Sometimes it feels as though specialty chemicals giant 3M—once possibly Earth’s single greatest promoter of fluorine atoms—will be litigating the damage done by its “forever chemicals” more or less forever.
After much litigation, 3M agreed to pay $10.3 billion to settle with scores of U.S. municipalities over its toxic per- and poly-fluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) in 2023. It paid the state of New Jersey $450 million in a settlement just last year. And it has been litigating hundreds of cases like this since at least 1999. But now the beleaguered multinational conglomerate will soon be defending itself in the southern hemisphere, where it has been dragged down under by the long arms of the Australian law.
On Thursday, the Australian government announced that it is suing 3M for $1.4 billion USD ($2 billion in Australian dollars) over the “substantial costs” of damage done by the PFAS contained in a 3M-sold fire-fighting foam that was used at 28 of the commonwealth nation’s military bases.
“This misconduct has contributed to substantial costs for defence and the Australian taxpayer, including over $1bn [Australian, AUD] to date to investigate, remediate and mitigate PFAS contamination at defence estate sites,” Australia’s Attorney-General Michelle Rowland said, per one BBC report.
“This is a government that is prepared to take on one of the biggest multinational corporations in the world,” Rowland elaborated, according to The New York Times. She described the suit as the largest legal claim ever brought to court by the Australian government.
Foam parties’ opening statements
According to Australia’s assistant defense minister Peter Khalil, the nation’s military has already spent about $920 million USD ($1.3 billion AUD) on remediation efforts to lessen the impact of 3M’s PFAS-based firefighting foam, which had been engineered to suffocate flames.
Khalil stated that the ministry has to date excavated roughly 220,000 tons of contaminated earth from its bases to prevent further seepage of these “forever chemicals” into local ecosystems, according to the Associated Press. The ministry has also treated 3.4 billion gallons (13 billion liters) of PFAS-tainted water, Khalil told reporters.
“We are prepared to take on powerful corporations when Australians and Australian communities have been impacted,” Khalil added.
But a spokesperson for 3M offered a curious defense against the commonwealth nation’s allegations. While the Australian government maintains that 3M withheld and misrepresented critical information about the product, 3M’s aqueous film-forming foam (AFFF), the company itself claims that Australia and its military had ample time to figure out all these facts on their own.
“3M has never manufactured PFAS in Australia and ceased sales of the products at issue in Australia around two decades ago,” the company asserted in a press statement, quoted by The Guardian. “Despite this, the [Australian] Department of Defence continued to use PFAS-containing fire fighting foams for nearly two decades longer, as noted in a recent legislative committee report.”
Granted, it’s hard to interpret these comments when a 3M-published material safety data sheet dated to 2019 (i.e., not even one decade ago) still recommends using “aqueous film-forming foam (AFFF)” when dealing with fires started by another 3M chemical, Bondo® Traffic P-606V Flexible Loop Sealer. (Y’evah try Bondo®, cobbers?)
Foam truths
AFFFs can come in several mixtures of chemical components, according to an advisory on these fire-suppressing sprays put out by the state of Alaska’s Department of Environmental Conservation.
Older stocks of the foam can contain perfluorooctane sulfonate (PFOS), a long-chain PFAS, and newer stocks can contain perfluorooctanoic acid (PFOA) “not [as] an intended ingredient in AFFF, but [as] a side product created during the manufacturing process,” according to the department. PFOA has been linked to testicular and kidney cancer, according to the U.N. World Health Organization’s International Agency for Research on Cancer. And the agency ranks PFOS as “possibly carcinogenic to humans.”
In 1990, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency also flagged another compound present in AFFFs, ethanol, 2-(2-butoxyethoxy), as a hazardous pollutant under the Clean Air Act. But it’s a fairly common industrially made chemical, not a proprietary 3M product. Mediocre lawsuit potential, in other words.
