How Teflon Poisoned the World 

I was a jet engine mechanic in the US Air Force in the 1960s. Many of the hoses on the engines were lined with Teflon. We were told that if there ever was an engine fire in the hangar, to run, because the burning Teflon in the hoses releases a poisonous gas. When I came out of the Air Force, I was surprised to learn that they were selling frying pans lined with Teflon.

Private citizens who would be found guilty of deliberately dumping large quantities of highly toxic waste would serve long prison sentences. Companies doing this should not be fined, they should be dismantled as criminal organizations.

This will never stop until we stop suing companies, and start criminally prosecuting the individuals responsible within the company.

"don’t scratch the pan, the coating is poisonous" me as a child thinking "excuse me wot?"

I used to work with a guy who half-jokingly, half-seriously liked to say "If it doesn't cause cancer it's not durable."

The saddest part of it all is that Dupont just moved to the Netherlands and continued their polluting activities over there and are still getting away with it. Many of the people there are chronicly ill from swimming and eating crops grown using water from the area.

I missed the part where these chemicals were banned by the EPA, and the people who made them went to prison for poisoning millions of people and animals. .

Imagine living in a dystopian country where government agencies can just settle criminal cases with corporations.

My neighbor was rinsing a couple of paint brushes in the gutter in front of his house. The paint was a common, water-soluble latex he'd used in a couple rooms in his home. Some Karen nextdoor reported him to the city authorities and he had to pay over $20 THOUSAND dollars in fines plus attorney's fees defending himself. His daughter had to wait 3 extra years to attend medical school because he had to use the tuition money he'd saved for her to pay his lawyer's fees. All over two paint brushes. And DuPont keeps poisoning the world.

The fact these companies got caught poisoning people and covering it up….and got away with it Is absurd

You could've included Teflon poisoning in birds. People literally had their parakeets die on the spot from inhaling the PTFE fumes wafting from their pans.

In case you didn't know the movie called *Dark Waters (2019)* tells the real-life story of Rob Bilott, the lawyer who took on chemical giant DuPont after discovering that the company was polluting drinking water with the harmful chemical PFOA.

My town has a particularly high amount of this, many people have water that tested so high that the local government has had to install filter systems in their houses. We are warned not to eat fish from any of the local waterways and to avoid the foam in the lakes whilst swimming. Thanks dupont.

Why isn't it simply forbidden for companies to dump ANYTHING into bodies of water? (as it is where I live)

My dad worked for Sunbeam Corp. He was a teflon spray painter. He never got cancer during the 21 years he was there...go figure. Anyway, the company folded and moved. He collected his pension up until that went under and bankruptcy kicked in. PBGC paid my dad 10 cents on the dollar and we were screwed. He tried to work again but he was too aged and weak. He sort of cracked under the pressure and wasn't the same man. Most of the family had to distance themselves from him.To this day the suffering is felt. Sunbeam destroyed my dad & family. Just like the teflon that destroyed a segment of the world.

When the Ohio lawsuit was in process they tried to find a human that did not have PFOA's in the bloodstream. They only found one tribe in the South Pacific whose blood was not tainted by PFOA's. That is the definition of a forever chemical!

8:07 "They promised to use the land for non-hazardous landfill, but instead dumped chemicals right into the creek." Which seems to bring the moral of: If a corporation is trying to buy land, assume that they will strip away all resources and poison the ground with the most toxic substances in the universe.

As someone who works in the environmental sector I can tell you PFAS is going to be a major issue in the future. It is literally everywhere and the regulations are very lax since it is such a new contaminate.

I'll never understand how the individuals within companies are not held accountable for crimes they commit through a company. Additionally, if a company is considered its own entity akin to a person, why can it not be punished as such? or even more simply, if a company causes large scale damage or break established laws, why is it not just forcefully shut down? With these kinds of cases, i always wonder, "what would the consequences be if a privatte person did this?" and the answer is almost always lifelong concecutive jail sentences, we should hold companies and tthe individuals within them equally accountable.

Greed destroys everything. Can you imagine producing a product that you discover will kill people when used as directed and then not only continuing to produce said product but hiding the research that shows you knew it was deadly?

As I get older I'm more and more amazed at how many illegal and terrible things are allowed to happen just because.

In 1966 my mom burnt a Teflon skillet and toxic smoke filled our house. For two days I couldn’t get a full breath even after the smoke had been eliminated. My beloved parakeet “Pete” died. My mom never bought Teflon again.

There was a pfos and pfas scandal in Sweden recently too. 3M and Dupont put these chemicals into fire extinguishers as well. So after years of fire stopping exercises in certain areas by the Swedish fire brigade, the stuff had contaminated the ground water of the local areas, polluting the inhabitants with it who drank water from the wells and the local water treatment plants.

Excellent presentation and a very serious global crime that went largely unpunished and continues unabated.

What happened with this, and the lack of any real consequences, made me completely give up on the system we have now. A company can poison the world and just go on its merry way.

I can always count on Georg to cheer me up.

I live in Roanoke (pronounced Row-Ah-Noke) and frequently go to Christiansburg and Blacksburg so seeing Elliston being listed was a shock. Found out the company is called ProChem that's been dumping GenX into the South Fork of the Roanke River (which feeds a Hollow for drinking water). Figured that at this point we would've banned dumping chemicals into the rivers because of how polluted the Roanoke River already is. We moved here when I was a kid and the first time I ever went fishing with my dad we were told by his coworkers to only catch and release them because everyone that ate the fish from the Roanoke River in the 80s and 90s would without fail get some rare aggressive cancer and die. There used to not be signs on the river saying this so we were fortunate to know people that told us this. To this day and for years to come I'm sure the Roanoke River will be off limits from eating the fish. Back in Louisiana where we moved from the Mississippi River from Baton Rouge to the Gulf is called "Cancer Alley" for the same reasons when big chemical companies dumped waste into the river making places like New Orleans have abnormally high cancer rates. Even though the EPA banned most of this dumping in the 70s and 80s a lot of those chemicals will be in the Mississippi for more than 1000 years.

We used have a Teflon pot, cooked soup in it lots of times, thought the soup must have had pepper in it, later realised it was bits of Teflon coming of the pot.

I used to work for a carpet cleaning company (in the last 5 years). One of the most common services was a light misting of teflon on all carpet after the cleaning, followed up by raking it into the fibers. They changed products from teflon after it became common knowledge in my area that it caysed cancer, which is very recent. Crazy to think the health effects it likely had on people and their pets after 30 years of spraying it in almost every square foot of their home.

When I was in elementary school in the early 1960s, I told my mom I had a creepy feeling about our Teflon pans. My mother discounted my concern. In the early 1970s when I was living on my own, my mother gave me all of her Teflon cookware. All of it went immediately into the trashcan.

Companies that do this are criminals, and their CEOs should be in jail.

It's crazy how many things from that time we're still suffering from

I work in the water industry and this has been on our radars for about a decade. Ahhhh, the joys of modern life…

One person leaks chemicals, they go to prison. A company does it, they have a small mark on their balance sheets after 20 years of investigations. Seriously, how are none of their execs in prison? A monetary fine is not enough for these ghouls unless you take them for everything they got, and then some.

"The Devil We Know" has to be one of my favorite documentaries. It's frightening to realize that this dangerous chemical is used literally EVERYWHERE for EVERYTHING.

Someone I knew used to work for DuPont in the management from 1980s to 2000s. He was not aware of the risks, and often shared to me proudly of DuPont's no waste to environment policies, safety measurements. He even travelled to diff factories around the world to facilitate the measures. Now that I think back, perhaps some of those were just for shows, but I do believe that most employees, different from few decision makers, firmly believe in what they were doing is for a better future.

As a boy in the UK my school trousers were teflon coated to prevent rips and tears. It’s also become a trend in cooking to move away from non-stick pans for exactly the reasons listed. I still managed to rip the knee on my pants

Some of the youtubers converged into full investigating journalism over the years even though they started out with a different thematics.... and Im all here for them.

As a young, woman I had several pots and baking pans and various other grilling and electric cooking devices made with the Teflon non-stick coating (pie maker, electric wok, sandwich press, slow cooker, pressure cooker etc). All of these would wear after some time and start to peel. At times I know that I have eaten food with fragments of this plastic like coating in it. I have also been overcome from the toxic fumes. Now I wonder what damage I have not only done to myself over all of the years being naive to the dangers but I mostly worry about the possible harmful health effects to my 2 children. It truely is despicable these companies operated knowing these findings and that they are still in business today. There needs to be much harsher punishments put in place going ahead. I’m all for prison time for any executives found to have knowledge of these disgusting, selfish company actions and who choose to turn a blind eye. People over profit always!

If a company causes Negative externalities it should pay for them to be mitigated.

Dupont never stopped using C8. They just renamed it throughout the years. It's still affecting people to this day. 😢

Appreciate You putting this all together for us. Really nicely done.

Its the chemical dumping that concerns me. To do such a thing is sociopathic.

All I could think about during this video was people who spent every waking moment making sure they are as healthy as possible, tuning their bodies like machines all hours of the day. They could have been born right next to the factory, drank contaminated water, and then 30 years later they are devastated to find out they have liver failure, cancer, any unfortunate side effect from these chemicals. That's heart breaking in a way to realize without these big corporations disposing properly, we have less control over even our own health.

I live in the US and near one of DuPonts oldest incursions in Delaware. Im consistently surprised that no one seems to be aware of just how ridiculously brazen this company has always acted. And they've yet to be punished at all. Drives me crazy

I lost several beloved pet birds due to teflon fumes which I did not know were toxic. I now use nothing but stainless steel or cast iron.

We should open up criminal liability on these CEO’s. If you want to take credit for company improvements and make absurd amounts of money doing it, you should at least be semi-responsible for the bad decisions you sign off on by default. If I poisoned a water supply, I would be jailed without a second thought.

In Belgium 3M was also dumping PFAS in the river Schelde and the effects are stretching into the Netherlands.

the fact that to test the toxicity of PFOA they made people smoke cigarettes laced with the compound. its insane....

"Mistake" implies that not criminally charging these executives was a good-faith decision and not "regulators" willfully protecting the status quo.

For once I’m so glad that I grew up in a poor Caribbean household where we just had a Dutch pot and one large stainless steel pot for soup 🙏🏾🇯🇲

Lived in Minnesota and what 3M did there is catastrophic. And they employee so many people that people defend their dumping of forever chemicals all over the state. Its unbelievable.

I was born, grew up, and still live in Parkersburg, WV and both my parents worked for DuPont while I was growing up. My mother worked on the Teflon line and my father was a researcher. I went into the plant multiple times for a take your kids to work day and it was very interesting to see the insides as a kid. Its wild looking back at this and remembering hearing my parents defend Teflon and claiming it was perfectly fine and all the talk about cancer was overblown. They really both were a bit too committed to the company and still are. As a person who lives in that area and has first hand experience with it here are some interesting things you missed. - In the late 2000's there was a large scale blood testing survey in the area in which researchers paid residents to draw their blood to check for the levels of chemicals in our blood level. I remember taking part in it because my parents gave me 20 dollars spending money for it and the rests into a college fund. - Chemors/Dupont have several nature areas they look after in the area that they used to try to help clean up their image in the community. They are pretty mediocre and used mainly for recreational areas rather than conservation. That being said, the semi-public pool has a very nice deep end. I can say this because I worked on one of them during the summer several times as a teenagers. - Not totally related to Dupont, but still tangential, there is a warning system in the area for if a chemicals plant blows up. This is due to the Shell plant in nearby Belpre, Ohio having a major explosion in 1994, causing some level of chemical fall out for the citizen. I remember this because we used to have to do drills at school where we would shelter in place and the teachers would tape up all the windows and doors so the chemicals wouldn't get in should it happen again.

the DuPont plant was just up the river from my hometown (Parkersburg) Cancer is rampant in the area and we’ve all tested extremely high in these chems (C-8) in body, blood.

There was a recent exposé here in the Netherlands of the Chemours plant in Dordrecht. Now all of the surface water in the area is polluted. We're not supposed to swim in the water within a 50 km radius of the plant or eat the fruit and vegetables, and we're still waiting to hear if it's in the drinking water and how much. I grew up in the US, so I'm used to toxic chemicals all over the place, but I had hoped that the environmental and health regulations here would be better.

Dupont: We're going to safely dispose of this extremely hazardous stuff! *Dupont proceeds to literally dispose of the material in the most widely hazardous way possible*

We MUST start boycotting these companies, put pression to prosecute, regulate and stop this shit

It is hilarious how we are saving the planet aggressively, blindly pushing EVs, yet there are much more important, real issues like this one, not being addressed for decades ... Thank you, George, this one is a depressing masterpiece and will stick with me for quite a while.

The real punishment would be to take the executives and middlemen who ordered these chemicals dumped into the water supply and force them to drink down some of what they had dumped. Good enough for the rest of us to drink eh?

EPA probably shouldn't hire former Dupont excecs if we want this to stop. Also, the reason the fines are so small is because Dupont pays way more in campaign contributions so politicians dont create stiffer fines.

These settlements are all less than it would have cost them to properly dispose of toxic materials and much much less than they made while knowingly being evil. They still saved money. Industrial fines need to be much much more severe.

Unfortunately, you can't really go after any executives as long as they can legally claim that their corporation is a 'person', and the responsible party

Living downriver from the Washington works I applied for a job there mid 70's. Played in the Ohio river and boated since the 60's. During droughts we'd haul water from the Ohio river for our dairy. The water discharge into the Ohio river was huge and I'd marvel how much water was coming out when passing in a boat. Amazing they got away with that for so long.

The big wigs should be made to drink the chemicals they are going to dump before they dump them

Of course it's DuPont. They should be held liable for crimes against humanity.

I love my cast iron pans. After years of good care, they’re basically non stick with years of avocado oil seasoning. Those are my most used. After that are my stainless steel.

There is a similar scandal going on in Belgium right now. I live in the Netherlands were they also used to dump it in the water. It got closed and the waste transported to an waste treatment plant for PFOA's in Antwerpen. But then it turned out PFOA's were also being dumped in the water! It turns out it is reeaally hard to destroy these chemicals completely and the little that leaks out is already waay more than dangerous levels for the entire Westerschelde (an inland sea). So the fish is toxic and the Samphire is toxic! It is worrying how much land and sea can be poisoned by just a little of this hardy molecule.

The 3M company is based in Saint Paul Minnesota not far from where I live. There is ground water contamination in multiple areas east of Saint Paul including under an old farm I rent storage barns on. They have mapped the entire path of the chemicals including depth as it makes it’s way to the Saint Croix river. There are lots of cancer cases in Cottage Grove Minnesota which is southeast of Saint Paul. The world should just stick to buying iron cooking pans.

You sir are a phenomenal chronicler of the shapes and contours of the mess we collectively find ourselves in. 💐 🌹

The fact they are still in business is insane. And Teflon is just their latest poisoning, they were also the ones selling lead for gasoline

Growing up, a friends mom had a cockatoo. Pretty annoying animal. I was over at that friends house the afternoon another friend had gone upstairs to boil water for mac&cheese. Few hours later, after someone realized we hadnt heard the bird squawk... We went upstairs to be investigate and found the cockatoo dead in the bottom of the cage. Friend had put an empty teflon pot on the burner and forgot the water and forgot it was on the stove. Teflon had cooked off.

I've always suspected Teflon is a poison. I stopped using pots and pans lined with purported nonstick coating when I noticed how they eventually deteriorate with continuous exposure to high heat and lose their nonstick properties. I told my wife that we're basically eating burned paint and must stop using her favorite pots and pans if she doesn't want to die early. I just hope it's not too late yet😳😳😳

Our family lived in Parkersburg for 3 + 1/2 years in the early mid fifties. I have aches in my legs and can barely stand for very long. I just had my prostate removed and feel fortunate to be alive from all the pollution that is in the world. We escaped Parkersburg but what a horror it is for so many ~

I needed a new frying pan. I went to 5 different big name department stores, all of them only had exclusively teflon pans in their range. I went to smaller home/kitchen stores, same deal. I had to go to a commercial kitchen supply store in order to find a steel pan with no teflon. How many people out there are using teflon for lack of an alternative?

Absolutely disgusting behavior by the corporations, driven by greed!

Thanks, that's a good summary of the problem. I'm just about to start a new job where a part of my remit will be sorting out the PFAS content of the product portfolio (mostly in the form of PTFE parts). It's always good to have a history on hand when persuading the board to act.

Sometimes I see a beautiful house on acres of pristine land by a river for sale in the US and it’s a good price but then I go to that PFAS / C8 etc. interactive map online and see the levels in the area and they are off the charts, or I trace the river on a map and it leads back to a dump site. I’m sure this is true in other parts of the world as well.

Bravo to this truth you are exposing here! I have subscribed and hit the bell and I will be sharing this everywhere!

These things are going on, and my doctor friend still is adamant that more cancer cases just mean more identified, due to better tools of today, compared to the olden days when the same amount simply went undetected. And i can tell him nothing to make him think otherwise. I'll always be the under educated moron in his eyes.

I'm so glad DuPont was able to continually pay settlements instead of facing any real consequences or being shut down completely. [Sarcasm]

I remember when my mom bought the first Teflon pan in our house. It used to shed flakes into the food. I remember being served eggs with little black flakes of Teflon scattered throughout them and being told that it's fine and not to worry.

Totally agree: executives responsible for crimes against the environment should face heavy jail terms. If it is only fines to the company, it's not a deterrent, it's a business expense. Especially is the sums involved are less than the cost of safe handling/disposal.

Not only do publicly traded companies like Dupont have "no incentive to stop doing this" in actual fact it would be ILELGAL for them to stop doing such things. If they factor in that the fines they will pay will be less than the cost of not polluting then the act of not polluting would be choosing to lose money for shareholders, which would get them in actual serious legal trouble with Wall Street.

I had to explain to this old lady some years ago that her parakeets were dying because she was cooking with Teflon pan and her birds were less than 10 feet away from her stove.

It's amazing, and curious, how something so insidious can be made to appear so innocuous by clever (and expensive) marketing. A couple of months ago I decided to switch out my teflon frying pan for an old-style cast iron one. Sometimes old can be better than new. It's an imperceptibly small step, but it's one I can do.

Who doesn't love a pan that adds black sprinkles to the food?

Ha, I used to work at a shrimp pound in Newfoundland. The safety manager saw clumps of teflon mixed in with the outgoing shrimp and tried to have that load dumped for contamination. She was escorted off the grounds and fired that very day.

If we punished bank robbers the same as corporations, for robbing 10 million dollars the robbers would be fined 1.5 million and get to keep the rest. It's a good job we are only stupid enough to punish corporations with such ludicrous methods.

I'm not the sort of person to say "end capitalism!" but punitive fines actually need to be punitive. If dumping toxic chemicals saved $10bn then you need to fine them $30bn for doing it. And if they can't pay it, so what? People don't get out of fines because they're broke. And yes, decision makers should be help personally responsible for corporate criminal behaviour.

This is the same energy as car manufacturers choosing not to do recalls. It ends up being cheaper to just pay fines and settle lawsuits from dead/injured customers or other victims when the cars malfunction than to properly fix them.

"Right? Riiiiiight?" Expecting a corporate entity to do the right thing that would result in higher upfront costs but lower long term damage and fines that equate to fractions of percentages of their profit margins? No, Georg. I believe that I shall continue to expect the worst.

in my chemistry lab, we currently have some work going on defluorinating polyfluorinated organic chemicals so they can be more safely disposed or recycled. the ironic thing is, we have teflon and other polyfluorinated plastics everywhere in the lab, from stopcocks to containers.

Thank you for this video. Fantastic work. Jail time and required cleanups of public water should be a priority. But it will never happen. Our public tap water exceeds the limits for PFO's by the state level but more importantly the federal 'suggested' level we are off the charts. It's disturbing. It's in everything. Coffee we order, foods we wash, what we bathe in, the local brewery... on an on. We filter our drinking water at home with a RO system. But that is only one source. Even bottled waters have PFO's. This company just gave millions of people cancers and other health problems and nothing but a tiny fine will result.

In my country there is no such thing as settlements when an issue concerns the broader health of the public.

Great video! I like this style of content. Thank you for making this!

I live in minnesota, 3m comes to elementary schools and tells us about enviormentalism, cleaner energy, reduce, reuse, recycle, and all that stuff. But meanwhile stuff like this is happening, totally not hypocritical or anything.

I was thinking I hadn't had a full serve of corporate awful in a while and Georg is the man to give it to you straight up. No filler, just pure reality.

The first time I ever had any sort of buzz or "high" was when I was spending the night over at a friend's house and we went to one of his friends's places. He pulled out a can of Scotch Guard and introduced me to "huffing". Only time I ever did that shit. I moved on to real drugs after that. Much healthier.

PFAS is the current focus of our drinking water testing and processing at work.. And it's EVERYWHERE.

Millions of 3D printers use PTFE that sits ontop of the heating element which often produces fumes, but they didn't mention the extent of harm this material causes