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At my house, there’s a drawer down in the basement, next to the laundry, full of bottles that I don’t think about very often.

Just going to do this live. I have no idea what’s in this drawer.

It’s the “gear care” drawer, and it’s where I throw the rest of each bottle after I finish re-waterproofing my waterproof gear. Generally once every other winter.

Boot care waterproofing for nubuck, fabric, and suede.

I live in one of the rainier parts of the country, and there’s a weird cultural thing here where no one uses an umbrella. So I’ve got a lot of rain jackets. There’s the cheap rain jacket I run in, my lightweight, emergency rain layer that lives at the bottom of my pack, my “nice” rain jacket that’s super waterproof, and my “working in the yard” rain jacket that’s super durable.

It’s kind of like how arctic cultures have so many different words for snow. Except instead of words, they’re waterproof layers. But it seems like every piece of gear requires a very different kind of waterproof treatment. So my “gear care” drawer is really full. I have special detergents for my Arcteryx,

…technical detergent.

I have a wax compound that I rub directly onto my Danner boots.

…contains no fluorocarbons.

And then a kaleidoscope of products for washing-in, spraying-on, and revitalizing the water repellency of many different fabrics.

And until I started working on this episode, I had no idea what was in any of them.

…contains fluoropolymer emulsion…

And it turns out, what’s in them might be kind of nasty.

…prolonged exposure may be harmful…

Nasty enough that next year, several different states and major retailers will be making many of these products illegal. They’ve been regulated in Europe since 2009.

The problem is something called PFAS. Also known as “forever chemicals” they are the chemical solution to the problem of how to stay dry. It’s what most waterproof breathable membranes—like Gore-Tex—are made out of. They’re also in the treatment sprays that make the rain bead up all pretty on your raincoat.

But they’ve been linked to all sorts of health problems and if they ever break down and biodegrade, it’s not on a timescale that’s relevant to humanity. .

So the outdoor industry is facing a huge challenge. A number of states and retailers are banning PFAS, which means outdoor companies have to figure out how to replace them.

Producer Aaron Scott has been looking into this for us and has this story of how one company replaced these chemicals, and why maybe these things never needed to be so waterproof to begin with. Here’s Aaron.

Aaron Scott: Arlene Blum still remembers when the idea of breathable waterproof gear popped onto her radar.

Arlene Blum: When I went on expeditions in the 70s, um, I knew Bill Gore, who was a very nice guy, who would give us all this free gear with this new product called Gore-Tex.

Aaron: At the time, Arlene was a trailblazing mountaineer, taking on the world’s biggest peaks. Like Denali, in Alaska, in 1970.

Arlene: I wanted to go on a guided climb with my climbing friends who were guys and they told me women could go as far as base camp and help with the cooking  because they weren't, because they weren't physically strong enough or emotionally stable enough to climb Denali.

So, um, so I organized an all women's expedition.

Aaron: She was 25 when she not only summited Denali, but conducted one of the first high altitude rescues, bringing a climber down on a stretcher. Then in 1976, she was the first American woman to attempt Everest. And in 1978, she led the first American ascent of Annapurna. Also, all women. They raised money selling t-shirts that said "A woman's place is on top."

And all these mountains? She climbed them wearing things like coated nylon jackets and rubber boots with laces up the front, known as bunny boots.

Arlene:We climbed Denali and Everest and things before there was much Gore-Tex around. And even when it was introduced, we preferred not using it in the beginning.

Aaron: Why not Gore-Tex? Well, it didn’t really work at first.

Arlene: We would call it upside down cloth, because we joked that when you had a Gore-Tex jacket, the sweat stayed in and the rain came in. But, that was in the beginning and it got better and now the sweat goes out and the rain stays out.

Aaron: Over the years, Arlene, along with most of the mountaineering community, came to rely on Gore-Tex and other waterproof membranes and treatments. And not just folks climbing the world’s tallest peaks. It’s all of us. If you listen to this show, chances are your closet is full of jackets and gear with water repellent treatments or waterproof membranes. I know mine is.

The reason these materials are so effective at keeping water out mainly comes down to the properties of one family of chemicals: PFAS, or per and polyfluoroalkyl substances.

Arlene: They're all synthetic. That means man made. They have great properties, uh, for stain repellency, water repellency.

Aaron: Turns out, Arlene is not only a trailblazing mountaineer, she is also a trailblazing chemist. So she understands what makes these waterproof materials so extraordinary.

Arlene: The unique thing about PFAS is the carbon fluorine bond. It's the strongest bond in the periodic table.

Aaron: You would need a lot of organic chemistry for a complete picture of the carbon fluorine bond, but the gist of it is that fluorine wants electrons and carbon has electrons. So these two things stick together really, really tightly. It’s this super tight bond that makes them so slippery and repellant. Nothing gets in. Which is why PFAS compounds earned the nickname "forever chemicals."

Arlene: It practically takes the energy of lightning to break that bond. So once you have major PFAS, it's in the world forever.

Aaron: PFAS were created in the 1930s. But it wasn’t until the 1950s that the chemical giants DuPont and 3M realized that they were perfect for making things nonstick, waterproof, and stain resistant.

Ad 1: Even burned food won’t stick to Teflon.

Ad 2: Then there was Teflon, easy-clean no-stick Teflon.

Ad 3: It keeps ordinary spills from becoming extraordinary stains.

Aaron: Things like Teflon and Scotchguard were seen as wonders of science. And as tends to happen in America, when we find something we like, we go all out. We put it in everything.

Arlene: They have been used a lot on textiles. Uh, Ski Wax that are really slippery and slidy tend to have PFAS. Um, they have been used a lot on carpets and furniture, clothing.

Aaron: Also, dental floss, fast food wrappers, and the rinse aid stuff that you add to your dishwasher.

Chemicals used in consumer goods are  kind of Arlene’s thing. While she was climbing all those mountains in the 1970s, she was also making a name for herself with research proving a flame retardant used in children’s pajamas could lead to cancer. Her work led to that chemical being banned.

So when she learned in 2008 that the flame retardant was back in use in furniture and baby products, she started an organization called the Green Science Policy Institute. The group's goal is to get toxic chemicals out of consumer goods. But PFAS didn't register as a concern for her until 2013.

Arlene: I was trekking in Nepal with a Swedish chemist who studied PFAS, and I was reading a book called "Stain Repellent, Waterproof, and Lethal: the story of C8," which told the story, uh, the same story that's told in Dark Waters, that wonderful movie.

Aaron: The movie Dark Waters came out in 2019. It stars Mark Ruffalo and tells the real-life story of the lawyer Robert Bilott. He spent more than 20 years taking on the chemical giant Dupont over its use of a type of PFAS called C8, in Teflon and other products. His case led to one of the largest health studies in US history. This is the scene where, after waiting for years, after almost giving up, he finally hears the results over the phone.

Dark Water Clip: It’s irrefutable. We’ve linked sustained exposure to C8 to six categories of illness. Kidney cancer, testicular cancer, thyroid disease, preeclampsia, high cholesterol, ulcerative colitis. 3,500 people in the class already have these diseases. Many more will develop them.

Aaron: The outcry over Teflon being toxic led the US to phase out the two types of PFAS chemicals used to make it, PFOA and PFOS. Dupont, for its part, replaced them with other PFAS chemicals that it said were safe. Word for the wise here: if you see on a package that something doesn’t contain PFOA or PFOS specifically, but it doesn’t say “no PFAS,” you can generally assume there’s another form of PFAS in it.

Arlene: And so I was reading the book and I, I was incredulous, but my friend who was a PFAS scientist said, ‘Oh yes, we all know how bad it is. And we all know it's out in the world and, and we all know nothing's being done.’ So in 2013, we started a call, which has been once a month ever since then for over 10 years, of the best scientists in the world. And we called it the Science and Policy of PFAS.

Aaron: They started doing research and publishing papers. The big C8 study mentioned in Dark Waters found strong evidence that PFOA and PFOS caused all sorts of problems: liver, kidney and thyroid disease, testicular cancer, hormone disruption, decreased fertility, increased cholesterol.

It’s like there’s not an organ the substances don’t affect. The industry said the newer PFAS were safe. The trouble is, they’re also industry secrets. We often don’t know which company uses which ones, and there are simply a ton of them.

Jamie Dewitt: To our knowledge, there are well over 14,000 individual chemicals that we call PFAS. And out of that huge list of individual chemicals, we've really only studied a handful of them.

Aaron: This is Jamie Dewitt. She’s a professor of environmental and molecular toxicology at Oregon State University and the director of the Pacific Northwest Center for Translational Environmental Health Research.  She’s co-written several research papers with Arlene. I called her up to get a sense of how PFAS cause all these health problems, and she says they have different effects on different organs.

Jamie: Our body thinks that they look like fatty acids, which are nutrients that we need.  And so some parts of our bodies try to treat them like they're fatty acids. So in the liver, they interact with some receptors that have impacts on our metabolism.

Aaron: Some studies have found this disruption in the liver leads to things like non-alcoholic fatty liver disease.

Jamie: In the kidney, for example, as they go to get excreted, the kidneys seem to like them. So they get taken back up into the body. That's one of the reasons they have such long half lives in the bodies of humans. And then in other organs, it seems like they can cross membranes and maybe cause problems with membranes by damaging membranes.

Aaron: There’s evidence they cross membranes into the brain, and into developing fetuses, and into nursing babies through breastmilk.

Jamie: So scientists are still working very hard to figure out the molecular ways that PFAS affects different cells.

Aaron: What research has been done on newer PFAS molecules has been mixed. Some studies have found similar harmful effects to PFOA and PFOS. Some studies haven’t. Some studies have found newer alternatives are worse. For example, a chemical dubbed GenX is even than the early forms of PFAS.

And this all leads to the fear among scientists of what’s called regrettable substitution. It’s this fear that companies might be replacing one harmful form of PFAS with an even more harmful version.

What we know is that all PFAS share several concerning traits. They are long lasting, they are mobile, which is to say they move around easily in the environment and in our bodies, and they build up in living organisms, both humans and other animals.

What we is: which ones, if any, are safe, at what level different PFAS cause harm, and what happens when different PFAS combine in our bodies. So scientists like Jamie and Arlene are recommending we treat them all as a group, and the government is starting to take that approach.

Jamie: The US EPA has taken a mixtures based approach for one of its proposed maximum contaminant levels under the Safe Drinking Water Act, and that's for four different PFAS, because these four likely co-occur together. And they produce a suite of health effects that likely arise from similar actions on the body. But for all of the other PFAS in the environment, we still really don't know how they interact while they're within our bodies.

Aaron: But we do know that they’re in the environment. After decades of being manufactured, used, and dumped across the world, PFAS are now pretty much everywhere. They’re in nearly . They’re in the soil. They’ve been found in the deepest ocean trenches and on the top of .

And they’re in most of us, too. The Center for Disease Control and Prevention has found four of the most widely studied PFAS chemicals in the of nearly everyone it has tested.

As all this research started to build up, Arlene and the other scientists started sharing it with different industries. They had a lot of success getting carpet manufacturers and retailers to remove PFAS from carpeting. And they found certain individual companies like IKEA to be very receptive.

Arlene: They said, we want to stop the use and we're going to find alternatives. And in less than a year, by 2015, IKEA reported that they had found substitutes for raincoats, umbrellas, shower curtains, other treatments that they could use to make them waterproof.

Aaron: But the outdoor industry—Arlene's people—our people—they were a different story. They got rid of PFOA and PFOS early on, but the rest of the chemicals?

Arlene: So I got in touch with the sustainability people for the outdoor industry. And they said, well, we know it's bad, but you know, we really don't want to hear about it unless you can come up with good substitutes.

Aaron: Arlene’s response was “it’s not my job to offer substitutes.” My job is pointing out dangerous chemicals in our clothing and gear. Your job is figuring out safe alternatives.

Arlene: And I said, if you say that you're not going to use it anymore, there will be substitutes.  And, uh, they really didn't want to hear from me because I used to give talks about mountain climbing at the outdoor industry, at some of the outdoor companies. And when I started talking about PFAS, they stopped inviting me. They did not want me to publicly tell the outdoor industry that there were problems with PFAS.

Aaron: After the break, a small outdoor footwear company tries to figure out what it would actually take to get PFAS out of their products. And it turns out, “forever chemicals” is an awfully good name for these things.

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Aaron: When Arlene Blum started spreading the message that the chemicals in waterproof gear could make people sick, most outdoor companies tried to avoid eye contact. They pulled their head down into their figurative sleeping bags and hoped the problem went away.

There was one brand, however, that started to pay attention. A small, family-owned shoe company named Keen. You probably know Keen for the Newport Sandal. It covers your toes like a shoe, and most people either think it's ugly, or it’s so ugly it’s beautiful.

Even Keen describes it like this:

Keen Ad: The world’s ugliest sandal, the Keen Newport.

Aaron: Keen now makes all sorts of sandals, both ugly and pretty, plus hiking shoes, running shoes, and work boots. One of the company’s core missions is to quote unquote “create consciously.” Y’know, be environmentally and socially responsible. It’s the kind of place where the headquarters are full of salvaged and repurposed materials, which is actually the first thing I noticed when I went there to meet Kirsten Blackburn.

Kirsten Blackburn: We purchased this building, there’s a dog, dogs are welcome, I don’t know, 2015, Had contractors who basically were challenged to repurpose the entire building using less than one dumpster worth of waste. These tables that we're looking at used to be pieces of floor. You'll see old oil drums and chemical drums that have been transformed into couches.

Aaron: Kirsten heads up Keen’s sustainability and social responsibility efforts. Which means she spends a lot of time thinking about PFAS.

Kirsten: And we had started to sort of hear about them, but no one really understood where, where they were in footwear manufacturing or what the effects were, you know. There wasn't much information really. But when they started doing more research, learn how bad they were. And so 2014, um, we sort of begin our detox journey, as we call it.

Aaron: So, how to get rid of forever chemicals, in five not-so-easy steps. Step one, figure out where the forever chemicals are.

Kirsten: We did an in depth analysis of all the styles that comprised about 90 percent of our output and checked every single component of every single style to under, to test for it basically. And it was in like a hundred and five places. And that blew our minds right? Like unknowingly, hadn't asked for it, but it was there.

Aaron: You might not think about it, but there are a lot of bits that go into a single shoe. Kirsten holds up a waterproof hiking shoe to show me.

Kirsten: Just in the upper there's probably 70 different materials. You can see thread, you can see leather, you can see mesh. It's endless, basically. And it's kind of like a sandwich. There's so many hidden components. There's, you know, a toe box reinforcer that you can't see, that's in between the Keen dry membrane and the upper outsole.

Aaron: Their tests revealed that PFAS wasn't just in the spots where you'd expect it, like the outer surface of the shoe that had been treated with a water repellant. it was in some two-thirds of the components. Which raised the question, did it need to be there?

Kirsten: We don't need any sort of dirt, water, stain repellency on our laces. We certainly don't need it, you know, in the toe box reinforcer that's covered by, you know, leather or some sort of other material. Like, these things, these, these things that are in the middle of the sandwich, they certainly don't need any sort of durable water repellency because they're not exposed to that element.

Aaron: You know what else doesn't need to be water repellant? Water sandals.

Kirsten: PFAS had been sort of unknowingly being applied to the webbing of our water sandals.

Aaron: So the webbing stays dry while the rest of your foot, you know, gets totally wet because it is a water sandal.

Kirsten: So that was sort of an easy solve. And it actually might be a cost savings, right?

Which brings us to step two, eliminate water repellent chemicals where you don’t need them.

Kirsten: So we, you know, consulted with organizations and individuals like Arlene Bloom, and she, you know, enlightened us to the precautionary principle, which is only use what you need. And so that's where we decided there are many, many, many places, like 60 percent of the places where we found PFAS, we just didn't need any DWR, any water repellency or dust particle repellency technology at all. So we just stopped using it there.

Aaron: Sounds simple, right? It wasn't.

Suppliers were used to using PFAS in all their products, and they didn’t want to switch the recipe for just this one small company. Eventually, Keen had to come up with what's called a restricted substances list, or RSL.

Kirsten: We went back to the supplier and we said, if you would like to continue to do business with Keen, you can no longer have this chemical in your material.

Aaron: But it wasn’t just one supplier. It was hundreds of them, spread all across the globe. While it might take a village to raise a child, it takes a world to make a shoe.

Kirsten: I’m holding up the Targhee-IV, you can’t see it, but it’s our most sustainably made hiker and it has hundreds of components. Each component likely has a different supplier. Each. You know, so maybe they're in the same country, maybe they're not in the same country. So that's, at a minimum, a hundred different individuals or suppliers that we're contacting to comply with our RSL and chemical management policy.

Aaron: So they required their suppliers to stop applying PFAS to all these unnecessary components. But they didn’t just take the suppliers’ word for it. They tested the materials. And PFAS kept turning up.

So where was it coming from? Were companies lying about getting rid of it? Not necessarily. It turns out PFAS wasn’t just applied to the materials, it was also applied to the machines. It was sprayed onto molds for the shoe and sandal soles like PAM is sprayed onto a waffle machine. So even if the supplier didn't intentionally apply it to the product, it found a way to sneak aboard.

Kirsten: So yeah, it was super challenging. I think because, because it's everywhere, because the industry and not just footwear, really everyone has just started using it for, for everything. It was, it was, it was like a full court press.

Aaron: But what about the places where you do need to keep out water? That brings us to step three, find and test alternative water repellent treatments.

And here, Keen got lucky. In 2007, the company had developed a proprietary waterproof membrane they named Keen Dry, using a type of plastic called polyurethane. And they discovered that, of all things, it did not contain PFAS, so they could keep using it to line their waterproof shoes.

But they did need a new durable water repellent. This is the surface treatment that’s applied to waterproof or water resistant gear. And while they found alternative chemicals to PFAS, it turned out there was no perfect one for one swap.

That’s because some water repellents would work great on one material, like say mesh, but then change the color of another material, like say a leather. Or some of the other alternatives just didn’t work so great. So it turned out they had to work with every supplier to find the right chemical for their component.

Kirsten: Certainly when we identified alternatives that met our safe, effective, affordable criteria, we had to test them.

Aaron: First, the lab tests. They began by submerging a shoe into water, let it sit for several hours, and then made sure no water passed through. Then they flexed the shoe 50,000 times, to mimic daily wear, and put it back in the water to make sure it’s still waterproof. Finally, they asked a couple dozen backpackers to wear test shoes as they hiked the Pacific Crest Trail and then to report back. The final word: the new water repellent and waterproof treatments stood up to the elements.

So in 2018, Keen declared a quiet victory.

Kirsten: Starting the journey to PFAS-free it took, you know, four years, I think 11,000 hours, over a million dollars invested, and I think as a result we've diverted 180 tons of PFAS chemicals from being used in our products.

Aaron: Which means success, right?

Not quite. Because step four is stay vigilant.

Kirsten: Fast forward to 2022. We're still finding trace amounts of PFAS in our, in our products, and we're all scratching our heads, like, where is this coming from? So we did some digging and, um, you know, went back and tested individual components and they were passing. And then we, someone, I don't even know who, decided that we might think about expanding our search and we found that there was PFAS applied to shipping receipts. And so, you know, when you're, when you print something on a piece of paper, you don't want the ink to smudge. You especially don't want it to smudge on a pair of shoes that just, that's just been made. And so a PFAS application was being applied to the shipping receipts and it was rubbing off on the shoes.

You can never eliminate it entirely. It's everywhere. It's in the shipping containers. It's in the, you know, it could, it could brush past something on the way out of a facility and be contaminated. So PFAS free is asterisked. Like nothing can ever be net free. So we still have a line item in our budget for restricted substances list testing and it will never go away.

Aaron: Which brings us to step five, spread the word.

In 2020, Kirsten and company wrote what they called a green paper, basically an instruction manual that they titled the Road to PFAS Free.

Kirsten: and with that we put an ad in the New York Times. Solomon had just said that they were PFAS free. We congratulated Solomon on joining the PFAS free club, and we basically published a link to our green paper and said Anyone else who wants to do this? " Here's how you do it. Even shares the alternatives that we used.

Aaron: That is, the water repellant chemicals that don't contain PFAS.

Kirsten: Um, and we want people to use it, because we're all on the same team here, right?

There are certainly more PFAS free alternatives available now than there were when we started this journey eight years ago. I think manufacturers now know that they don't need it, but the reality is there's 24 billion pairs of shoes made every year. So if one, you know, mid sized footwear company is demanding this change and that's all that is, really, it's a drop in the bucket. So we need sort of this, this tidal wave effect of everybody holding hands and saying, not needed, don't use it. This is a problem that we need to address.

Aaron: I'd like to say the rest of the industry eagerly jumped into action. Many smaller companies did. But not everyone. In 2022, several national nonprofits published a report grading the PFAS policies and commitments of 30 of the biggest U.S.-based apparel and footwear brands. Indoor apparel companies did best. Levi's got an A+, Victoria's Secret got an A-, and a number of other clothing brands got Bs. In footwear, Keen got an A-, and Deckers, which makes Ugg and Teva, also got an A-.

Outdoor apparel was a different story. Patagonia got a B.

But Otherwise? Detentions all around. LL Bean got a D. The corporation that makes North Face and Timberland got a D. Columbia Sportswear, REI, and a bunch of others got Fs.

All that said, the increased awareness did get the attention of consumer and environmental advocates, who started nationwide pressure campaigns and class action lawsuits.

James Pollack: Yeah I think there are multiple factors involved.

Aaron: James Pollack is a senior associate at the environmental law firm, Martin Law. He’s written a book about PFAS and works both on litigation to clean up PFAS in water sources, and with a lot of outdoor companies to help them meet PFAS regulations.

James Pollack: There have been some lawsuits filed targeting apparel manufacturers. There is a growing risk of litigation.

Aaron: In fact, W.L. Gore & Associates, the maker of Gore-Tex, is currently facing a class action lawsuit accusing it of many of the same practices as Dupont, which is where Bill Gore worked when he first invented the material behind Gore-Tex. The case alleges the company knew that its manufacturing plants were poisoning employees and the ground water of neighboring properties.

The state of Maryland is now investigating and has extremely elevated levels of PFOA in some neighboring wells. We should add Gore phased out the chemical PFOA in 2015 and is currently in the process of introducing a free of all PFAS chemicals, although it still uses them in other products.

Not surprisingly, these are the sorts of lawsuits and campaigns that catch the ear of legislators.

James: The regulatory environment is certainly changing. We're seeing regulations at the state and federal level targeting the use of PFAS in products including in the outdoor industry.

Aaron: States across the country are introducing a range of PFAS bans, targeting everything from cosmetics to fast food wrappers. You can track your own state at saferstate.org.

James: I think the biggest set of deadlines that people are looking at are California and New York. Those two states have regulations targeting in California it's textile articles, in New York it's apparel. And those regulations require the phase out of PFAS in those product categories by January 1st, 2025.

Aaron: James says these looming deadlines are a huge challenge for the industry. After all, Keen took four years to remove PFAS, and these deadlines are now less than a year away.

James: folks are working to innovate their way out of this, to design their way out of this, to inventory manage out of this.

Aaron: Retailers are also trying to navigate the challenge. The gorilla in the industry, REI, announced it will prohibit PFAS in pretty much everything except expedition-level gear, beginning this fall. Which raises the next challenge, many of the PFAS alternatives behave differently.

James: Some of them are better in certain circumstances than others. For instance, some may work better in the cold or some may work better in submerged environments versus rain falling. And some may work better on certain materials than others. What it's going to require is more creativity and more experimentation.

Aaron: So what is that going to mean for your gear? For some things, You’ll see new care instructions.

James: I bought my first PFAS-free raincoat just a few months ago before I moved to Seattle and when I was at the checkout the retailer actually asked me, “hey, have you heard of PFAS?” I didn't tell him that I happen to know a lot and have written a book on the subject. And so I told him “oh no I have no idea, could you tell me more?” And he said, “yeah this is part of our brand's transition away from PFAS chemicals but just know that you're going to have to take care of this garment in order to make sure that it protects you.” And he said one of the key points for this particular replacement is to dry it, which I wouldn't have thought of, I didn't realize that, but he said putting it into the dryer is a really important part of keeping this new fabric treatment on the fabric.

Aaron: For some items, like raincoats, you’re going to have to wash them and reapply water repellents like Nikwax more often.

James: I will say that this experience has really changed my personal relationship to my gear and about what I expect from my gear. I'm a lawyer. I work in Seattle. When I'm commuting to work I don't need to wear the most waterproof jacket on the market. It's really fun for me to imagine that I'm hiking in the Hoh Rainforest. But the reality is that I'm not. I'm walking to my office building.

Aaron: On the very slight chance that you are planning on climbing Everest sometime soon, most of the bans are currently allowing a loophole for technical gear to keep using PFAS, at least for a little longer while replacements are developed.

James: I think that ultimately it comes down to this transition that we're going to be having around our products and the relationship that we have with those products. I'm going to need to take care of the jacket that I have in order to make sure that it protects me going forward. I think that tradeoff is worth it if it means that we have healthier workers, we have a healthier environment, and that we are able to keep this stuff out of our water and air. I think those are tradeoffs that make sense to me.

Aaron: So, Does this mean you should throw out all your old gear? Everyone I spoke with said, not necessarily. If the gear’s in good shape and doesn’t sit against your skin, the risk of absorbing PFAS is low. But if the coating or material is starting to break down, the PFAS could be flaking off, and that’s when you might want to look at retiring your gear.

Because when you think about it, our gear, all of our stuff, they’re designed to last for thousands of years. Neither are we. So we don’t need a waterproof chemical to last that long, either. Ultimately, this new evolution in waterproofing technology comes down to the fact that for decades, our rain gear has been overengineered.

It’s so waterproof, it’s bad for us. But now the outdoor industry is adding a new feature called not making people sick. There might be some trade-offs, like a little more time spent cleaning and drying, but if Arlene Blum didn’t need PFAS to climb Annapurna, chances are we’ll be just fine without it, too.

Peter: That was Aaron Scott.

If you want to learn more about PFAS, as well as a half dozen other toxic chemicals that Arlene and the Green Policy Science Institute is trying to get out of outdoor apparel and other consumer goods–things like antimicrobials, flame retardants, and solvents–visit their site greenpolicyinstitute.org.

���ϳԹ��� Online recently published a piece on PFAS in rain gear and how to clean and care for this new generation of waterproof technology. There’s a link in the show notes.

This episode was written and produced by Aaron, with editing by me, Peter Frick-Wright. Music and sound design by Robbie Carver.

The ���ϳԹ��� Podcast is made possible by our ���ϳԹ��� Plus members. Learn more about all the benefits of membership at outsideonline.com/outsideplus.