Is the headline of this article from the Guardian. And, of course, most of the poison is being delivered to poor and minority communities. And, also of course, it was being done virtually in secret while bending the law to protect contractors involved.
As new data published by Bennington College this week documents, the US military ordered the clandestine burning of over 20m pounds of AFFF and AFFF waste between 2016-2020. That’s despite the fact that there is no evidence that incineration actually destroys these synthetic chemicals. In fact, there is good reason to believe that burning AFFF simply emits these toxins into the air and onto nearby communities, farms, and waterways. The Pentagon is effectively conducting a toxic experiment and has enrolled the health of millions of Americans as unwitting test subjects.
AFFF was invented and popularized by the US Armed Forces. Introduced during the Vietnam War to combat petroleum fires on naval ships and air strips, AFFF was the whizz kid of chemical engineering that forged a synthetic molecular bond stronger than anything known in nature. Once manufactured, this carbon-fluorine bond is virtually indestructible. Refusing to become fuel, this herculean bond overpowers and tames even the most incendiary infernos.
Some brief background. AFFF (Aqueous Film Forming Foam) was a broadly used fire suppressant on military bases used in routine training and allowed to flow into the ground water polluting hundreds of sites across the country. Those pollutants, per- and poly- fluorinated compounds (PFAS), were designed so they are not destroyed by fire. So the Military decided to burn it.
Despite AFFF’s extraordinary resistance to fire, incineration quietly became the military’s preferred method to handle AFFF. “We knew that this would be a costly endeavor, since it meant we’d be burning something that was engineered to put out fires,” Steve Schneider, chief of Hazardous Disposal for the logistics wing of DOD, said in 2017 as the operation got underway.
Only one detail stood in the way of this grand plan: there is no evidence that incineration destroys the toxic chemistry of AFFF.
Noting the “strong flame inhibition effects” of the carbon-fluorine bond, a 2020 EPA report concluded, “It is not well understood how effective high-temperature combustion is in completely destroying PFAS.”
In a 2019 technical guide for incinerators, the EPA wrote that our grasp of the “thermal destructibility” of PFAS is sparse, thinly extrapolated, and currently inoperable. An influential interstate environmental council refused to endorse burning AFFF last year, noting incineration is still “an active area of research.”
Nor was such hesitation restricted to environmental agencies. Even as it was sending tanker trucks of AFFF to incinerators in 2017, the military itself noted “the high-temperature chemistry of PFOS […] has not been characterized” (PFOS is the major PFAS ingredient in AFFF), and “many likely byproducts will also be environmentally unsatisfactory.”
Knowing all along that it was a terrible decision.
Like so much else in the Trump Administration, the reckless rush to burn AFFF unfolded almost completely out of public view. The intrepid reporting of Sharon Lerner at the Intercept and an Earth Justice lawsuit against DOD opened a window into this debacle in 2019. As information percolated back into communities near the incinerators, spirited advocacy helped push the crackpot logic of the entire operation further into unflattering visibility in Ohio and New York.
And they found the environmentally worse of the worst incinerators and then agreed to let them off the requirement to provide proof/certification of disposal/destruction.
Not only is burning AFFF extremely ill-advised, but the six hazardous waste incinerators contracted to do so are habitual violators of environmental law. Since 2017, two of the contracted incinerators were out of compliance with some environmental laws 100% of the time according to the EPA (Clean Harbors incinerator in Nebraska, Clean Harbors Aragonite in Utah), two were out of compliance 75% of the time (Norlite incinerator in New York, Heritage WTI incinerator in Ohio), and the remaining two were out of compliance 50% of the time (Reynolds Metals incinerator in Arkansas, Clean Harbors incinerator in Arkansas). The EPA has issued a total of 65 enforcement actions against these six incinerators in the past five years alone.
Not that the military was expecting the best. Even as it shelled out millions of dollars to the hazardous waste industry to burn AFFF, the military did not specify burn parameters nor emission controls. The military also withdrew typical documentation requirements of hazardous waste, noting in the contract that incinerators “will not be required to provide Certificates of Disposal/Destruction.” When it came to burning AFFF, the Pentagon didn’t want to know what was really going on at these incinerators.
But just six toxic sites now downwind of the incinerators wasn’t enough so the military also had fuel blending facilities mix the inflammable poisons into their industrial fuels to ensure the toxins were spread all over America.
Places like East Liverpool and Cohoes are the destinations of AFFF that we can track. Some 5.5m pounds of AFFF, 40% of military’s stockpile, was sent to “fuel-blending” facilities where it was mixed into fuels for industrial use. It is not clear where the AFFF laden fuel went next, although the DOD contract stipulates incineration should be the endpoint. If you live in the United States, it’s possible it might have been burned in your community. And, because AFFF is a “forever chemical” that doesn’t break down, that pollution could likely plague communities for generations.
Recently there was some good news regarding these pollutants shared with us by Kosack Lefty Coaster, Finally! EPA to regulate "Forever Chemicals" like PFAS This hits close to home for millions & me. Good thing the military spread their poison all over America before they would have had to pay for proper disposal. They knew it was poison, they knew their means of disposal was insufficient, they knew they would be poisoning America and they did it anyway. It should be criminal.