Thread regarding 3M layoffs

3M's environmental record is shameful. 3M talked a good game with 3P and many other environmental programs but in secret 3M put into motion one of the greatest pollution catastrophes of all time. No amount of science or good can make up for what 3M has done.

A. Certain executive , Dr “m” was strikingly absent from the article.

Ouch. This is crushing. 3M should have been more careful before eliminating this chemist’s position.

Have any of you actually used the fire fighting foam? I have, during the periodic fire safety training at cottage Grove. It works wonders. Nothing else comes close for solvent fires. If there’s an airplane crash you for sure want this stuff on hand to save lives.

Now the problem is that during safety drills the airport crews just let that foam residue down the sewers and into the water supply. Obviously a huge mistake. But that’s where a lot of the contamination comes from I believe.

The old 3M management were clearly in the wrong. But in the last few years of his tenure, at least Desimone made the right call to discontinue all C8 related product. A few years after that (during McNerney’s first year or two), C4 based chemistries were found not to be bioaccumulative which led to PBSF based products. In my time at 3M, I believe management made the correct and ethical calls on fluorochemical products. In fact, I personally believe Mike Roman went overboard in stopping hydrofluoroether production. HFEs are not known to be harmful.

3M is a horrible company. Looks like there never really was a Code of Conduct other than do whatever it takes to keep 3M making money, keep your job, get promoted and more. The bad behaviors among senior leaders have not changed over the years. Gaslighting is still going strong at 3M as are bullying, harassment and favoritism. 3M does not care how these behaviors adversely affect its employees. It is well known these bad behaviors can result in anxiety, depression and even PTSD. I hope more people come out and tell the truth about 3M. Those of us who are still working with young children cannot take the risk but others might be able to say something.

This article is a collaboration between The New Yorker and ProPublica.

Kris Hansen had worked as a chemist at the 3M Corporation for about a year when her boss, an affable senior scientist named Jim Johnson, gave her a strange assignment. 3M had invented Scotch Tape and Post-it notes; it sold everything from sandpaper to kitchen sponges. But on this day, in 1997, Johnson wanted Hansen to test human blood for chemical contamination.

Several of 3M’s most successful products contained man-made compounds called fluorochemicals. In a spray called Scotchgard, fluorochemicals protected leather and fabric from stains. In a coating known as Scotchban, they prevented food packaging from getting soggy. In a soapy foam used by firefighters, they helped extinguish jet-fuel fires. Johnson explained to Hansen that one of the company’s fluorochemicals, PFOS—short for perfluorooctanesulfonic acid—often found its way into the bodies of 3M factory workers. Although he said that they were unharmed, he had recently hired an outside lab to measure the levels in their blood. The lab had just reported something odd, however. For the sake of comparison, it had tested blood samples from the American Red Cross, which came from the general population and should have been free of fluorochemicals. Instead, it kept finding a contaminant in the blood.

Johnson asked Hansen to figure out whether the lab had made a mistake. Detecting trace levels of chemicals was her specialty: she had recently written a doctoral dissertation about tiny particles in the atmosphere. Hansen’s team of lab technicians and junior scientists fetched a blood sample from a lab-supply company and prepped it for analysis. Then Hansen switched on an oven-size box known as a mass spectrometer, which weighs molecules so that scientists can identify them.

As the lab equipment hummed around her, Hansen loaded a sample into the machine. A graph appeared on the mass spectrometer’s display; it suggested that there was a compound in the blood that could be PFOS. That’s weird, Hansen thought. Why would a chemical produced by 3M show up in people who had never worked for the company?

Hansen didn’t want to share her results until she was certain that they were correct, so she and her team spent several weeks analyzing more blood, often in time-consuming overnight tests. All the samples appeared to be contaminated. When Hansen used a more precise method, liquid chromatography, the results left little doubt that the chemical in the Red Cross blood was PFOS.

Hansen now felt obligated to update her boss. Johnson was a towering, bearded man, and she liked him: he seemed to trust her expertise, and he found something to laugh about in most conversations. But, when she shared her findings, his response was cryptic. “This changes everything,” he said. Before she could ask him what he meant, he went into his office and closed the door.

This was not the first time that Hansen had found a chemical where it didn’t belong. A wiry woman who grew up skiing competitively, Hansen had always liked to spend time outdoors; for her chemistry thesis at Williams College, she had kayaked around the former site of an electric company on the Hoosic River, collecting crayfish and testing them for industrial pollutants called polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs). Her research, which showed that a drainage ditch at the site was leaking the chemicals, prompted a news story and contributed to a cleanup effort overseen by the Massachusetts Department of Environmental Protection. At 3M, Hansen assumed that her bosses would respond to her findings with the same kind of diligence and care.

Hansen stayed near Johnson’s office for the rest of the day, anxiously waiting for him to react to her research. He never did. In the days that followed, Hansen sensed that Johnson had notified some of his superiors. She remembers his boss, Dale Bacon, a paunchy fellow with gray hair, stopping by her desk and suggesting that she had made a mistake. “I don’t think so,” she told him. In subsequent weeks, Hansen and her team ordered fresh blood samples from every supplier that 3M worked with. Each of the samples tested positive for PFOS.

In the middle of this testing, Johnson suddenly announced that he would be taking early retirement. After he packed up his office and left, Hansen felt adrift. She was so new to corporate life that her office clothes—pleated pants and dress shirts—still felt like a costume. Johnson had always guided her research, and he hadn’t told Hansen what she should do next. She reminded herself of what he had said—that the chemical wasn’t harmful in factory workers. But she couldn’t be sure that it was harmless. She knew that PCBs, for example, were mass-produced for years before studies showed that they accumulate in the food chain and cause a range of health issues, including damage to the brain. The most reliable way to gauge the safety of chemicals is to study them over time, in animals and, if possible, in humans.

Dog and cat playing chess cat swiping captured pieces onto floor.
“You can just put the captured pieces off to the side . . .”
Cartoon by Harry Bliss
Copy link to cartoon
Link copied

Shop

Open cartoon gallery
What Hansen didn’t know was that 3M had already conducted animal studies—two decades earlier. They had shown PFOS to be toxic, yet the results remained secret, even to many at the company. In one early experiment, conducted in the late seventies, a group of 3M scientists fed PFOS to rats on a daily basis. Starting at the second-lowest dose that the scientists tested, about ten milligrams for every kilogram of body weight, the rats showed signs of possible harm to their livers, and half of them died. At higher doses, every rat died. Soon afterward, 3M scientists found that a relatively low daily dose, 4.5 milligrams for every kilogram of body weight, could ki-l a monkey within weeks. (Based on this result, the chemical would currently fall into the highest of five toxicity levels recognized by the United Nations.) This daily dose of PFOS was orders of magnitude greater than the amount that the average person would ingest, but it was still relatively low—roughly comparable to the dose of aspirin in a standard tablet.

VIDEO FROM THE NEW YORKER

Textures: For Black Women, Embracing Natural Hair Is About More than Style

In 1979, an internal company report deemed PFOS “certainly more toxic than anticipated” and recommended longer-term studies. That year, 3M executives flew to San Francisco to consult Harold Hodge, a respected toxicologist. They told Hodge only part of what they knew: that PFOS had sickened and even ki-led laboratory animals, and had caused liver abnormalities in factory workers. According to a 3M document that was marked “confidential,” Hodge urged the executives to study whether the company’s fluorochemicals caused reproductive issues or cancer. After reviewing more data, he told one of them to find out whether the chemicals were present “in man,” and he added, “If the levels are high and widespread and the half-life is long, we could have a serious problem.” Yet Hodge’s warning was omitted from official meeting notes, and the company’s fluorochemical production increased over time.

Hansen’s bosses never told her that PFOS was toxic. In the weeks after Johnson left 3M, however, she felt that she was under a new level of scrutiny. One of her superiors suggested that her equipment might be contaminated, so she cleaned the mass spectrometer and then the entire lab. Her results didn’t change. Another encouraged her to repeatedly analyze her syringes, bags, and test tubes, in case they had tainted the blood. (They had not.) Her managers were less concerned about PFOS, it seemed to Hansen, than about the chance that she was wrong.

Sometimes Hansen doubted herself. She was twenty-eight and had only recently earned her Ph.D. But she continued her experiments, if only to respond to the questions of her managers. 3M bought three additional mass spectrometers, which each cost more than a car, and Hansen used them to test more blood samples. In late 1997, her new boss, Bacon, even had her fly out to the company that manufactured the machines, so that she could repeat her tests there. She studied the blood of hundreds of people, from more than a dozen blood banks in various states. Each sample contained PFOS. The chemical seemed to be everywhere.

When 3M was founded, in 1902, it was known as the Minnesota Mining and Manufacturing Company. After its mining operations flopped, the company pivoted to sandpaper, and then to a series of clever inventions aimed at improving everyday life. An early employee noticed that autoworkers were struggling to paint two-tone cars, which were popular at the time; he eventually invented masking tape, using crêpe paper and cabinetmaker’s glue. Another 3M employee created Post-it notes, to help him bookmark passages in his church hymnal. An official history of 3M, published for the company’s hundredth anniversary, celebrated its “tolerance for tinkerers.”

Fluorochemicals had their origins in the American effort to build the atomic bo-b. During the Second World War, scientists for the Manhattan Project developed one of the first safe processes for bonding carbon to fluorine, a dangerously reactive element that experts had nicknamed “the wildest hellcat” of chemistry. After the war, 3M hired some Manhattan Project chemists and began mass-producing chains of carbon atoms bonded to fluorine atoms. The resulting chemicals proved to be astonishingly versatile, in part because they resist oil, water, and heat. They are also incredibly long-lasting, earning them the moniker “forever chemicals.”

I believe this might be the same article just in a different publication.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/toxic-gaslighting-how-3m-executives-convinced-a-scientist-the-forever-chemicals-she-found-in-human-blood-were-safe/ar-BB1mHMDl?ocid=msedgdhp&pc=LCTS&cvid=6765b94898e84b38ac1e538dc65eaf1f&ei=19

Can some kind soul paste the full text? Thanks

It is a fascinating read!

Long interesting read. I remember the day back in 2000 when my supervisor entered my production room and put some red tape on the valves of the chlorinated solvent line used to make scotch guard and fire fighting foam and instructed me not to use it. I have had liver issues too.