RonZeplin
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The U.S. Military Plans to Keep Incinerating Toxic Firefighting Foam, Despite Health Risks
The U.S. military plans to incinerate unused firefighting foam containing hazardous chemicals, even with the health and environmental risks this poses.
The U.S. military is moving ahead with plans to collect and destroy unused firefighting foam that contains the hazardous chemicals PFOS and PFOA. But in trying to solve one environmental problem related to these persistent chemicals, which have caused massive drinking water contamination, the Defense Department may be creating another.
More than 3 million gallons of the foam and related waste have been retrieved from U.S. Navy, Marine Corps, National Guard, Army, and Air Force bases around the world. Now the question is what to do with them. Known as aqueous film-forming foam, or AFFF, it was originally created to put out jet fuel fires. AFFF is flame-resistant by design and contains PFAS chemicals, such as PFOA and PFOS, which cause a wide range of health problems and last indefinitely in the environment.
For decades, the military has been using AFFF to put out fires and to train military firefighters; that training involved spraying the foam onto blazes that were purposefully set in pits, many of which were unlined. From there, PFOS, PFOA, and other chemicals in their class seeped into groundwater in and around U.S. military bases at home and abroad.
Because of environmental concerns about the chemicals, which are associated with kidney cancer, testicular cancer, immune dysfunction, and many other health problems, the Air Force decided in 2016 to stop using foam that contained PFOA and PFOS, and began replacing the foam at installations worldwide. Unfortunately, as The Intercept reported last year, the new foam contains only slightly tweaked versions of the same problematic compounds, so it is likely to present many of the same health and environmental risks.
For the Air Force, the question of how best to dispose of the old foam comes too late. In January 2017, a waste disposal company hired by the Defense Department began incinerating more than 1 million gallons of the foam and AFFF-contaminated water that had been collected from Air Force bases around the country. According to the contract, the incineration was to be complete by this month.
But that leaves more than 2 million gallons of foam and contaminated water from other branches of the military, as well as unknown quantities possessed by nonmilitary airports and firefighters, which some states have recently begun to collect.
Dangerous Byproducts
Although incineration is the military’s chosen disposal method, there has been little research on the safety of burning the foam. Two studies concluded that the incineration of PFAS chemicals would not be a source of further contamination, but both were funded by companies with a vested interest in making the problem go away. The first study was funded by DuPont, which used PFOA in the production of Teflon. The second was funded by 3M, which developed AFFF in partnership with the Navy in the 1960s and was the military’s exclusive supplier of AFFF for decades.
But some of the scant research on the topic suggests that incineration may not fully destroy PFAS. After PCBs were found in chicken eggs laid near an incinerator, a 2018 study determined that PFOA was released into the air by a municipal incinerator in the Netherlands. The author concluded that “modern incinerators cannot fully destroy” PFOA, PCBs, and other persistent chemicals.
The Air Force itself acknowledged in a 2017 document that the foam, which was designed to resist extremely high temperatures, is hard to burn and that “the high-temperature chemistry of PFOS and PFOA has not been characterized, so there is no precedent to predict products of pyrolysis or combustion, temperatures at which these will occur, or the extent of destruction that will be realized.”
Even more concerning, “environmentally unsatisfactory” byproducts may be created by incinerating the foam. Among the highly toxic byproducts of PFAS incineration are hydrofluoric acid, which burns human skin on contact; perfluoroisobutylene, a chemical that so reliably kills people within hours of being inhaled that it’s been used as a warfare agent; as well as dioxins and furans, which cause cancer.
Unfortunately, by the time the Air Force acknowledged the serious potential dangers of incinerating the firefighting foam, it had already burned much of its AFFF stockpile.
In November 2018, the Defense Department entered into two contracts with Tradebe, an Indiana-based company, to incinerate more than 1 million gallons of stockpiled foam that had been collected from the Army, Navy, National Guard, and Marine installations in Italy, Spain, Bahrain, Greece, Romania, Japan, Korea, Cuba, Djibouti, and the U.S. But that foam has yet to be incinerated, according to Edith Terolli, a Tradebe spokesperson.
The Defense Department “has issued no service orders to Tradebe under either of the contracts,” Terolli wrote in a statement to The Intercept. “If DLA [the Defense Logistics Agency] issues a service order, Tradebe can ensure that all management practices will be conducted in full compliance with and on the basis of established regulations. Tradebe’s priority is safety and the protection of people and the environment.”
According to the Defense Department’s Logistics Agency, the AFFF will be sent to five or six hazardous waste incinerators.
A Heritage Thermal Services incinerator spews smoke from its smokestack close to nearby homes on Feb. 25, 2003, in East Liverpool, Ohio.
Photo: Tony Dejak/AP
A History of Violations
https://theintercept.com/2019/01/27/toxic-firefighting-foam-pfas-pfoa/
The U.S. military plans to incinerate unused firefighting foam containing hazardous chemicals, even with the health and environmental risks this poses.
The U.S. military is moving ahead with plans to collect and destroy unused firefighting foam that contains the hazardous chemicals PFOS and PFOA. But in trying to solve one environmental problem related to these persistent chemicals, which have caused massive drinking water contamination, the Defense Department may be creating another.
More than 3 million gallons of the foam and related waste have been retrieved from U.S. Navy, Marine Corps, National Guard, Army, and Air Force bases around the world. Now the question is what to do with them. Known as aqueous film-forming foam, or AFFF, it was originally created to put out jet fuel fires. AFFF is flame-resistant by design and contains PFAS chemicals, such as PFOA and PFOS, which cause a wide range of health problems and last indefinitely in the environment.
For decades, the military has been using AFFF to put out fires and to train military firefighters; that training involved spraying the foam onto blazes that were purposefully set in pits, many of which were unlined. From there, PFOS, PFOA, and other chemicals in their class seeped into groundwater in and around U.S. military bases at home and abroad.
Because of environmental concerns about the chemicals, which are associated with kidney cancer, testicular cancer, immune dysfunction, and many other health problems, the Air Force decided in 2016 to stop using foam that contained PFOA and PFOS, and began replacing the foam at installations worldwide. Unfortunately, as The Intercept reported last year, the new foam contains only slightly tweaked versions of the same problematic compounds, so it is likely to present many of the same health and environmental risks.
For the Air Force, the question of how best to dispose of the old foam comes too late. In January 2017, a waste disposal company hired by the Defense Department began incinerating more than 1 million gallons of the foam and AFFF-contaminated water that had been collected from Air Force bases around the country. According to the contract, the incineration was to be complete by this month.
But that leaves more than 2 million gallons of foam and contaminated water from other branches of the military, as well as unknown quantities possessed by nonmilitary airports and firefighters, which some states have recently begun to collect.
Dangerous Byproducts
Although incineration is the military’s chosen disposal method, there has been little research on the safety of burning the foam. Two studies concluded that the incineration of PFAS chemicals would not be a source of further contamination, but both were funded by companies with a vested interest in making the problem go away. The first study was funded by DuPont, which used PFOA in the production of Teflon. The second was funded by 3M, which developed AFFF in partnership with the Navy in the 1960s and was the military’s exclusive supplier of AFFF for decades.
But some of the scant research on the topic suggests that incineration may not fully destroy PFAS. After PCBs were found in chicken eggs laid near an incinerator, a 2018 study determined that PFOA was released into the air by a municipal incinerator in the Netherlands. The author concluded that “modern incinerators cannot fully destroy” PFOA, PCBs, and other persistent chemicals.
The Air Force itself acknowledged in a 2017 document that the foam, which was designed to resist extremely high temperatures, is hard to burn and that “the high-temperature chemistry of PFOS and PFOA has not been characterized, so there is no precedent to predict products of pyrolysis or combustion, temperatures at which these will occur, or the extent of destruction that will be realized.”
Even more concerning, “environmentally unsatisfactory” byproducts may be created by incinerating the foam. Among the highly toxic byproducts of PFAS incineration are hydrofluoric acid, which burns human skin on contact; perfluoroisobutylene, a chemical that so reliably kills people within hours of being inhaled that it’s been used as a warfare agent; as well as dioxins and furans, which cause cancer.
Unfortunately, by the time the Air Force acknowledged the serious potential dangers of incinerating the firefighting foam, it had already burned much of its AFFF stockpile.
In November 2018, the Defense Department entered into two contracts with Tradebe, an Indiana-based company, to incinerate more than 1 million gallons of stockpiled foam that had been collected from the Army, Navy, National Guard, and Marine installations in Italy, Spain, Bahrain, Greece, Romania, Japan, Korea, Cuba, Djibouti, and the U.S. But that foam has yet to be incinerated, according to Edith Terolli, a Tradebe spokesperson.
The Defense Department “has issued no service orders to Tradebe under either of the contracts,” Terolli wrote in a statement to The Intercept. “If DLA [the Defense Logistics Agency] issues a service order, Tradebe can ensure that all management practices will be conducted in full compliance with and on the basis of established regulations. Tradebe’s priority is safety and the protection of people and the environment.”
According to the Defense Department’s Logistics Agency, the AFFF will be sent to five or six hazardous waste incinerators.
A Heritage Thermal Services incinerator spews smoke from its smokestack close to nearby homes on Feb. 25, 2003, in East Liverpool, Ohio.
Photo: Tony Dejak/AP
A History of Violations
https://theintercept.com/2019/01/27/toxic-firefighting-foam-pfas-pfoa/
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