Greenpeace names outdoor brands in new PFC row
29/10/2012
As it often does, Greenpeace wastes no time in naming a group of prominent outdoor brands in whose products it has found “noticeable concentrations” of perfluorooctanoic acid (PFOA) or of fluorotelomer alcohols, which can break down into PFOA. The companies to feature in the report are: The North Face, Vaude, Jack Wolfskin, Patagonia, Kaikkialla, Marmot and Mammut. We have made contact with all of them to ask for their reaction.
The official position of the US Environmental Protection Agency on PFOA is: “PFOA is very persistent and has been found at very low levels both in the environment and in the blood of the general US population. Studies indicate that PFOA can cause developmental and other adverse effects in laboratory animals. PFOA also appears to remain in the human body for a long time. All of these factors, taken together, prompted the agency to investigate whether PFOA might pose a risk to human health and the environment at the levels currently being found, or at levels that might be reached in the future as PFOA continues to be released into the environment.”
PFOA is not an ingredient that manufacturers deliberately add in the making of their water- and oil-repellency products, but a substance that appears in small quantities as a by-product of the synthesis that takes place in the making of C8 chemicals.
At the start of 2006, the agency set up a stewardship programme with eight chemical companies: Arkema, Asahi, Ciba Specialty Chemicals (now BASF), Clariant, Daikin, 3M/Dyneon, DuPont and Solvay Solexis. These eight manufacturers committed voluntarily to reduce C8 content in all their products, including those aimed at textile manufacturers, by 95% by no later than 2012 and to work towards eliminating PFOA altogether by 2015. Just over two years from that deadline, it is no surprise that some products should still show signs of PFOA’s presence.
Some of the alternatives companies have spent years and millions of dollars working to develop are members of the same family of chemicals as PFOA, the perfluorinated and polyfluorinated chemicals (PFCs) family. The new alternatives are based on C6 rather than C8 chemistry and their manufacturers are confident clothing companies using them will be free from the risk of detectable levels of PFOA forming in their clothing products.
In a statement on October 29, however, the campaign group said: “Greenpeace calls on the outdoor clothing industry to ban PFCs from production and to further develop fluorine-free alternatives. The textile manufacturers need to replace these hazardous chemicals with environmental-friendly alternatives.”
Retail group Marks & Spencer made a statement on October 24 to say it had reached an agreement with Greenpeace to stop using all PFCs by July 2016. On the day of its statement, Marks & Spencer acknowledged in comments it gave to sportstextiles.com that it was taking this step “in the absence of any compelling evidence or science”, but said it wanted to minimise the risk to its business by “coming out of the [PFC] family altogether”.
At the time of the Marks & Spencer announcement, Greenpeace told us: “The case against certain PFCs has been clear for many years, especially key C8 compounds. Evidence for other PFCs, although more limited, indicates that some are likely to have hazardous properties.”
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