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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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?