States Are Banning Forever Chemicals. Industry Is Fighting Back

It’s not just the cookware industry making this argument. Erich O’Shea, the director of product communications at the American Chemistry Council, told WIRED in an email that the group supports New Mexico’s fluoropolymer exclusion and that it will “allow New Mexico to avoid the headaches experienced by decisionmakers in other states.”

The FDA has authorized nonstick cookware for human use since the 1960s. Some research—including one peer-reviewed study conducted by the American Chemistry Council’s Performance Fluoropolymer Partnership, whose members include 3M and Chemours, has found that fluoropolymers are safe to consume and less harmful than other types of PFAS. Separate research has called their safety into question.

However, the production of fluoropolymers for use in nonstick cookware and other products has historically released harmful PFAS into the environment. And while major US manufacturers have phased out PFOA in their production chain, other factories overseas still use the chemical in making fluoropolymers.

The debate over fluoropolymers’ inclusion in state bans is part of a larger argument made by industry and business groups: that states are defining PFAS chemicals too broadly, opening the door to overregulation of safe products. A position paper from the Cookware Sustainability Alliance provided to WIRED lambasts the “indiscriminate definition of PFAS” in many states with recent bans or restrictions.

“Our argument is that fluoropolymers are very different from PFAS chemicals of concern,” Burns says.

Some advocates disagree. The exemption of fluoropolymers from New Mexico’s ban, along with a host of other industry-specific exemptions in the bill, means that the legislation “is not going to meet the stated intentions of what the bill’s sponsors want it to do,” says Gretchen Salter, the policy director at Safer States.

Advocates like Salter have concerns around the use of forever chemicals in the production of fluoropolymers as well as their durability throughout their life cycles. “Fluoropolymers are PFAS. PFAS plastics are PFAS. They are dangerous at every stage of their life, from production to use to disposal,” she claims.

Kenney acknowledges that the fluoropolymer exemption has garnered a “little bit of criticism.” But he says that this bill is meant to be a starting point.

“We’re not trying to demonize PFAS—it’s in a lot of things that we rightfully still use—but we are trying to gauge the risk,” he says. “We don’t expect this to be a one and done. We expect science to grow and the exemptions to change.”

With a newly industry-friendly set of regulators in DC, industry groups are looking for wins at the federal level too. In February, an organization of chemical manufacturers and business groups, including the American Chemistry Council and the Cookware Sustainability Alliance, sent a letter to the EPA outlining suggested “principles and policy recommendations” around PFAS. The group emphasized the need to “recognize that PFAS are a broad class of chemistries with very diverse and necessary properties” and recommended the agency adopt a government-wide definition of PFAS based on West Virginia and Delaware’s definitions. Both of those states have a much more conservative definition of what defines PFAS than dozens of other states, including Maine, New Mexico, and Minnesota.