Closed in January 2016, the Shenango Coke Works on Neville Island is a quiet place these days. A group of local activists would like to keep it that way: They’d like to see the site turned into a solar farm. A pipe dream? Maybe not. The utility that owns it actually has a robust recent history of investing in renewables.
Last year when Leah Andrascik heard the Shenango Coke Works was closing, she thought it was a joke. Then, when she realized the news sent in an email by a fellow activist was true, she was relieved.
Andrascik lives just across the Ohio River from Neville Island, just north of Pittsburgh, where the coke plant was a constant source of concern for many residents. “When it was still in operation, there was a lot of dark smoke that would come out of the battery,” Andrascik says.
The battery is where the coke—a fuel derived from coal—was baked. She says the air smelled funny a lot of the time, and the sky was hazy. She was concerned for the health of her two small sons. That’s why she got involved with Allegheny County Clean Air Now (ACCAN). The group pressured the Allegheny County Health Department to take the coke plant to task over air quality violations and lobbied to shut it down.
LISTEN: What’s Next for the Shenango Coke Works Site?
DTE Energy, which owns the plant, cited the downturn in the steel industry as the reason it decided to shutter the plant. Andrascik says she felt bad that 173 workers lost their jobs, but this summer, she could let her boys play in their yard without having to worry about how the air was affecting them.
Credit Kara Holsopple
/
Leah Andrascik, who lives just across the river from Shenango Coke Works, thought it was a joke when she heard the plant was closing. Now, she’s relieved she can let her two boys play in their yard without having to worry about air pollution.
Now ACCAN is pushing for something else at the industrial site: a solar farm. The group has 800 signatures on a petition asking DTE to blanket Neville Island with solar arrays.
“It would be the first one in the Pittsburgh area,” Andrascik says. And she thinks it would be a feather in the city’s cap.
DTE owns one of the largest solar arrays in the eastern U.S, and another project in Lapeer, Michigan is expected to produce enough energy to power 9,000 homes. These sites incorporate hundreds of thousands of solar panels, and the utility is also building a smaller, urban solar array in Detroit.
A company spokesperson says it hasn’t yet determined a plan for the 50-acre Shenango site, but DTE Energy is aware of the petition and appreciates the community’s interest. Right now, the utility is working on cleaning up the site.
Credit DTE Energy
/
DTE Energy
The 4-acre, 2,800-panel solar array at General Motors is part of a big push by DTE Energy to install more renewable energy operations in and around Michigan. The Detroit-based utilty has invested $2 billion in solar and wind projects since 2008.
Leah Andrascik says her group is concerned that the development of Shell’s ethane cracker in Beaver County will influence how the Shenango site is redeveloped. The cracker plant will produce polyethylene pellets to sell to plastics manufacturers.
“That would open up a whole host of different industry,” Andrascik says. “They call it downriver industry.”
For Andrascik, that means more pollution. She says Pittsburgh has worked hard to redefine itself from being the “Smoky City” to a clean and green leader that gets national attention for its bike trails and LEED certified buildings. With that track record, Andrascik thinks installing clean energy technology at the Shenango site just makes sense.
“I think that would go just one step further in saying we want to choose development that’s not going to impact the health of our citizens and that’s not going to impact the environment,” she says.
###
This story is part of our Headwaters series, which explores the environmental and economic importance of the Ohio River. Headwaters is funded by the Benedum Foundation and the Foundation for Pennsylvania Watersheds, and is produced in collaboration with The Allegheny Front.
A federal judge has approved a settlement requiring pollution reductions and a $900,000 civil penalty by Appalachian coal mines owned by West Virginia Governor-elect Jim Justice.
The Environmental Protection Agency and Department of Justice announced the settlement in September with Southern Coal Corp. and 26 affiliates.
The settlement resolves allegations of Clean Water Act violations from Justice-owned mines in Alabama, Kentucky, Tennessee, Virginia and West Virginia.
It requires Southern Coal to use an EPA-approved environmental management system, undergo compliance auditing, implement data tracking, and pay escalating penalties for future violations. It also calls for the company to set up a public website about water test results and to produce a $4.5 million letter of credit to ensure work is done.
U.S. District Judge Glen Conrad approved the consent decree this week, finding it “fair, adequate and reasonable” and not against the public interest.
Calls to Southern Coal and its attorney were not immediately returned Thursday. Company spokesman Tom Lusk said in September that most of the violations cited were from permits inherited from coal companies not previously owned by Southern Coal.
The civil penalty will be split between the federal government and Alabama, Kentucky, Tennessee, and Virginia. West Virginia withdrew from the lawsuit talks in early 2015, saying the company’s compliance had improved under state enforcement since 2008.
Assistant U.S. Attorney General John Cruden wrote in a brief last week, supporting approval, that the settlement followed lengthy negotiations. “It ensures compliance at existing operations, reaches beyond violating facilities to impose company-wide preventive measures, and addresses environmental concerns broader in scope than those alleged in the complaint — all the while avoiding the delay, risk, and expense of protracted litigation,” he said.
The federal complaint, filed along with the proposed settlement in September, said the coal companies exceeded their permits for water pollution discharges or failed to sample water and monitor and report discharges “on numerous occasions.” Environmental Protection Agency enforcement officer Laurie Ireland cited 852 violations in 2012, dropping to 405 last year and down to 272 so far year. There have been “notable improvements” in the mines’ compliance since negotiations began in 2014, she wrote in a court document filed Dec. 2.
Industry has left a dirty legacy along the Ohio River. We’re talking about toxins like PCBs, dioxins and mercury—discharged into the water by steel mills and the petroleum industry for decades. This week, we caught up with Judy Petersen, executive director of the Kentucky Waterways Alliance, to tell us more about how legacy pollution—and new pollution—impacts more of our lives than we might think.
The Allegheny Front: So systemwide, what are the legacy pollutants in the Ohio River, and how did they get there?
Judy Petersen: Well, the worst legacy pollutants in the Ohio River are mercury, PCBs and dioxin. Many of them got there decades ago with steel industry and petroleum industry releases into the Ohio, and many of those pollutants date back to before the Clean Water Act was passed.
AF: And what kinds of impacts do they have on the environment?
JP: Their main impact on the environment is fish consumption. What happens with those kinds of pollutants is they accumulate in the sediment, and all of the little insects and bugs that form the base of the food chain in the river get contaminated. Small fish eat those and bigger fish eat them, and when it moves up through the food chain, that’s called bio-accumulation. So the worst problems are with people who eat a lot of fish out of the Ohio. And I believe that there are disadvantaged people in many of these communities—like the West End here in Louisville—who are down there fishing on the Ohio River every day. And they are fishing to supplement their family’s diet. And we can’t lose sight of those people.
LISTEN: How Legacy Pollutants Impact the Ohio River
AF: And exposure to these toxins, like mercury, has been associated with nervous system issues, problems with developing fetuses and cancer. But if you don’t eat a lot of fish from the river, should you still be concerned?
JP: First of all, there is commercial fishing in the Ohio. There can be fish sticks at your local food store that came from Ohio River fish. But we should care for a whole lot of different reasons. We should care because of all the wildlife that are going to eat those fish, [like] the eagles we see coming back throughout the Ohio River Basin. One of the reasons some of those pollutants were originally banned was because we saw the devastating consequences that they had on the reproductive viability of eagle and osprey and hawks.
AF: On the Hudson River in New York, there was a major issue with PCBs, and it was addressed by dredging that portion of the river. Is the Ohio to that level of pollution, or is it more like a “sleeping giant”—that is, we don’t want to disturb what’s there by dredging it up?
JP: Once you start dredging the river, you stir up all those contaminated sediments and they can remix with the water. So in most cases, it just makes sense to let nature take its course. I think PCBs and dioxins are a little different than mercury. We’re not really discharging PCBs and dioxins—those are legacy contaminants. Mercury is also a bit of a legacy contaminant, but what we’re worried about is new and continued discharges of mercury into the river when parts of the river are already contaminated. If we tip that scale even further, the entire river will be contaminated. Then, we’ve done a disservice for not just fish consumption, but possibly for some of the smaller drinking water systems that rely on the Ohio River. Mercury is not an easy thing to get out. If you live in Louisville or Pittsburgh, they have sophisticated water treatment. If you live in a smaller town, and there is too much mercury in the river, it’s going to escalate their treatment costs enormously. They may or may not be able to afford to treat for mercury. It’s one of the reasons why we’re actively fighting new discharges of mercury into the river. A number of years ago, ORSANCO [the Ohio River Valley Water Sanitation Commission], an eight state agency, said that there would be no more discharges of mercury above a certain level into the Ohio River. And they gave industries 10 years to comply with that. Come 2013, they found that they weren’t ready to comply. They have indefinitely extended that waiver, and they have given that responsibility back to the individual states. As a headwaters state, what that means for Pennsylvania may not be the same thing as for a downstream state like Kentucky.
According to the EPA, the Ohio River is the most polluted river in the country and has held that ranking for the last seven years. In 2013, industry discharged more than 24 million tons of pollutants, more than double what industries dumped into the second-ranked Mississippi River.
AF: In other words, you’re receiving whatever is coming downstream.
JP: Yep—we all live downstream, [even if] it’s a little bitty stream that feeds into a larger stream that feeds into the Ohio River. If you’re a major river city like Louisville, then you live downstream from Pittsburgh and Wheeling and Cincinnati and big and little towns that are upstream of both the Ohio as well as the Allegheny and Monongahela.
AF: How does legacy and new pollution impact the Ohio River Basin’s future, economically and with regard to recreation?
JP: I don’t want to get so far into the pollution scenario that we lose sight of the fact that the Ohio River is cleaner than it has been in many, many decades. People cleaning up all the sewer overflows and the Clean Water Act that put limits on many of these kinds of industrial facilities that discharge into the Ohio—all of those have had an enormous impact. I just want to make sure we don’t start sliding backwards because the job is not done.
AF: And the Ohio is still ranked as the most polluted river in the country.
JP: It does have that ranking. And that is based on data in a particular index called the Toxic Release Inventory. But believe it or not, there is one facility in Indiana that discharges a lot of nitrates that puts the Ohio over and above all those other rivers. So there are things we can do to clean it up. And I think that people need to stand back up and demand that we have a clean environment and say that this is one of the basic government functions that we all need.
Chances are, one of the first things you do in the morning is turn on the faucet. For more than three million people in Ohio, Pennsylvania, Kentucky and West Virginia, that means getting tap water that comes from the Ohio River. But according to the Environmental Protection Agency, the Ohio is also one of the most polluted rivers in the country.
For residents of the region, news reports about toxic chemical spills shutting down drinking water supplies are the stuff of recent memory. In 2014, for example, a toxic chemical spill in Charleston, West Virginia on the Elk River — a tributary of the Ohio — affected the water supply for more than 300,000 West Virginians and shut down schools, businesses and local governments.
The story of Charleston is well known now. Ten thousand gallons of a coal-processing chemical leaked into the river from a storage tank owned by Freedom Industries. It was just upstream from a water treatment plant, where Charleston pulls in water from the river to send to customers.
LISTEN: The Silver Lining of Chemical Spills
When Evan Hansen, head of an environmental consulting group in Morgantown, saw what was happening, he got to work.
“I started doing research online on source water protection and policy and started tweeting out information I started to find,” Hansen says. He wrote up a report about it, which quickly found its way to West Virginia lawmakers.
“The impact was so great because the drinking water system got contaminated,” Hansen says. “Systems were not in place, or actions were not taken, to prevent that contamination from happening.”
The accident, which was in a part of West Virginia nicknamed “Chemical Valley,” spurred the whole state to get more serious about protecting its drinking water from chemical spills. West Virginia increased its regulation of chemical storage tanks, and it required water treatment plants to spell out how they would protect their source water. Other states along the Ohio River, like Pennsylvania and Ohio, have been doing this for years.
“The Ohio River has been in front of any water system in this country—and probably around the world,” says Stanley States, who worked at the Pittsburgh Water and Sewer Authority for more than 30 years. He now educates experts at water treatment plants around the country on how to protect drinking water from chemical spills and other environmental problems.
He says it wasn’t that other states had more foresight; the simply responded to earlier industrial spills of their own. “Unfortunately, they have to wait for definitive proof that this is really a threat before you can justify putting huge sums of money in it,” States says.
Credit Steve Helber / AP
/
AP
The 2014 toxic chemical spill in Charleston, West Virginia affected the water supply for more than 300,000 West Virginians and shut down schools, businesses and local governments. In this photo, Jonathan Steele, owner of Bluegrass Kitchen, fills a jug with cleaning water in the back of his restaurant. Steele installed a large tank in the back of his restaurant and was able to open his restaurant using bottled water.
The 2014 toxic chemical spill in Charleston, West Virginia affected the water supply for more than 300,000 West Virginians and shut down schools, businesses and local governments. In this photo, Jonathan Steele, owner of Bluegrass Kitchen, fills a jug with water behind his restaurant. Steele installed a large tank in the back of his restaurant and was able to reopen using bottled water. Photo: Steve Helber / AP
Another silver lining of unexpected contamination in the Ohio River is improved water monitoring for problems. Richard Harrison is head of the Ohio River Valley Water Sanitation Commission (ORSANCO), and he says the agency gets about 600 calls a year about spills into the river. Sometimes it’s something really small. But when it’s a bigger spill, ORSANCO works with the water utilities to assess what should be done.
“[We] really help determine if it’s something the downstream utilities need to be concerned about,” he says.
For example, as the Elk River spill made its way down the Ohio River, water utilities were actively communicating with each other. By the time the contamination reached Cincinnati, they knew what time to expect it and how long to shut down their water intakes.
“And then we were able to work with the Greater Cincinnati Water Works to convey that same information downstream to Louisville and Evansville,” Harrison says.
You might also expect that treatment plants continuously test the raw water coming into their plants. In some cities like Pittsburgh, they do, and Charleston was required to do that after the Elk River spill. But that’s actually a new idea in many places. Some treatment plants don’t have the resources for constant monitoring.
That’s where new technologies could help. Christopher Tomaszewski is a PhD student at Carnegie Mellon University, and at 26, he looks a little old to be playing with the toy-sized boat he’s just launched into a small pond in Pittsburgh’s Highland Park neighborhood. But it’s not just any old model boat.
“I work at Platypus, which is an environmental monitoring company,” he says. “And we use robots like this to survey areas for depth or pollution.”
Credit Julie Grant
/
It’s kind of like a drone in the water, and it uses a cell phone’s compass and GPS systems to navigate around. The Platypus boat has been used to collect water quality data near wastewater treatment plants—including information about salinity and dissolved oxygen, which Tomaszewski says are critical to fish and plant life.
He says the data and water samples collected by this little boat give a more comprehensive look at what’s happening in the water than researchers could get before. And this is just one way technology is being used. As projects like Platypus improve data gathering, others are now sharing that information online in real time. The idea is to keep giving water treatment plants more information—and more notice—so they can handle what’s coming down the river and protect our drinking water.
###
This story is part of our Headwaters series, which explores the environmental and economic importance of the Ohio River. Headwaters is funded by the Benedum Foundation and the Foundation for Pennsylvania Watersheds, and is produced in collaboration with The Allegheny Front.
Some water quality advocates think getting big industrial polluters to pay for farm runoff prevention projects is an innovative way to control water pollution. But critics of the Ohio River’s pollution credit trading system say it’s just another pay-to-pollute scheme.
There are about 55 cows and 10 pigs on Ken Merrick’s farm in eastern Ohio. It sits on a hillside above a creek that leads to the Tuscarawas River, a tributary of the Ohio River. It’s a part of the country Merrick is plenty familiar with. He grew up milking cows at his grandma’s place, which is right next door to the property he and his wife have farmed since 2005.
Today, they sell grass-fed beef and pasture-raised pork direct to customers. By a barn at the top of the hill, you can see one of their farm’s main hubs of activity: A spot where they feed their animals—and pile their manure.
It’s a muddy hill.
“This was literally, at times, waist-deep in mud in spots,” Merrick says.
LISTEN: “This Farm Could Be a Model for Cleaning Up the Ohio River”
The cows used to slosh around in it while they ate. And the manure? Today, the pile is more than five feet tall. But Merrick says that’s nothing.
“That pile’s actually half the size it was a month and a half ago.”
The manure and mud used to wash down the hill, mucking up the creek that runs through his property. And Merrick didn’t like that.
“I needed to change something,” he says. “The manure would wash off every time it rained. We didn’t have any way of containing it, and we didn’t have space for the cows.”
Credit Julie Grant / Allegheny Front
/
Allegheny Front
Ken Merrick and his wife, Natsuko, on their farm in eastern Ohio.
This type of agricultural runoff is common, and it creates a serious pollution load. There are more than 250,000 farms in the Ohio River watershed, which is part of the larger Mississippi River Basin. And farm runoff from the Mississippi, which contains nutrients like nitrogen and phosphorus, is considered the major contributor to the 6,000-square-mile dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico.
Though agricultural runoff is largely unregulated, Ken Merrick decided he wanted to do something to stop it on his farm. His plan was to create a large concrete slab for the cows and manure at the top of the hill, secure the hillside and fence the cattle away from the stream. But the $20,000 price tag was pretty steep.
“That’s an enormous cost,” he says. “Most people would do [it] if they have the opportunity, but they don’t have the money to do it. So it never gets done.”
But Merrick was able to get it done with help from a regional water credit trading program. That’s where industrial polluters—like power plants—buy credits as a way of meeting their pollution limits. And the money goes to farmers to pay for projects like the one on Merrick’s farm.
“We started looking into it to try to test out if water quality trading could be an effective mechanism to protect America’s waters—and to meet company bottom lines,” says Jessica Fox, an environmental scientist with the Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI), which runs the credit program.
That’s one reason water trading credit programs have been popping up around the country: It might be more cost effective for industry to pay for farm projects that clean up nitrogen and phosphorus pollution than to control an equal amount of it at their plants.
Credit Shayla Klein
/
Currently in the Ohio River watershed, there are limits on nitrogen but not on phosphorous pollution. As these nutrients are increasingly blamed for toxic algae blooms, that’s expected to change. For instance, environmental regulators in Ohio are now pushing for new limits on phosphorus pollution in the Ohio River. And that could make those credits—which cost $10 for a pound of nitrogen or phosphorous—more appealing.
Jessica Fox has worked for more than a decade on this water pollution marketplace between Ohio, Kentucky and Indiana. It’s the first multi-state program in the country.
“The first thing outright is that there’s rigorous science and verification to say that nutrient reductions that we claim we are achieving and turning into credits is real and valid, [so] that we know that those reductions are legitimate,” Fox says.
But some environmental advocates says the credit trading program is just another ‘pay-to-pollute’ scheme.
“We are trading accountability for unaccountability,” says Food and Water Watch’s Scott Edwards. His group investigated water trading credits in the Ohio River and the Chesapeake Bay. And he says these programs have made it impossible to track exact pollution loads from power plants.
“A power plant has to measure its discharges at the end of the pipe—tak[ing] water samples every month, or every quarter, depending on what their permit says—and report those results,” Edwards says. “I can tell you—or I used to be able to tell you—exactly how much pollution was coming out of a power plant and into a stream.”
Edwards gives the example of the Brunner Island Electric Plant. The plant has a permit from the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection to discharge pollution into the Susquehanna River, which runs into the Chesapeake Bay. Both are officially impaired waterways. But in 2013, for example, Brunner Island used water quality trading credits to offset all of its nitrogen and phosphorous discharges.
“When I look at Brunner Island now, I see that they’ve discharged 87,000 pounds of nitrogen,” Edwards says. “[But] can you prove to me that that those groups of farms that you bought credits from have reduced their discharges by 87,000 pounds? All they can do is hold out their credits that they purchased and say, ‘Here, we bought 87,000 pounds of credits.’ No one will ever know if those farms reduced their load by 87,000 pounds or not.”
Many of those credits paid for projects that hauled away millions of tons of chicken manure from farms in the Chesapeake Bay watershed. That sounds good for water quality in the bay. But Edwards points out that all the manure was trucked to southwestern Pennsylvania—and into the Ohio River watershed. He says that means they didn’t reduce pollution; they just moved it.
WATCH: Ken Merrick Talks About Reducing Farm Runoff
The Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection says it regulates how manure is applied to farm fields, although it hasn’t specifically tracked final distribution of the Chesapeake Bay manure. And Edwards says that’s the crux of the issue: There’s no way to test exactly how much pollution is being reduced by mitigation measures, like manure pads or buffer strips on farms.
“No one is ever going to measure whether those thousand of pounds ever were stopped at that farm from entering into a waterway. There’s no monitoring going on, there’s no water sampling going on.”
But Jessica Fox, who helps manage the credit trading program in the Ohio River watershed, says they use well-established modeling to estimate pollution reduction on farms. And they work with state regulators to verify annually that the projects are being maintained.
“I go out there,” Fox says. “I can see the projects where there used to be all kinds of sediment and manure running right into the river. There’s no question when you see these projects on the field that nutrient recovery is happening.”
She acknowledges that they can’t exactly measure pollution reduction on a farm the way they can at the end of a pipe. But she says that doesn’t mean there aren’t as many benefits. So far, the program has helped fund projects on more than 30 farms and prevented more than 100,000 pounds of nitrogen and phosphorous from getting into the Ohio River.
Beef farmer Ken Merrick has also witnessed the benefits of the controls he’s put in using the credit trading program. Now, the mud from his farm no longer washes into the water, and his stream has come back to life.
“My wife was actually out here last summer catching fish with the kids,” he says. “My grandpa used to do that. I never caught anything. It’s kind of cool to see the fish coming back into the area.”
###
This story is part of Allegheny Front’s Headwaters series, which explores the environmental and economic importance of the Ohio River. Headwaters is funded by the Benedum Foundation and the Foundation for Pennsylvania Watersheds, and is produced in collaboration with Allegheny Front.
Residents throughout the Ohio River Valley from West Virginia to Kentucky have been quietly living with the toxic legacy of a chemical known as C8.…
Residents throughout the Ohio River Valley from West Virginia to Kentucky have been quietly living with the toxic legacy of a chemical known as C8. Manufactured by DuPont, C8 was an important component of consumer products like non-stick Teflon cookware. But researchers now know that C8 exposure is linked to all kinds of health problems, including cancer. Recently, Sharon Lerner, who covered the issue in an 11-part series for The Intercept, talked with us about the key aspects of the story and how some Ohio Valley residents sought justice through a class action lawsuit.
The Allegheny Front: So what kinds of health problems were people experiencing as a result of C8 exposure?
Sharon Lerner: There is a panel of epidemiologists—people who study diseases in populations—approved by both sides, and they were tasked with figuring out what were the probable associations between exposures to C8 and disease. And they came up with six, [including] kidney cancer, testicular cancer, preeclampsia, high cholesterol and thyroid disease. What they did is they looked at the population and saw that throughout the population, those who were exposed at higher rates had increases in these six disease. Since then—and their final results came out in 2012—there are health issues connected to immunity, reproductive outcomes and obesity.
LISTEN: Tracking the Health Impacts of C8 Exposure
AF: You talked with one of the workers in the West Virginia plant whose son ended up with birth defects, and she wondered if that was related to working with the C8 chemical.
SL: That was the case with Sue Bailey and her son Bucky Bailey, who had facial deformities. Those were seen in some health studies as well, so she had good reason to think that they might be related. And actually, the number of mothers who were pregnant who were working in the Teflon division and had some birth defects was higher than it should have been. One of the main reasons I wrote about her, though, [was that] Dupont had this evidence and they didn’t share it with the EPA—which is why the agency sued the company. It was, at the time, the agency’s biggest fine that it had levied. So it became the first solid case of them withholding important evidence of the harms of this chemical, or things that should have at least raised concern and been shared with the public.
AF: Chemical companies are no longer producing C8 in the U.S. But now they’re making something called C6, which is also known as GenX. But many people think this is a “regrettable” solution. Why is that?
SL: I looked at the adverse incident reports, and I found that it had essentially the same constellation of health problems that were associated with C8. In lab animals, they found cancers, and they found effects on the liver and endocrine system as well.
AF: I think what is so striking about your series is that there really is no way for residents who live near these facilities to protect themselves—or even the average consumer to really know what they’re being exposed to. It’s surprising that the Environmental Protection Agency often doesn’t know very much what chemical companies, like DuPont, are making and releasing into the environment.
SL: Well, in the case of C6, they actually did have that information. Dupont did file the adverse incident reports, as they are required to by law. But the gap that I found was that when they reported it, there was no clear course of action from the EPA. One would assume they would take that information and act on it. Instead, the agency that’s supposed to be in charge of protecting the public from these kinds of dangers just filed them away.
AF: And it might not be all that shocking that people working or living near these chemical plants have high levels of these chemicals in their bodies. But research has shown that nearly all Americans have some level. So how can we avoid exposure?
SL: The big thing would be to not get stain-resistant coating on things and look into what’s on your stain-resistant clothing or tents or outdoor gear—that kind of stuff. While it wouldn’t be manufactured in the U.S. anymore with C8, it could be coming from other countries. And it very well could be manufactured within the United States with some of the replacements that are also thought to have some of the same health effects.
AF: And on a personal level, what are you taking away from reporting this story?
SL: One of the most upsetting things to me is how big it is. At every step, you pull the string and it keeps coming. I went deep on this particular chemical, and focused squarely on it. But this is only one type of perfluorinated chemical, and perfluorinated chemicals are only a small part of the toxic chemicals that are unregulated and affecting our health and that we’re exposed to all the time. And because of the way we do things, they’re out in the world way before we know what their effects are. So we have to do it backwards: We have to do it after the fact and look back.
###
Check out Sharon Lerner’s 11-part series on C8 at The Intercept.
