Washington has become the first state in the nation to ban nonstick chemicals in food packaging that have been linked to serious health problems and are showing up in the water supplies of many states.
Democratic Gov. Jay Inslee in March signed a bill into law that will phase out perfluoroalkyl and polyfluoroalkyl substances, or PFAs, in food packaging such as popcorn bags and burger wrappers.
The law, introduced by Democratic Rep. Joan McBride, requires that starting in January 2022, every food product sold in Washington — whether it be at fast-food restaurants, grocery stores, or any other retailer — must be packaged in materials that do not include perfluorinated chemicals. The state’s department of ecology will have to determine by January 2020 if a safer alternative can be found or if it needs to keep searching.
Dr. Sheela Sathyanarayana, a pediatrician at Seattle Children’s Hospital who specializes in environmental health, said the chemicals can cause serious problems. They do not automatically break down while passing through the body’s digestive system because they are resistant to oil, grease, and water.
“They persist in biological systems including the human body for long periods of time. This means they have the potential to affect your health over many years,” Sathyanarayana, associate professor of pediatrics and adjunct at the University of Washington’s Department of Environmental and Occupational Health Sciences, wrote in an email. “I think the health effects that are most likely to be seen are the non-cancer health effects (increased cholesterol, lower birth weight babies, thyroid problems) because they are more common in the population, and cancer is rare. One thing to remember is that these chemicals don’t cause cancer alone — they are one contributor to a mix of factors that predict cancer.”
The Food and Drug Administration in 2008 found that the chemicals have the ability to travel through air or food into the human body, where it is not absorbed and processed like food.
Last year, the Environmental Working Group worked with scientists to test fast food wrappers. They found that 40 percent of wrappers tested positive for the chemicals.
The Environmental Protection Agency last month called for a nationwide summit in May to address the chemicals.
“EPA’s leadership summit will bring together stakeholders from across the country to build on the steps we are already taking and to identify immediate actions to protect public health,” EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt said in announcing the two-day meeting.
Other states also are looking to deal with the chemicals. Half a dozen states have introduced legislation following Washington’s, include California, New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, and Vermont.
However, the majority of states are waiting for the EPA.
“Many states cannot take action on PFAS [perfluoroalkyl and polyfluoroalkyl substances] issues until EPA makes a regulatory determination, and all states would like to see continued federal research and leadership in this area,” the executive director of the Environmental Council of the States council’s executive director, Sambhav Sankar, told the Washington Examiner in March. The council is the main trade group representing state environmental regulators.
However, the chemical industry says that new versions of the chemicals are safer. FluoroCouncil, an industry group that opposed the Washington bill, said the Environmental Working Group’s study did not test for newer PFAs that don’t pose the same threat as older versions.
“Without further examination of the data, it’s impossible to draw any definitive conclusions about the nature and source of the compounds that were detected in this particular study,” the group said in a February statement. “It is important to note, however, that the major manufacturers of fluorinated chemistries in the U.S., [European Union] and Japan have stopped manufacturing the older, long-chain fluorinated chemistries, such as PFOA and PFOS, which have been the chemicals of concern to regulators.”
Meanwhile, food companies complying with Washington’s ban may force the issue by changing their packaging nationwide to keep their costs down.
“In order to comply with the new law, food companies that want to sell their products in Washington state will have to use packaging that uses safe, non-toxic, chemicals,” Amit Narang, regulatory policy advocate for Public Citizen’s Congress Watch arm, wrote in an email. “That could lead to a ‘race to the top’ where food companies decide to use safer packaging across the country instead of different packaging for different state safety standards that could end up proving more expensive for those companies.”
