Fluorochemicals in the Outdoor Industry
By Nick Brown, founder and managing director of Nikwax
Environmental Safety With whom does the responsibility lie?
As a retailer, consumer, or gear manufacturer, how much responsibility
do we have for avoiding the release into our environment of suspect
materials? Should we leave everything to government legislation? In my
opinion, the answer is no. Government can take a very long time to
respond to scientific evidence. The use of perfluoroctyl chemicals is a
case in point.
Perfluoroctyl (PFO) fluorocarbons are everywhere.
The outdoor industry – the apparel/footwear categories in particular –
makes use of a class of chemical compounds called perfluoroctyl (PFO)
fluorocarbons for the specific purpose of providing water-repellency on
the exterior surface of jackets, footwear and bags of all kinds. There
is a rapidly growing awareness that these compounds can biodegrade to a
chemical called PFOA, which is highly persistent in the environment and
in the human body. It is defined as a human carcinogen by the EPA and
is a suspected cause of birth defects. This is a sensitive issue for
people in the outdoor industry. We are supposedly environmentally
friendly, yet we continue to use materials that have been shown to be
risky.
Some History:
The first wake up call for me came in 2000, when 3M removed their
entire range of perfluoroctyl products from the market, cutting out
hundreds of millions of dollars of revenue. I believe it was a highly
responsible action on their part. Subsequently, most outdoor brands
have continued to use PFO products on their garments sourced from other
manufacturers. In the last seven years, however, the weight of evidence
for the harmful nature of PFOs has continued to grow. The United States
Environmental Protection Agency has called for the total elimination of
all PFO products by 2015. Some well-known major outdoor brands have
noted this evidence and are actively pursuing PFO alternatives for
their own products.
PFO is not appropriate to take into the home as a liquid.
Personally, I do not think that there is a significant risk to a wearer
of garments that have been treated with PFO products in a factory.
However, I do believe there is a risk associated with having these
chemicals in a liquid form in the home as an aftercare treatment for
water-repellency. As a manufacturer Nikwax could have chosen this
technology, but we rejected it. I did not want to bear the
responsibility of putting small liquid packages of fluorocarbon into
homes where it was being used unsupervised, potentially in a food area,
and perhaps being spilled and ingested or directly inhaled.
Fluorocarbons may be dangerous to unborn children.
Recent research in both the USA and Denmark has linked head dimension
of newborn babies to the amount of a perfluoroctyl material, PFOA,
found in their umbilical cords. In other words, even extremely low
levels of PFOA may negatively affect human growth. PFOA, which is
persistent in human tissue, has a half-life of eight years. All humans
now have PFOA in their blood.
Conclusion
What is the responsibility born by individuals, manufacturers and
retailers? As individuals we have the right to take risks with our own
lives and bodies. But as manufacturers and retailers, we have to be
much more careful about the risks that we take for the individuals who
use our products. We can never be fully aware of what all those risks
are. However, when we become aware of them, we most certainly should
not try to cover them up and act as if they do not exist. It is always
better to jump before you are pushed!
