- [TV Narrator] And you will know the benefits of the many industries pioneered by science.

- A recent government study estimates that nearly half of America's tap water could contain toxic forever chemicals known as PFAS.

- [Matt] PFAS are everywhere because they were used in an awful lot of things.

So they were in firefighting foam, cosmetics, fabric protectors.

So think the 3M Scotch guard, if you've had your couch or your carpet treated with that, food wrappers, microwave, popcorn bags.

It wasn't until they were found everywhere that people said, "Well, how harmful are these things?"

(bright music) PFAS is a term for a large group of chemicals, thousands.

And it means per and polyfluoroalkyl substances.

And that's just a fancy way of saying that chemists have taken hydrogens on hydrocarbons and replaced them with fluorine.

They've been around since the late fifties, mid sixties era.

But I would say the general public probably didn't hear about them until the last, say, decade or so.

For the history of industrial chemicals, since World War II, what tends to make these chemicals really good at what they do tends to make them really bad for the environment.

It just happens with every chemical we've looked at.

You'll go back to DDT, PCBs and now PFAS.

These things were great for their intended consequences, but not so great for the environment.

Originally, they thought that these chemicals wouldn't go very far because they're, quite water soluble and they're not volatile.

They don't associate with the fat in our blood like other, other chemicals do.

PFAS are weird.

They're strange in the environment.

They're strange in my lab.

They're strange in their intended uses.

And they also tend to be strange when we talk about toxicology.

They will bind to proteins, which is different than other chemicals we look at.

They associate with membranes of cells, which is different.

They actually affect the lipid content of our blood, which can be really important in fetal development.

Some of the associations people are finding are with immune system responses in children.

So my biggest fear is that the issues we might find with developing children.

(bright music) They don't stay where we want them to stay.

They tend to end up in our waste stream.

Brita filters will remove these chemicals.

The longer chain ones, more so than the shorter chain ones.

When these PFAS were found all over the world, they stopped being produced in that formulation.

They started making shorter chain molecules because they're more soluble figuring, okay, these will not accumulate in people.

They won't be as big of a problem.

Unfortunately, they're harder to remove from the environment because they're so soluble.

A wastewater treatment plant's job is to remove three things, organic matter, solids and pathogens.

They're really well designed to remove those things.

They're not well designed to remove micro contaminants, things that are at parts per trillion, parts per billion, parts per million levels.

And unfortunately these chemicals, because they're so soluble, they won't stick to those particles in organic matter that we're trying to remove.

They'll stay and they'll move their way through the plant and end up back out into our system.

(bright music) So we started investigating.

So by we, my lab and my colleagues have been looking at trying to remove these contaminants from the environment.

We took a little bit different tact versus destroying it because these things are, again, they're called forever chemicals for a reason.

They're very difficult to break down.

They don't break down in the lab very easily.

They're not gonna break down underground very easily.

What we propose to do, is make them stickier, make them stick to the soil and let the water flow through cleanly.

We'll trap 'em all in one place.

They can come in later and try and figure out how to destroy them, because it's very, very difficult to do.

And we started getting funding about 10 years ago, mostly through the Defense Department because these PFAS chemicals were used a lot in the aqueous film forming foam.

These film forming foams do a really good job of putting out fires.

And what the military likes to do is practice.

So you have hundreds and hundreds of sites around the country that have fire training activities.

All of this foam now seeps into the ground, it contaminates the groundwater and the defense department wants an easy way to find, to destroy these underground so that they don't have to excavate the soil, pump out the water and treat it that way.

The one technique that we demonstrated on the east coast was, I liken it to a Brita filter.

We put in a well and we pushed our material out into the soil around it.

And that sort of acted like a Brita filter as it came back up in.

Unfortunately, we're a ways off from the, any implementation of our methods in a wastewater treatment plant or landfill.

Luckily we have some very forward thinking operators at some of these plants that are really interested in removing these contaminants, even though they are not yet regulated for them.

For the last 10, 15 years, the water supplies have been required to monitor for these chemicals.

They're under what's called the, "unregulated contaminated monitoring rule".

There was just a lawsuit settled between wastewater and water drinking utilities with the manufacturers of these chemicals, because they said, look, we have to meet these standards.

We didn't produce them.

Our customers are flushing it down the drain and it's coming to us.

We need help getting rid of these things that you created.

Some of the folks that are in the industry are fighting back against that, because they're afraid that they're not getting enough money to actually adequately deal with this problem.

(bright music) The more we put out there, what we're being exposed to, the more people will start to question, is that okay?

And if not, how do we get rid of it and what else do we use in its place?

And if you're interested in removing it from your home, the easiest way or the most effective way, is to use a reverse osmosis system.

I have people say, "Well, what can I do?

I'm just one person."

and I say, "Well, you're just one person, but you still vote in presidential elections, right?"

I say, "We vote every day with the things we purchase and the things that we do."

So if we're conscious of the products that we're buying, and understand throughout the entire lifecycle of that product, does it have any unintended consequences, then maybe we can find something different.

If there's one thing you shouldn't buy it's microwave popcorn.

The chemicals that are used in the bags are not necessary.

You can take a brown paper bag and take popcorn and put it in your microwave and it pops just fine.

Fortunately with the announcement from 3M that they're not gonna produce these anymore, that's a huge step.

That doesn't mean there aren't other companies around the world now producing them.

We do an awful lot of business with China and we don't have any control over the manufacturer of that, except through what we purchase or what we allow into our country.

We don't want kids closed catching on fire, but we also don't want 'em exposed to these chemicals.

So that's where it falls back to the synthetic organic chemist.

Come up with something that's better, that still is retards flames, but doesn't pollute our children.

I don't think we should be conducting a huge uncontrolled experiment on ourselves.

In the United States we produce things and make a lot of money off of it until somebody figures out it's bad and then we stop it.

We should prove things that are safe before we're allowed to produce them.

And so that we're not creating issues for my children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren.