BURLINGTON — A concerned legislator asked recently, “What can we do to prevent the invasion of toxins before they harm us?”
Per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, or PFAS, were developed by Dupont and 3M, beginning in the 1940s. EPA did not exist until December 1970. PFAS were still under the radar screen of any environmental organizations. By 1970, 3M and Dupont scientists knew PFAS were toxic to inhale and moderately toxic to ingest, but hid the evidence and skewed discussions in their favor. Children with facial deformities were born to women who worked with PFAS in the factories. EPA was not informed about PFAS until the 1990s. Around 2016, PFAS used by ChemFab and Saint Gobain factories showed up in North Bennington’s water, causing cancers. The state sued the companies. PFAS contaminate our waters today.
Let’s call them “foreverywheres” or “forever chemicals,” as PFAS contaminate many products in our modern lives like nonstick cooking pans (get rid of them), carpets, furniture, other household products, personal care products, and various industrial products. PFAS contaminate soil, water and fish, and our bodies. Many just don’t break down but accumulate in living tissue. A movie titled “Dark Waters” tells the story about some of the first folks to be affected by the early use of these chemicals and the efforts of one lawyer who put his life and career on the line to bring this issue into the light of day.
PFAS are a large group of about 15,000 manmade chemicals combining fluorine and carbon, a very strong chemical bond. These chemical bonds don’t break down, but build up in living tissue over time. They are toxic to life at tiny amounts, undermine our immune systems, act as endocrine disruptors, and cause a number of serious health effects.
EPA does not require thorough testing of chemicals before they are produced for market. The Toxic Substances Control Act (TSCA) requires reporting to EPA for risk management purposes. Not until April of 2024 did EPA designate PFOA and PFOS as “hazardous substances.”
The precautionary principle would help us here, but it has not been adopted in the U.S. It is employed to a degree in Europe, giving governments some leverage to prevent use of some toxins before their release to the public.
Act 131 (S.25) passed in 2024 was intended to ban PFAS and other endocrine-disrupting chemicals in a number of products, including pesticides. After the bill was passed and signed, a working group of four Vermont agencies, including Agriculture, created an implementation plan, deleting pesticides from the legislation and changing the definition of PFAS. Question: By what authority could they do that after the law was passed and signed?
Enter H.238 (2025), its sequel, to give the attorney general enforcement authority over PFAS.
Pesticides were included in Act 131 for a reason: Vermont uses several thousand pounds of pesticides containing PFAS active ingredients in corn culture, on fields and forage, some food crops, golf courses and landscaping.
Fluorinated pesticides cause serious health effects in humans, including endocrine disruption and immune suppression. They impair central physiological processes in non-target species via their persistent and mobile break-down products, which kill the living soil, and mess with hormones and enzymes found in many living organisms. They kill non-target beneficial species, including pollinators, and contaminate the water needed by all life.
Fluorinated pesticides represent a new cycle of an ever-expanding spiral of more complex pesticides created to “control” or kill some insects or plants, while causing lethal impacts on beneficial organisms and on human health. I see Vermont at a critical turning point in our collective ability to spread economic poisons.
Is the Agency of Agriculture so captured by the pesticide industry that they cannot see the miracle of life, the interconnected community of life that is so damaged by pesticides? When will the Public Health and Agriculture Resource Management team face the ugly truth of PFAS in pesticides, embrace public health and end their romance with the pesticide industry?
How dare we allow pesticide corporations to continue poisoning our bodies, the land, food and water? Our moral capacity to protect life must catch up to our ability to do long-lasting damage to life on a large scale.
H.238 does not include pesticides, but I urge your support for it anyway to reduce toxic PFAS in our state. The time to limit pesticides is coming.
Since my commentary on H.238 and PFAS was published in Times Argus (3/24/25), H.238 passed in the Vermont House almost unanimously. It is now in the Senate Health and Human Welfare Committee. It would prevent PFAS from being used in several classes of
consumer products such.
It would prevent PFAS from being used in several classes of consumer products such as dental floss, clothing, artificial turf, cookware, and mattresses, provide a consumer suit option, and give enforcement authority to the Agency of Natural Resources and the Vermont Attorney General’s office.
PFAS stands for per- and poly-fluoroalkyl substances, a very large, and growing, group of man-made chemicals combining fluorine and carbon, a very strong and persistent chemical bond. A factsheet from New Jersey on PFAS in drinking water is at nj.gov/health/ceohs/documents/pfas_drinking%20water.pdf
Thankfully, we see that no PFAS were found in the Hardwick town water supply. A link to the 2019 Consumer Confidence Report on Hardwick’s Town Water is at https://hardwickvt.gov/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/Town-of-Hardwick-wsid-5039-CCR 2019.pdf
Other towns like Bennington are not so fortunate. Unfortunately, the report grossly under-estimates the number of PFAS compounds that exist and present health or environmental problems. They number in the tens of thousands. Let’s call them “foreverywheres”.
One PFAS-containing consumer product class wholly omitted from H.238 is pesticides. We have data indicating their use all over Vermont including on food crops. What a handy way to spread toxic PFAS everywhere.
Because our country has not adopted the Precautionary Principle, corporations get to create chemicals with very little oversight. Now we are paying the price.
Sylvia Knight is community advocate/researcher at Vermont Pesticide & Poison Action Network (PAPAN) in [email protected]
