Well this thread has examined some of the ills that enter theenvironment/water environment. Did anybody watch Storyville last night BBC 4 on Teflon?
Yes the pan coating and much more, plus one of the chemicals in particular that makes it up called C8. Two American companies original made it Du Pont and 3M and knew for years that it had impacts on humans, animals, fish, etc health, denied it, covered up internal reports saying there were serious problems with it, the usual bloody script.
When the Environment Protection Authority (EPA) looked for clean blood from humans to run baseline tests for comparable studies amongst the at the time global population they couldn’t find any!
They had to go back to old storied stocks before the Teflon was created to get the baseline data. They also found by looking for this baseline that C8 was a bio-accumulator, bio-persistent substance. M3 dropped C8 from it production of Teflon but Du Pont didn’t and continued to use it and deny it had any toxic impacts whatsoever. Even though workers were developing statistically significant numbers of cancers over and above what would be expected in the general population.
Women works were again giving birth to statistically significant birth defected children. The company did make a concession over this and removed pregnant women from the frontline of production where C8 was produced and used.
Eventually Du Pont was prosecuted by the EPA under EPA regs fined 13M$ and settled many civil cases for injuries/illnesses due to C8. Subsequently stopped using C8 and change it for another manmade chemical, which now and again is starting to appear in the environment.
One chilling fact in the programme’s conclusion was that there are 88,000 unregulated, tested chemicals used daily in the US at the last count.
The programme for those who are interested in this sort of stuff (and we all should be) can be viewed on Iplayer for the next week Storyville: Poisoning America.