www.yourturnoutgearandpfoa.com
WHAT HAPPENS WHEN YOUR PFAS SATURATED TURNOUT GEAR REACHES THE LANDFILL?
The information below is being redistributed today in an effort to arm firefighters with the data they need in order to combat the ACC who has vowed to fight any PFAS regulations.
What’s important to note is this information was first shared January 2019 in Massachusetts during the MA DES hearing on PFAS:
This is the response from Dr. Graham Peaslee, nuclear physicist at Notre Dame University, when asked what happens when our turnout gear reaches the landfill.
Diane, we don’t know how much of the PFAS coating in a jacket will degrade into PFOA, and how much will degrade into other PFAS unfortunately. I do know the timescale on textiles like turnout gear will be on the order of a decade or two before it all decomposes. And I do know from literature (attached) that the majority of clothing will decay in PFOA compared to other PFAS…maybe 50–60% will end up as PFOA. This leads to a scary amount of PFOA in a typical landfill leachate.
So to get you something more concrete, I went back to the measurement of the new turnout gears, that had 116 ppm of PFOA that was readily available from the material on the jacket. I am guessing 95+ % remain on the jacket, but this was what would come off immediately if you soaked the jacket in water for a couple days. I went to the internet and looked up how much material is in a men’s jacket, and it is about 3 yards x 45 in wide fabric or 1620 inches squared. Then I weighed a piece of jacket fabric in my lab from Boston FD, and I calculate about 730 g of fabric per jacket. (This is under 2 lbs, which seem a little light, but there is a lt of reinforced cloth and buckles on a typical jacket that probaly gives it a few more pounds, but no more PFAS.) If there are 730 g of fabric per jacket and there are 116 ppm PFOA per gram, then you end with about 85 mg of free PFOA per jacket. This may not seem like much, but if you tossed two jackets into an Olympic-sized swimming pool (with 660,000 gallons of water), this amount of PFOA would exceed the 70 parts per trillion EPA standard for drinking water! This is without decaying in a landfill 20 years. Imagining pants are about the same as a jacket, that means one set of new turnout gear tossed into water would produce enough waste PFOA to contaminate a full-sized swimming pool. Then if you let it decay in a landfill for 10–20 years you would probably get enough PFOA to contaminate 100 times that much…but the exact ratio of PFOA to to other PFAS isn’t known in decaying fabric, and the total amount of fluorochemicals applied to the clothing isn’t known exactly by anybody but manufacturers, so it will be hard to say whether it is 100x or 500x. But the bottom line is that these heavily treated textiles will contaminate 300,000 gallons of water per item readily, and maybe 100 times that over a couple of decades in the landfill…which is a lot of water.
There are some assumptions in here…but this is why I am concerned about the end-of-life disposal of turnout gear…like carpets they represent a significant source of PFAS for a few generations to come.