Manufacturers try to get ahead of the curve
Tatum McConnell for the Environmental Health News
Laces, buckles, interior textiles and more were receiving
a PFAS treatment before becoming part of a sandal or hiking boot.
“PFAS were being applied to styles that were meant to go
in the water, and a water shoe doesn't need to be waterproof,” Lauren Hood,
KEEN sustainability manager, told Environmental Health News (EHN).
The company started by asking suppliers to stop using unnecessary PFAS, which removed about 65% of this type of chemicals in their products. It took four years for KEEN to phase out PFAS in all products, through finding and testing chemical water-proofing alternatives.
Now apparel companies will need to follow KEEN’s example
to comply with upcoming bans on PFAS in consumer products, including outdoor
clothing, passed in at least three U.S. states. With varying timelines, the
bans apply to all types of PFAS chemicals (researchers have documented more
than 9,000), and cover industries specified in each state’s bill, such as food
packaging or textiles.
PFAS is short for per-and polyfluoroalkyl substances, a family containing thousands of chemicals with at least one strong carbon-fluorine bond. The bonds allow PFAS to repel water from clothing, but it also makes the chemicals extremely persistent in humans and the environment.
Research has linked PFAS to health harms including reproductive issues, cancers
and developmental delays in children, according to the Environmental
Protection Agency (EPA).
California and New York are first up — both states banned PFAS in food packaging starting in 2023, and have a 2025 deadline for removing PFAS from apparel. Maine has targeted 2030 to ban PFAS from nearly all products sold in the state.
The bans in California and New York will have a wide impact,
Avinash Kar, senior director of NRDC’s Health and Food, People and Communities
Program, told EHN. “Larger states can drive the overarching
marketplace,” he said. Companies are likely to make uniform changes for their
product line, so that the same items can be sold in states with or without PFAS
bans, Kar added.
Some companies are ahead of the regulatory curve and
have already phased out all PFAS from their
products, including Jack Wolfskin and Nikwax. Others have voluntary policies to
phase out PFAS ahead of the 2025 deadline, including REI, which announced in February it won’t carry
products included in the California PFAS ban starting in the fall of 2024. This
standard applies to hundreds of outdoor brands that sell items through the
co-op.
PFAS are often applied to products like rain coats and other water-resistant items used outdoors, so the upcoming bans will have a big impact on the outdoor apparel industry. To comply with the law, companies need to hunt down and remove the chemicals from their products.
This means having conversations with suppliers and testing materials, then redesigning items if PFAS are present. These changes will likely ripple out to places beyond current PFAS-ban adopters, as companies remove PFAS across their supply-chain.
Experts
say this will cut down on people’s exposure to PFAS beyond the states enacting
the bans, from factory workers and communities surrounding production sites, to
consumers across the globe.
State by state bans
Enacted and proposed PFAS bans across U.S. states target
different industries and include varying enforcement methods, but most cover a broad
range of consumer products. In March, New York amended its law to better align
with California’s regulation timeline and broadened the ban to include outdoor
apparel and other industries. The synced timeline “makes planning much easier
for companies,” James Pollack, an attorney who specializes in consumer product
regulation at Marten Law, told EHN. “California and New York are
two pretty big markets.”
Some states carve out exemptions or longer timelines for
personal protective equipment and outdoor gear used in extreme conditions. For
example, the California bill notes that there are currently no
PFAS-alternatives for firefighting gear and exempts it from the ban.
One-at-a-time bans create a patchwork of regulation that
can be difficult for companies to comply with, Pollack said. For the outdoor
apparel industry, “the design phases for this [gear] are often years in
advance,” he pointed out.
Enforcement methods for PFAS bans differ by state. California’s ban could be administered through lawsuits from the attorney general’s office or city and district attorneys. “We purposely did not put very stringent enforcement in there,” said California Assemblymember Phil Ting in a webinar about the PFAS ban he introduced.
“The point of the bill is really to provide a timeline. We know that many
retailers are already moving in this direction.” New York’s ban, on the other
hand, introduces monetary penalties and assigns a department to administer the
new regulations.
In addition to California, New York and Maine, there are enacted PFAS bans in Vermont, Maryland and Colorado, though apparel is not included in these states. PFAS bans for some products have been proposed in Minnesota and Rhode Island, and Vermont and New York are considering bills to expand theirs.
Washington state’s legislature directed its department of ecology to create a PFAS ban for aftermarket fabric treatments, carpets and indoor furniture as early as 2025, and has set a later date for banning PFAS in apparel. The European Union is also considering a measure to ban all uses of PFAS.
At the U.S. federal level, however, there’s been less
action on PFAS in consumer products. A bipartisan bill introduced to the U.S.
House and Senate in 2021 to ban PFAS in food packaging never reached a vote in
either body. The EPA announced standards for six common
PFAS compounds in drinking water in March, following 10 states
that created their own enforceable limits on PFAS in drinking water.
“I've been doing this work for a long time. It is
powerful how bipartisan PFAS is,” Sarah Doll, national director of Safer
States, told EHN. This month Vermont’s senate unanimously
approved the bill that expands the range of consumer products included in its
PFAS ban, which will now move to the state’s house. PFAS bans have seen
bipartisan support in other states as well.
PFAS exposure isn’t seen as an urban or rural issue, said
Doll. PFAS can be found in products nearly all Americans come into contact with
from food packaging to furniture, so many want to see them phased out.
Getting PFAS out
Outdoor apparel brands and companies in other industries
are now tasked with tracking down PFAS added to products and taking it out of
their supply chain.
“In many cases, brands have no idea what's in the
products that they sell,” said Mike Schade, director of Mind the Store at
Toxic-Free Future. Figuring out what chemicals are present can involve working
through layers of suppliers to learn what is added to components of a product.
Companies can also test their products to look for fluorine, a component of
PFAS, or specific PFAS chemicals out of the thousands in the family.
Fluorine testing has found evidence of PFAS in clothes,
food and makeup, including in many so-called “green” and “organic”
brands, EHN and Mamavation uncovered last year.
For some products, like KEEN’s water shoes, PFAS simply
isn’t needed and companies can work with their suppliers to remove it from
production. For others, like wet weather gear, brands have to find and test
alternative chemicals to find new options that perform well outdoors.
“As companies move away from PFAS, we think it’s
important…to evaluate the safety of alternatives to ensure they’re not moving
from one bad actor chemical to another. We don’t want to repeat mistakes of the
past,” Schade said.
Those mistakes include a transition from long-chain PFAS
to short-chain PFAS, which contain fewer carbon atoms. Many companies
transitioned their apparel to short-chain PFAS, including Patagonia, in 2016.
But researchers say these chemicals still pose risks to the environment and
health. GenX, one chemical produced as an alternative to long-chain PFAS by
Chemours, a spinoff of DuPont, has been linked to impacts on the liver,
kidneys, immune system and development in animal studies, according to the EPA.
Now some companies have to go back to correct that “regrettable substitution.”
(Patagonia plans to carry entirely PFAS-free products by 2025.)
In addition to use for water and stain repellency, PFAS can end up in textiles and products unintentionally.
Machine lubricants and other materials used in manufacturing can contain PFAS
and contaminate the items produced in factories. In these instances, textile
producers and brands may not be aware that PFAS are present. Removing those
sources of the toxic chemicals could require testing and finding alternative
materials to use during manufacturing.
KEEN has removed all intentionally added PFAS chemicals
from their products, explained Hood. But, “the work is sort of never done,” she
said, “nothing is really PFAS-free. It’s in the ice in the Arctic and it’s in
our bodies. It’s just everywhere now.”
PFAS-free ripple effect
KEEN’s work to remove PFAS from products has created a
bigger supply-chain impact, said Hood. Some manufacturers KEEN worked with to
phase out the chemicals now sell PFAS-free components to other companies as
well. Brands that have phased out PFAS are able to share resources and
information, such as a guide KEEN published that
includes alternative water-proofing recommendations.
Tracking down intentional uses of PFAS and removing them
from products is a good start at reducing the presence of this harmful class of
chemicals, said Schade. But preventing unintentional PFAS contamination will be
a challenge that could take industries longer to solve. Ultimately, “unless we
cut off the manufacturing of PFAS, they’re going to continue to show up as a
contaminant,” Schade said.
Related: First-of-its kind testing points to dangers and unknowns of PFAS in clothing
Tatum McConnell is a reporting fellow at EHN.org. Follow
her on Twitter at @tatum_mcconnell.