits from protecting citizens from the ravages of corporate greed... that still counts as a good system.
If the government were somehow able to capture the entire market cap of 3M (without any execution slippage, which is obviously an unrealistic assumption), it would be enough to run the federal government for a little over 3 days...
Oh boy, this PFAS stuff makes me feel bad because I recall using aqueous film forming foam as deck washing liquid in the Navy. AFFF contains a lot of PFAS, I found out a while ago. We just thought it was a good cleaner. I wonder if I’ll have any personal medical issues from dealing with that stuff in my youth?
Requiring a business to report what it knows, but not requiring it to actually know in the first place, is a mess of enforcement challenge.
Instead, government should require disclosure of new chemicals, tax the chemical industry (or use general fund), and perform its own studies on new chemicals.
Is it possible to determine a number of casualties through the withholding of information? I vaguely remember that there was number of induced deaths in the VW scandal.
Actually, the problem is, we allow new chemicals to be introduced with minimal if any testing. Imagine if medical chemicals (i.e., drugs) were allowed the same Wild West approach?
In short, industrials chemicals are innocent until proven guilty. That's great for the justice system. It's a complete clusterfuck for Mother Nature and all her creatures, including humans.
So what, they'll pay a few million (even few billion) fine, and go back to doing it anyways. Having grown up as part of the "Maryvale Cancer Cluster" in Arizona in the 70's with DuPont dumping fluorine and other bad things into the well water and giving most of my family leukemia, cancer, and who knows what else. Class action ensued, DuPont lawyers fought it for 30 years, end of the day my dad got a check for $200 dollars. Thanks, sorry about that leukemia there...
I'm always amazed that in cases like this nobody gets crazy and try to get justice themselves.
There are so many guns in the US, and we hear about rogue snipers and school shooters, but never about one guy that decided a CEO should pay for his bad deeds in blood.
Maybe it shows that the average human being is quite stable and peaceful?
Despite our media, it isn't part of our shared culture to go out shoot someone in revenge. Things like murder and generational feuds are taboo. And we're too individualistic to do things like make the ultimate self-sacrifice in pursuit of justice.
We are also very far removed from nature and death. Most of us fear death and do everything to avoid it. Few of us have any experience in killing.
It's easy to get a gun and kill someone in broad daylight. But you have to be really motivated to overcome all that I mentioned and accept the consequences.
To whoever flagged this: grow a spine. The poster is making an observation - and an interesting one. Not even a call to action. Instead of plugging your ears and screaming lalalala, why don't you come up with an equally interesting response to this question that has apparently made you so uncomfortable?
Vigilante justice died down with the phase out of leaded gasoline. One of the effects of people not being so violent and impulsive anymore is that people are not so violent and impulsive anymore
And yet, you still get 'I hate society and I'm going to shoot up a school/mall/movie theatre/parade/nightclub' terracts on the regular.
It is strange that intersection of 'I'm angry at stuff and want to make people pay', and 'I own guns and I'm going to use them' seems to consistently result in rage and violence against society at large, rather than bad actors in particular.
It's almost as if there's a kind of slant to the propaganda that pushes people into those buckets. Not a lot of unhinged, violent anti-3M/Purdue/Kaiser/DuPont rhetoric on the *chans and in the Q-sphere...
I sympathize with your family’s hurt. Is this case equivalent? DuPont did the dumping into the well water.
3M manufactured a non-stick coating used by thousands of companies on thousands of different products. What is the end game here? They never produce teflon again and industries like biomedical suffer?
If the chemicals are bad, and everywhere, we need a reaction time faster than 50 years.
For new inventions (not well-known issues), it would be far better to be fast-reacting and no-fault rather than slow-reacting with vengeance.
Run studies as the use of the chemicals scales up and start raising warnings early so the company has time to collect more information and adapt formulas or applications. As the costs become apparent, start placing those costs on the companies ahead of time rather than 50 years later. That will sort out who really needs the new chemical, versus who just wants to spray it everywhere.
> Run studies as the use of the chemicals scales up and start raising warnings early so the company has time to collect more information and adapt formulas or applications
] A lawsuit filed by Minnesota against 3M, the company that first developed and sold PFOS and PFOA, the two best-known PFAS compounds, has revealed that the company knew that these chemicals were accumulating in people’s blood for more than 40 years. 3M researchers documented the chemicals in fish, just as the Michigan scientist did, but they did so back in the 1970s. That same decade, 3M scientists realized that the compounds they produced were toxic. The company even had evidence back then of the compounds’ effects on the immune system, studies of which are just now driving the lower levels put forward by the ATSDR, as well as several states and the European Union.
For a large company like 3M, the goal isn't to figure out who really needs the new chemical, it's to figure out how to profit the most from that chemical. And who will fund all the testing required? I can just hear the cry of "too much government paperwork" and "bureaucratic obstacles in the way of the innovation and the free market."
If you depend on the company making the chemical to do studies and be transparent about them, of course the reaction time will be bad. You need independent studies and environmental monitoring.
The blame game gives the politicians and bureaucrats a nice excuse for inaction, and not much else. And 50 years later it just looks ridiculous.
Sure, if someone does something bad, blame may be a part of the response. But you need good outcomes first and foremost, not bad outcomes and blaming.
> You need independent studies and environmental monitoring.
Certainly. Clearly so.
As to my point, how do we change things? How do we put that into place?
> The blame game gives the politicians and bureaucrats a nice excuse for inaction, and not much else.
I didn't make my point clear enough.
The blame game results in "much else" - corporate profit. Enough profit they can fund efforts to tilt the system in their favor.
It's not just inaction. The Supreme Court is actively weakening, for example, EPA power to enforce Clean Water Act. Even something like Ryan Zinke's order to lift the ban on lead bullets in national wildlife refuges was an active action which increased lead pollution in the environment, to favor of cheaper bullets.
"Enough profit they can fund efforts to tilt the system in their favor."
That might explain things in the US, but worldwide?
Why didn't some other country at some point run some studies, call some cabinet head in the US and say "Why are you spraying this chemical on everything? Don't you know it's kinda bad? We're restricting imports of stuff with that chemical unless it's really needed.".
"The Supreme Court..."
Congress needs to do its job and stop blaming SCOTUS for federal law interpretation and regulatory scoping issues. (Constitutional law is a different story because Congress can't do anything about that.)
Politicians optimize for shouting loudly about things, and then blaming others when they do nothing.
> Why didn't some other country at some point run some studies
I know little about the topic, but I can suggest reasons why this isn't so simple.
Up until the 1960s or so, people didn't care much about pollution. They thought nature could absorb it. This include Europe. The Swiss chemical industry dumped their wastes into the Rhine, and they weren't the only one along the river.
The goal then, in Europe as in the US, was to make money.
It wasn't until REACH in 2007 - https://echa.europa.eu/regulations/reach/understanding-reach - that laws were changed to place the onus on companies. Quoting that link: "To comply with the regulation, companies must identify and manage the risks linked to the substances they manufacture and market in the EU. They have to demonstrate to ECHA how the substance can be safely used, and they must communicate the risk management measures to the users."
However, for reasons I do not know, PFAS were excluded from REACH.
My guess is it's for the same reason - PFAS are industrially very useful. Europe's chemical industry is about the same size as the US's, and I know it can influence legislation there too.
> Congress needs to do its job and stop blaming SCOTUS for federal law interpretation
My point was that "a nice excuse for inaction" is insufficient to explain what's going on in the US.
> Constitutional law is a different story because Congress can't do anything about that
My example about the EPA power to enforce Clean Water Act was a constitutional law issue.
Sometimes it's not possible to get fast reaction times. If I were the first person to invent asbestos, I could use it for the next 20 or 30 years and not get any symptoms. But of course we know in hindsight it is highly carcinogenic.
> Financial research firm CreditSights estimates that 3M could ultimately be on the hook for nationwide PFAS cleanup costs of up to $142.7 billion. That’s almost triple the company’s $53 billion market capitalization, and that’s before any personal injury claims and other lawsuits.
What does this actually mean? It's just showing off a big number without giving any real context. 3M is the only manufacturer of tons of important materials as I understand it, so it's not like they can just get erased from the market. But what does accountability actually mean in this context?
They go bankrupt, because their liabilities exceed their assets. There are three main sets of creditors - the US government who are receiving this $142.7 billion, equity shareholders who own $MMM, and bondholders. In a bankruptcy, you arrange levels of creditors by "seniority", where more senior creditors are paid first. In this case, I would imagine the levels of seniority are:
1. The US government
2. Bondholders
3. Equity shareholders
3M has plenty of assets to be distributed to the creditors - the manufacturing capabilities that you mention, intellectual property, relationships with purchasers. These assets might be sold directly on the market (this is easier with physical assets like manufacturing labs). A new corporation with new management might be established to handle liquidating the assets, or even running the business (this is what happened with FTX). Either way, it seems like bondholders and shareholders alike would get zero'd out and the US government could do what it want with 3M's assets.
To answer your question succintly:
> 3M is the only manufacturer of tons of important materials as I understand it, so it's not like they can just get erased from the market
3M is a corporation and one of their assets is their ability to manufacture tons of important materials. 3M the corporation would be obliterated but their ability to manufacture tons of important material would likely be sold off.
Everyone's hating on this, but I do think we have to rethink limited liability because of some of these contexts. 3M paid out dividends for years while producing these chemicals. Their liabilities exceed their _current market cap_, but their market cap could have been higher had they not decided to consistently make those payouts.
Consider J&J's (failed) attempt to spin out a new company to hold their liability over the talcum powder case. It was attacked and shot down because it was so clearly a post-hoc maneuver. If they had merely spun out that child company earlier, would it have been ok?
What if the new playbook is:
- spin out a new company for every potentially risky product line. A parent company may hold a large stake, but other investors can hold shares too.
- sell, grow revenue, but keep few assets in the company; pay out dividends aggressively
- drag out or quash or deny any research or evidence suggesting your product is dangerous, or being sold in an irresponsible way
- when you're finally sued and lose, the company has very little money left in it; plaintiffs get relatively little compensation for their harm, but you don't care because you're busy growing your next dangerous company
If that works, it sounds like a broken system. If you're doing something you should expect will cause large liabilities to crop up later, it seems abusive to pay out dividends to shareholders today and become insolvent tomorrow.
Exactly. Dollars are fungible, and spread around the economy pretty quickly. It's just not clear the "right" way to do any clawbbacks after a few years. If not done carefully, someone who inherits $1,000 worth of stock from their rich uncle on just the wrong day could the very next day discover they've inherited a $100,000 debt through the crime of being born in the wrong family. People die, people inherit stock, there are lots of second- and third-order effects to take into account in order to have a proper accounting of everyone who profited from the misbehavior.
In a relatively short period, the answer becomes "pretty much the whole economy benefited financially". On the one hand, that's a good argument in favor of partially funding the healthcare system via a financial transaction tax, but is also less emotionally satisfying than what you're looking for.
If you want to make long-term clawbacks practical, you need to do something like force all dividends to be paid as long-duration low-seniority zero-coupon corporate bonds backed by a special-purpose legal entity that holds cash/treasuries to fully back the bonds and can only be raided via bankruptcy hearings. That way, the value is kept non-fungible and risk explicitly tracked.
Though, in practice, equity holders would probably sell those bonds immediately on the market, offloading the risk to third parties. You could make the bonds non-transferable except in case of inheritance, and ban short-selling/creating derivatives to prevent transferring the risk, but that's a lot of complication and overhead with little chance of improving corporate behavior.
Ultimately, long-term corporate responsibility is much harder to enforce than long-term personal responsibility. You need a licensed Professional Engineer (or something similar) overseeing safety testing of the chemicals putting their personal career on the line with their stamp of approval. "If everyone's responsible, nobody is responsible." You need a mechanism to make individuals both responsible and legally empowered.
what’s the point of even typing such silliness? you just said “confiscate the property of everyone on the _planet_ who has ever had a retirement account”
you might as well propose “we should just snap our fingers and wish really hard for utopia”
Well if the company goes bankrupt, theoretically other companies can buy e.g. 3M's patents / processes / subsidiaries and continue their production. THe company isn't unprofitable, so it would be sold off in parts and the proceeds of the sale (theoretically) would go towards settling lawsuits.
Unlikely though. Nobody would want to buy the company whole as that would include all of this liability. Selling of the individual parts to raise funds for paying the debts of the unsold parts of the business entering bankruptcy seems like the only way to go
I think maybe we're confusing terms here. Breaking up a company normally means separated into smaller existing companies. If you buy 3m's candy bar division, you still might be on the hook for the forever chemicals the candy shop dumped in the river.
If you're just talking about dissolving a company and selling off the tangible assets, not selling off functional business units then I agree, liability doesn't follow material Goods. This generally isn't considered breaking up a company.
Breaking up a large company into smaller ones during bankruptcy does not by default absolve the smaller companies of liability.
Courts can add bankruptcy settlement terms that absolve a company of liability moving forward, but these can be applied to the company at all as a whole or the smaller businesses if it is broken up.
What statute or case law supports this distinction between material goods and business units?
It seems reasonable to me that you could absolutely purchase a business unit from a bankrupt company without any associated liabilities. Of course, you'd pay the full price for it (as compared to the discount you'd be able to negotiate if you accepted liabilities). And, of course, the proceeds of the sale would go to the creditors before the shareholders.
I am not a lawyer, but here is a decent summary [1]. The legal term you would be looking for is "successor liability".
Liability can be servered from a operational buisness unit, but it basically requires the court intervention to formalize the seperation. Liability follows the functional business so that sale can't be used to evade liability.
Imagine if this wasnt the case. 3M could take on 100B debt, sell the bussness & assets to "4M" , leaving "3M" with no funds or assets for the creditors to go after.
I didn't say it removed the liability of the company. It just means that the company that is left after selling off its profitable assets has the burden of the liability but with nothing but literal toxic assets. They can use the proceeds of the sales to start paying down the debts.
The assets sold would obviously not be the toxic assets.
Maybe I'm misunderstanding, but you said the company would be sold off in individual parts to pay the debt.
My point is that selling it off as a complete company or mini companies doesn't really impact the liability. Both would be possible. What matters from a debt or liability perspective is the terms of the settlement.
In reality, the company is probably worth more as a single entity, sorry I wouldn't be surprised if it stays that way. That would maximize the recovery of damages and repayment of debt.
You sell of the formulas for scotch tape, and maybe the factories that make it as long as it is sequestered from the PFAS type stuff. You sell of the audio tape/VHS factories (haha). You sell off the patents/copyrights for all of that stuff as well. Those are the salable parts.
My point is that the whole thing is sellable. Propbably with a new stock offering for the whole company as a single entity.
If there is a huge judgement larger than the market cap, the most likely oputcome would be chapter 11 bankruptcy wiping out the investors, and the company moving forward as a single entity with a new ticker and new investors
This is the best of all worlds because it maximises the money recovered for damages and debtors.
What it should mean is the US government taking ownership of the company, appointing its' own executives and either selling the company to pay for the cleanup, or using the forward profits from the company to pay for it.
That won't happen, but wouldn't it be nice if it did? Just once.
It means that the market believes they are unlikely to be on the hook for that amount, or else the market cap would be near-zero. Given 3M's current profits, assets, and liabilities, a 142.7B payout would bankrupt it.
I'm starting to see a pattern which basically amounts to corporate shakedowns. I think the trend has only been accelerating since Perdue Parma. They will take the money and never do a thing to clean up the chemicals.
Assuming those numbers are realized it would mean bankruptcy, essentially, and questions like this are pretty standard and well-thought-about there. IANAL but I think this is why Chapter 11 bankruptcy exists (where you keep the company going because that's valuable) vs Chapter 7 (where you liquidate it). I think the Purdue bankruptcy is similar where the company is somewhat being handed over to the people that were harmed, because that's more valuable to them than selling the company piecemeal and then distributing the proceeds.
I read that sentence as saying someone came up with a cost estimate of $142.7b to clean up everything, and then there's a comparison to 3M's $53b market cap for scale/comparison.
I don't think all the money in the world could cleanup "everything" that is contaminated with PFAS - it is effectively pervasive in the ecosystem at this point.
Exactly. They should be nationalized. If they are the only producer of a number of strategically important materials, nationalization needs to happen.
The private markets are great, but cannot be trusted to clean up after their own mess - they have proven this time and time and time again. The taxpayers will ultimately be on the hook for this payout, and that's simply unacceptable.
If the public has to bail out this company, at the very least, the board and C-Suite need to be liquidated and be fined substantially for this sort of behavior. They've known about the danger of these chemicals for almost 60 years, and not once did they (AFAIK) go to the government and actively ask for help to replace said chemicals with safer alternatives that don't literally last forever if consumed.
Right, because nationalized industries/companies have a wonderful track record of environmental concern and practices?
I'm not sure what the solution is to these problems (or this particular problem) but "nationalizing" producers certainly isn't one of them. Destroying 3M isn't one either.
I don't understand the approach to difficult problems that starts with thinking "the government" is effectively a magic wand.
I'm not saying nationalized companies are great. I'm saying that if a company engages in such deceptive practices with materials that they know are toxic, and they fail to disclose that to the relevant parties (the government, and the people), they have no business being in business, as they are effectively externalizing the risk their products put on the rest of us.
Destroying the company is not the best idea, but there has to be a line society has to draw and be vigilant about defending it. Otherwise, you're going to just encourage more of this behavior...because the flip side is a really ugly precedent to set.
You want companies to use toxic chemicals in their products, lie about it, and when found out, just pay some fine and walk away like nothing happened?
No, there has to be a line where we say "you made a ton of money by lying to us and putting toxic chemicals in our air, our water, and our bodies. you're going to now pay that back with substantial interest, and be barred from ever being in a position of any level of corporate power whatsoever for the rest of your life". The taxpayer CAN NOT be the one to be on the hook for corporate misdeeds time and time again.
In countries like China, executives get disappeared for such hubris.
> Destroying the company is not the best idea, but there has to be a line society has to draw and be vigilant about defending it.
Why is it not the best idea? It's a great idea. Fine them more money and let them go bankrupt. Let companies that did not go under for such awful practices pick up the pieces. Why is bankruptcy acceptable for Kmart but not 3M? Be specific, no nonsense about how they are the only company in existence ever capable of creating some mysterious chemical yet also only have a $50B market capitalization (if their chemicals were so rare, impossible to produce, and highly sought after, market cap would be higher).
> The taxpayer CAN NOT be the one to be on the hook for corporate misdeeds time and time again.
I don't understand. You think the taxpayer cannot be on the hook, yet you also think we are obligated to bail out the business by nationalizing it? What do you think nationalizing a business entails? It would literally place the taxpayer on the hook for that business. Nationalizing it would not imply any guarantee the business remains profitable, and future losses would be owned by the public.
I do agree that execs should be punished more severely though. We are absolutely on the same page there. And I don't care if the current execs are not the original execs responsible. As far as I can tell, they've allowed the problem to continue if not get worse.
Thanks for taking my points in good faith - others have not done the same (or to your points either). Upvoted.
>Why is it not the best idea? It's a great idea. Fine them more money and let them go bankrupt.
It's not good politics, unfortunately. The political actors that have the will to do such a thing would get trounced by the next "pro business" candidate, and a lot of Americans would back such a candidate no matter how obvious the problem is. Job losses (albeit temporarily) as well as the temporary supply shock if 3M is the sole producer of any chemical or material that is of strategic importance. Voters who aren't the smartest lot would eat that sort of candidate up, and that candidate would also be backed heavily by other corporate wrong-doers who might also be in the crosshairs down the road. It's a tough situation.
The issue then becomes - if they don't have enough money to pay the fine, who is on the hook for the remaining damages? Think about it - if the company's market cap, assets, C-Suite/board combined net worths, etc.. is worth $N, and the total fine is $X (and N is less than X), who picks up the remainder of the cost to fully help those affected by the toxic chemicals? It's a tough question.
On a personal level, I fully agree with you - burn the company down and punish their board and C-Suite. Those who play by the rules get to participate in the free market, and those who don't need to suffer (and have their golden parachutes shot down). Skirting the rules is hubris at the end of the day, and hubris is not good.
>I don't understand. You think the taxpayer cannot be on the hook, yet you also think we are obligated to bail out the business by nationalizing it? What do you think nationalizing a business entails? It would literally place the taxpayer on the hook for that business. Nationalizing it would not imply any guarantee the business remains profitable, and future losses would be owned by the public.
Fair point. This is where things become difficult - because as I said above, who ultimately bears the responsibility if the company cannot afford to pay the full cost of damages? My solution would essentially be placing the company into a trust owned by the government - and the trust would be responsible for conducting a sale of the company's assets in a timely fashion.
The problem is that the taxpayer eventually foots the bill in one way or another. Damned if you do, damned if you don't.
>I do agree that execs should be punished more severely though. We are absolutely on the same page there. And I don't care if the current execs are not the original execs responsible. As far as I can tell, they've allowed the problem to continue if not get worse.
> if they don't have enough money to pay the fine, who is on the hook for the remaining damages?
No one. The remaining damages go uncollected as there is no one to collect them from. Shareholders, bondholders, and junior creditors are wiped out of their ownership stake in 3M and the 3M company would cease to exist.
And see - that's my issue. The fact that real people will still be fucked and unable to pay real medical costs associated with 3M's actions, yet the company and its shareholders can just say "oh, no more money, sorry" and wipe their hands.
I get the legal concept of Limited Liability, and appreciate why it's a thing, but I also get a really bad taste in my mouth if a corporation willingly and knowingly causes mass harm and doesn't face the full consequences for its actions.
In a company of 100k, probably like 8 people are at fault for this from the 80s and 90s. The rest are taking orders and are working on completely different areas of industry.
3M only works because they share R&D across various divisions. If it was broken up, the R&D goes away and new materials development all moves to Asia.
That's effectively how bankruptcy works but with more paperwork. You take assets (whether it's the deeds to the equipment or ownership of the whole company via stock) and you give the value of that (in the form of money or assets) to the claimants.
Either way it's a transfer of wealth from the current business owners (stockholders) to claimants, just a matter of how that transfer happens.
Strange that we sue companies for selling products we haven't even bothered to ban yet. The idea that 3M "knew the whole time" is kooky when we aren't even sure now, 15 years after people started looking into this, whether we should ban them.
Scientists, regulators and legislatures should decide what the rules are and then hold companies accountable for actually breaking the rules.
Hard disagree; companies should be responsible for harm caused by their products regardless of whether it's "legal". This is "loophole thinking" and it only benefits bad actors.
Doing something that's not illegal is not a loophole. A loophole involves doing something that would otherwise be illegal in a manner that makes it ambiguously not illegal, often due to a poorly-made law.
A lawsuit is about harm. If it's a civil lawsuit, you can absolutely be sued for doing things which you know to be harmful to others, even if they aren't crimes. That's what a tort is. The purpose of such private lawsuits it to give people a legal mechanism for redress that doesn't involve physically attacking each other or trying to legislate everything.
The evidence isn't difficult to search for, and your 30 second "look" at two sources from the Wikipedia article doesn't exactly amount to a meta analysis.
If you can post that meta-analysis that would be helpful, thanks. My goal is to find the evidence. It seems you have it, so it would be useful if you could post it. Generally if there is a meta-analysis or robust evidence it will be in the wikipedia article. If not, I'd love for you to add it (or I can). Evidence shouldn't be hard to find...
Why should evidence not be hard to find? It’s why we have detectives (to find evidence of crimes) and why lawsuits have long discovery processes (again, to find evidence).
We are talking about published scientific studies here, which are all listed on pubmed. Clearly there isnt any robust evidence, as nobody has posted a link to anything.
How do we know that any new product doesn't have long term health effects? As science advances, the ability to precisely measure health effects advances as well. In most cases, we simply don't know until it's too late. There's a realistic balance between caution and innovation.
That said, if 3M knew about and covered up known health effects, then take em for all they're worth.
Care you elaborate? I'm genuinely curious about how this plays out in in practice.
From the perspective of a driver, this fits: i am held responsible for harm i cause even if i was otherwise driving lawfully. But should my car maker be held responsible for the harm their car caused under lawful use?
If the other commenter saying "The problem is 3M scientists have know toxicity to human and have withheld the information to the public and regulators" is accurate, your point is invalid. How could we ban a product that we were misled on.
I totally agree if the toxicity is known. But the fact that these chemicals aren't banned completely, must mean that this isn't yet widely excepted?
Toxicity is a wide spectrum so the truth could be somewhere in between. Maybe teflon coated products don't have enough to be toxic, but dumping the chemicals wholesale into the water supply is enough to be toxic. And 3M could have concealed this high-dosage toxicity from regulators. (I'm trying to reconcile "3M scientists have know toxicity to humans" and the fact that these chemicals aren't banned)
Scientists, regulators, and legislatures already decided the rules. They're not being sued for "selling products we haven't even bothered to ban yet." That summary is inaccurate.
They're being sued for selling products they knew to be toxic, without disclosing that information, which is already against the law.
Johnson and Johnson tried to spin up a subsidiary and shift all the blame to it for including asbestos in talcum powder for decades. Thankfully, the courts saw through the move and made them pay billions of dollars too
J&J ended up paying $9 billion but they still ended up being allowed to spin a subsidiary to hold that money and essentially take on the liability of future lawsuits or what happens when the money runs out and there are more claims.
In the J&J case, the subsidiary had the right to draw at least ~$60B in order to pay off future lawsuits if the initial subsidiary's assets ran out, so there was never any real risk that it would leave suitholders unpaid. The switch into bankruptcy court is a way to arbitrate and organize the lawsuits, which was overturned because given the right to draw money from the J&J parent co the subsidiary wasn't actually at risk of bankruptcy.
Yeah I mean maybe mussolini liked to kick puppies too but I don't really need it as evidence of his character you know what I'm saying? The pfas stuff is so heinous it downplays it to even mention this other thing in the same context.
I wonder what the role of this corporation has been in historically 'hiding away' (making the knowledge 'safe') the majority of "our" know-how around industrial scale chemistry?
I am curious about this because they did to chemistry what (? the nuclear bomb programmes?) did to physics?
This that I have seen happen against computer technology during my short time on earth so far (related: "war on general purpose computers").
...that for the sake of safety (you wouldn't want randos making TNT? then nuclear bomb... now computer malware or 'dangerous' AI tools?) a way is found to make knowledge inaccessible (for safety's sake)
on the level of reasoning i'm seeking, 3M is one of many examples of an older 'deeper' practice around knowledge, accessibility, government, organization-constructing, etc...
At these times, it's good to remember that PFAS will very likely kill more people than any terror attack so far. Among cancers, it is a known contributor to obesity and many other diseases.
We go to war over terror attacks. And for this, we probably won't even bankrupt 3M, nor DuPont.
To my mind, it brings into question what qualifies as terrorism. Is it not terrorism if many people die to push the stock price up when it's terrorism if many people die for some other selfish end?
Is it still carelessness if one knows they are going to kill people for their own selfish, perhaps greedy, goals?
I don't see such a big difference in intent. I think it's more that terrorist groups have people that do what they do for selfish reasons very directly. And corporate groups have people that do what they do for selfish reasons in a way where they are acting on behalf of shareholders' greed, and they aren't really directly harming anyone right now. So it's very indirect. But the intent is kind of similar morally - personal gain at the cost of crimes against humanity, right?
I always find the discrepancy between drugs and chemicals odd. Drugs require years of research to prove that they are safe, whereas chemicals can seemingly be put into the environment as long as they are not proven to cause harm, and even then in some cases, despite the effects of chemicals being released into the environment potentially causing very bad effects.
I can't believe people do this just to make money. And it's not just this case, for example, our food supply is filled with stuff that is really bad for us, barely passes as edible, and is even sold as a healthy alternative in a lot of cases. For example, vegetable oils and cooking with vegetable oils and the growing evidence behind how bad they are, they extremely highly processed and in some cases not even an edible product until the last refinement step.
We're out own worst enemies and greed is so often the issue.
The issue is 3M has moved to stop using forever chemicals. Destroying 3M could mean companies that continue manufacturing the chemicals win out.
It'd be better if 3M received a penalty (severe but manageable over time) and mandate to set a higher bar for industry practices (or risk further consequences).
Prozac, Lipitor, Flonase and about of third of new pharmaceuticals are PFAS. Humans can figure out how to use this technology. Destroying 3M just means it gets made in China with no oversight.
Lawyers will win in the end regardless of what happens.
The most depressing part of this? Stopping the creation of PFAS might help out kids or grandkids, but we're kind of screwed. Well, unless you give blood a lot?
