Author Archives: David Evans

Plaintiffs and their lawyers gather outside the U.S. District Court in Rutland after the final approval hearing in their PFOA class-action lawsuit on Monday, April 18, 2022. Photo by Glenn Russell/VTDigger
RUTLAND — After the end of a half-hour hearing in federal court on Monday, the presiding judge removed his black robe, stepped down from the bench and chatted with the attorneys and the plaintiffs who were present. 
After nearly six years, U.S. District Court Chief Judge Geoffrey Crawford said he wanted to personally say goodbye to the people involved in the high-profile case, which had just finally been resolved.
Indeed, the hearing made it official: Bennington-area residents who sued a multinational plastics company for contaminating their soil and water will receive financial compensation and medical monitoring.
On Monday morning, Crawford approved the $34 million settlement agreement that the complainants and Saint-Gobain Performance Plastics Corporation reached in November. The final approval came three weeks before the class-action suit’s sixth anniversary.
“There were times in the past six years when it felt that today would never come,” Marie-Pierre Huguet, the widow of one of the plaintiffs, Sandy Sumner, said at the hearing in Rutland.“I am very grateful that today finally came. That both parties managed to come to an agreement. Not a perfect one, I’ll grant you that, but an agreement all the same,” she said. “Today will allow us to move forward.”
The settlement calls for Saint-Gobain to pay $26.2 million to eligible property owners affected by PFOA contamination. PFOA, or perfluorooctanoic acid, was used to coat fiberglass fabrics at its shuttered factories in Bennington and North Bennington.
The French multinational will also spend up to $6 million to screen for certain diseases among residents adversely exposed to PFOA, a variant of the PFAS group of chemicals that has been linked to harmful health outcomes. The rest of the money would cover a portion of the attorneys’ fees.
Bennington-area residents alleged that the factories — previously owned by ChemFab — emitted PFOA through their smokestacks, thereby contaminating drinking water, groundwater and soil in the surrounding areas. They believe the contamination affected nearly 2,400 properties and an estimated 8,000 residents in the towns of Bennington and Shaftsbury, and in the village of North Bennington. 
Saint-Gobain denies the accusations and any wrongdoing under the case settlement.
Crawford commended the plaintiffs for their “perseverance” as the litigation played out for more than half a decade. He said it was evident from the beginning that the residents pursued the lawsuit out of “civic duty” to their neighbors and their community.
Crawford also highlighted the work of Burlington-based mediator John Schraven, whom the judge described as “tireless in his devotion to the process of compromise.” He thanked Schraven for “bringing the ship into the dock.”
Crawford told the seven attorneys involved in the lawsuit that he enjoyed working with them and acknowledged their keeping the court out of the more contentious moments in the civil case.
Five of the eight plaintiffs attended: Linda Crawford and her husband, Ted Crawford; Gordon Garrison; Bill Knight; and Jim Sullivan, who has served as the group’s spokesperson.
Sumner died in August of a rare and aggressive cancer. Huguet, his widow, said Sumner believed his illness was due to PFOA exposure, though there is currently no data or science to support his claim.
One of Saint-Gobain’s lawyers said the company is glad that the lawsuit has come to an end. “This is something they are pleased to put behind,” New York-based attorney Mark Cheffo told the court. “They are not in the litigation business.”
Now that the settlement agreement has cleared the court, plaintiff attorney Emily Joselson told VTDigger she is hoping approved claims could be paid starting in May and medical monitoring can begin this fall. 
Claims under settlement
Property owners within the “zone of concern” are eligible to claim compensation if they meet the qualifications: They either owned residential real estate within the zone as of March 14, 2016, or after this date bought property that was later added to the zone.
Some 2,365 households have been notified of the settlement and none chose to be excluded, said plaintiff attorney Gary Davis, of the North Carolina-based firm Davis and Whitlock.
The payment amounts will vary depending on the property, said plaintiff attorney David Silver. That includes at least $4,000 for owners of property in the zone that were already hooked up to the Bennington municipal water system. Payments of at least $30,000 will be paid to property owners whose water wells have PFOA levels beyond 20 parts per billion and who had no way to connect to the town water system.
Medical monitoring will be available to residents who ingested PFOA-contaminated water and who have more than 2.1 parts per billion of PFOA in their blood. The median blood concentration of PFOA for the U.S. general population is 2.08 parts per billion, according to one study.
The free monitoring service will be run by Southwestern Vermont Medical Center, the hospital in Bennington. Arrangements would also be made for eligible claimants who have moved away from the area.
The Saint-Gobain factories, which closed in 2002, became famous for fiberglass fabrics used on structures such as sports stadium domes. These products were coated in Teflon, which was manufactured using PFOA.
In 2016, many Bennington-area residents learned that their drinking water wells were contaminated with PFOA. Some have discovered elevated levels of the industrial chemical in their blood and are not sure whether to connect an array of illnesses to the contamination. 
PFAS, or perfluoroalkyl and polyfluoroalkyl substances, are often described as “forever chemicals” because they are believed capable of lingering indefinitely in the environment.
In 2017 and 2019, the state reached separate agreements with Saint-Gobain, in which the company would pay for access to municipal drinking water for residents with contaminated properties. 
That process wrapped up in October, with 445 homes in Bennington, North Bennington and Shaftsbury having been connected to the Bennington town water system.

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Credit: CC0 Public Domain

Plastic pollution has become an alarming problem worldwide. A 2015 study published in Science Magazine projected that by 2025, around 100–250 million metric tons of plastic waste could enter our oceans every year.

The problem also triggered the United Nations (UN) to issue a global resolution to end plastic waste, adopted by representatives from 173 countries.
However, even if all drastic measures were put in place to stop plastic production tomorrow, we would still have around 5 billion tons of plastic waste in landfills and the environment.
Research has shown that plastic can disintegrate into microplastic—particles ranging from 1 nanometer (nm) to less than 5 micrometers (mm)—with various shapes, densities, and mechanical and chemical properties.
Due to their small volume and high surface area, microplastics can absorb pollutants, causing chronic toxicity when consumed and accumulated within organisms.
For decades, scientists have been looking to nature for our fight against the plastic problem. Combined with global strategic action to slow down plastic production, we could prevent future plastic disasters.
Microalgae, for instance, are the most promising nature-based candidate capable of destroying microplastics. It is a unicellular species that exists individually or in chains or groups. Depending on the species, their size can range from a few millimeters to hundreds of micrometers.
Cultivating microalgae is simple because it does not require fertile land, large quantities of freshwater, and pesticides compared to other aquaculture crops.
Microalgae are also capable of growing rapidly. Open pond cultivation has been one of the oldest and simplest ways to cultivate microalgae on a large scale. Some people also use photobioreactors—bioreactors used in an enclosed system to increase microalgae cultivation.

Water bottles. Shopping bags. Computers. Medical equipment. Food containers. And on and on and on.Plastics. They never go away. And even if we can’t see them — they’re everywhere.“They are carried in the atmosphere, they are raining down on us. They’ve been found in the Himalayan mountains,” Erica Cirino says. “So right now we are immersed in a microplastics and nanoplastics soup.”But are those microplastics inside of us?“About five years ago was when scientists first began questioning, Are there plastics inside our bodies? And indeed there are,” Cirino adds.For the first time, microplastics have been found in living humans — their lungs and blood.“I don’t like it at all that plastic waste is in the river of life. One thing is clear that we are exposed,” Heather Leslie says. “Do they actually cause adverse health outcomes? That’s a question that takes many years to answer.”Today, On Point: Microplastics and your health.GuestsErica Cirino, communications manager at the Plastic Pollution Coalition. Author of Thicker Than Water: The Quest for Solutions to the Plastic Crisis. (@erica_cirino)Heather Leslie, she established the microplastics lab at the Free University of Amsterdam. Lead author of a new study which found microplastics and nanoplastics in human blood.Also FeaturedMary Kosuth, researcher at the University of Minnesota’s School of Public Health.Book ExcerptExcerpt from Thicker Than Water: The Quest for Solutions to the Plastic Crisis By Erica Cirino. Copyright © 2021, Published by Island Press. All rights reserved.Transcript: Microplastics, The Bloodstream and Your HealthMEGHNA CHAKRABARTI: Joining us now from Amsterdam in the Netherlands is Heather Leslie. She established the Microplastics Lab at the Free University of Amsterdam. Heather, welcome to the program.HEATHER LESLIE: Thank you very much.CHAKRABARTI: So you and your team have also found evidence of micro and nanoplastics in living human bodies. Where did you find them?LESLIE: Yes, we looked in the human bloodstream and we found out that micro and nanoplastics are actually very close to our hearts. We expected that plastics would be circulating in our bodies, but now we know they are. We have the first evidence for that.CHAKRABARTI: How did you find it?LESLIE: It took a lot of trial and error to develop a method that’s sensitive enough. And of course, just like your studio, our lab has a lot of plastic in it. And we have to be extremely careful about the quality control of the analysis. I think this was the most difficult analysis I’ve ever tried in my entire career. And so it took us a long time to get our analysis sensitive enough. And to make sure we weren’t introducing any background contamination from our lab or from all the stuff that we use in order to do the analysis.CHAKRABARTI: Heather, in the reading and thinking that we’ve been doing about this hour, I have to admit it didn’t even occur to me the high chance of cross-contamination because of the ubiquity of plastics, even just in scientific laboratory equipment. Wow. OK, but you overcame that challenge and were able to come up with some kind of assay that detected these micro and nanoplastics in blood samples. Where did you get the samples from? Obviously, we don’t have to identify the individual people, but … where did they come from?LESLIE: Yeah. So we had 22 anonymous donors, that our university also has a university hospital. So I worked together with an immunologist and doctor there, and we were able to access these samples from there. It was a little bit difficult because we were doing that during the first lockdowns and the immunologists were working on COVID research and this had a little bit less priority at the time. But we managed to finish up our short one year pilot project, which had, of course, a lot of work done before that, before we were ready for the samples.But yeah, we were ready for the samples and we managed to do 22 people, which gives us a good indication of concentration ranges to expect and to see if we could find anything at all. Because really, you know, if you find something in the air or in the food chain, that tells you a lot about what we are encountering. But it doesn’t tell you what’s being absorbed in your body. And so by looking in the bloodstream, you’re actually doing that extra step to find out what is the absorbable fraction.CHAKRABARTI: OK, so we’re going to talk about what you actually found in the blood in a second here. But were the samples from adults or was there a range of ages?LESLIE: Oh yes, they were all adults over 18.CHAKRABARTI: Because we’re going to want to talk about the impact on children a little bit later. Or maybe the questions we should ask to understand what the potential impact on kids can be. OK, so what concentrations of micro and nanoplastics did you find in these blood samples?LESLIE: … Plastic is a whole range of different substances, let’s say. So we looked at, with our method, we weren’t looking at counting the particles like some other studies, but we were actually measuring the mass of each type of plastic individually. So we found things like PET, which you make water bottles out of. And polystyrene, a type of polymers and polyethylene and these kinds of plastics. And some people are just interested in the whole sum of all the plastics.So we also in our article, reported the sum. And when you add up all of the plastics that we find in one sample, we came to an average of 1.6 micrograms in a milliliter of blood. And that sounds like a very small amount. But if that blood sample is representative for the whole body, then we’re talking milligrams in a single human body just circulating in the bloodstream. At the time that we were sampling.CHAKRABARTI: I’m trying to think of what a visual equivalent of a of a milligram, would be like a quarter teaspoon or something. Maybe that’s still too much.LESLIE: Oh, it’s very, very, very small. … Plastic is very light, you know, it’s not a very heavy material. So a microgram, it’s like around a microgram in a milliliter of blood. A milliliter of blood, that’s well, I think there’s 15 milliliters in a teaspoon or something like that. So it’s a small amount of blood, but it’s also a very small amount of plastic in the blood.CHAKRABARTI: OK, so Erica Cirino, what’s your thoughts when you first heard about Heather and her team’s research, essentially confirming that there are, even if a small amount, discernibly different types of micro and nanoplastics circulating in living human bodies?ERICA CIRINO: Well, like most people, probably my first reaction was, oh, no. But I also know in the context of the research I did when writing my book Thicker Than Water, to tell the story of the plastic crisis that actually research showing plastics and plastic particles in our environment were published as early as the 1960s and 1970s. And recently, you know, this research has kind of accelerated and there’s been a push to look inside the human body.And finally, we’re getting there and research is evolving rapidly now. But there has been a long understanding, I think, in the scientific community that plastic exists all around us on Earth. But the ubiquity and the true understanding that we live in a time where actually we change the geological nature of our planet and are living in a plasticine of sorts is not surprising, to know that we are also becoming plastic.CHAKRABARTI: Well, so, Heather, I this actually links back to why finding it in the blood is particularly eye opening. Because blood is everywhere in the human body. It has, you know, as you’ve said before, it’s the river of life. Its purpose is transport, right? To transport nutrients, oxygen to every cell in the body, to transport waste away from those cells. So does this mean that essentially every part of the human body is being exposed? Even if it’s to a small amount being exposed to these micro and nanoplastics?LESLIE: Yes, this is why I really wanted to focus on blood and in the first place. There have been some studies about feces, and I was thinking, Well, that’s more of a problem for the sewage treatment plants, you know, and it’s going right through our bodies. But the blood, if it’s absorbed into the blood, as you said just now, the blood bathes all of our cells of our body, and it needs to do that on a very regular basis. And so anything that is in our bloodstream can reach our organs.And in toxicology, we’re interested in what gets close to what we call sites of toxic action. So if it’s outside your body, it’s not interacting with the biology. But when it’s inside your body and it gets close to some area of your body that’s doing its thing, that’s functioning as it normally does in nature, then you can have an opportunity to cause toxicity. If that particle knows how to cause toxicity. It needs to be close to that or close to that area where it can cause the damage. So that’s why it’s important to look at blood.CHAKRABARTI: OK, so because there we have basically an exposure pathway to every organ system, every system in the human body through blood. But you know, on the other hand, of course, everyone wants to know like, Oh my gosh, so what impact does this have on human health? And we don’t have the answers to those questions yet, right? Because the research is still very new in confirming the presence of plastics inside living bodies.But I am thinking, you know, in modern life we’re exposed to a lot of things every day. We breathe them in, we eat them in. And I’m not saying that they’re inert, but perhaps they are absorbed into our bodies at such low levels that it doesn’t actually cause some kind of deleterious effect on human health. Could that be possible, Heather?LESLIE: I always say we have to not really jump the gun and claim that it’s safe or it’s not safe. We should just say we don’t know until we collect enough evidence to make those kinds of claims. So it’s a very difficult situation to be in to say, I don’t know. Because everybody wants an answer. We do have half of the answer because a risk to human health is built up from the exposure, and from knowledge about which exposure level is sort of a threshold for the toxicity.So above a certain level, you can expect toxicity. Below a certain level, you don’t expect it. It’s like the very, very 500-year-old knowledge that the dose makes the poison. So the most important part to know is, Is there any poison there or potential poison? And we know that if the dose gets high enough, we probably will see effects, even if it’s table salt or even if you drink too much water.So there is a certain point where it will be toxic. So it’s very important to know what the dose is. And there’s a lot of research going on now, and I think one of the main areas to really look at is the immuno-toxicological side. So what effect does this have on our immune systems? And I think that’s a good place to really look.

Karen Gdula lives in the house she grew up in, a modest home on a pretty street in rural western Pennsylvania. Ivy Lane, in her view, is someplace special. “There’s a warmth and a caring,” she said. “We look out for each other.” The street never needed those bonds more than on September 10, 2018.
Retired and newly married, Gdula was asleep when, just before 5 a.m., an explosion shook her home. The roar was so loud that some of her neighbors thought it was a plane crash. But when she and her husband saw a fireball stretching above the tops of the towering pine trees across the street, they knew exactly what had happened.
The Revolution Pipeline, running right behind Ivy Lane in Center Township, about 25 miles northwest of Pittsburgh, had come into service only days before, carrying gas from the fracking wells that are everywhere in the region. No one was hurt, but the explosion flattened a home three doors down from Gdula’s and toppled six giant electrical transmission towers.
Now, Revolution is back in service, and another pipeline has come to Ivy Lane, too. It’s called Line N, and it feeds gas to the vast, $6 billion petrochemical plant Shell is building five miles away in Monaca, right on the Ohio River. That plant, called an “ethane cracker,” will soon turn ethane — a byproduct of fracking — into 1.6 million tons of raw plastic a year.

The Ohio River Valley is wrestling with whether to tie its fortunes to another toxic, boom-and-bust industry.

Five years ago, the flood of ethane coming from the Ohio River Valley’s fracking wells got the plastic industry — petrochemical firms that are often subsidiaries of big fossil fuel producers — dreaming about a new generation of massive plants in the region. Companies envisioned building as many as four more ethane crackers like Shell’s in Appalachia, and state and local officials from both parties embraced the idea.
That vision is now foundering. Obstacles including global overproduction of plastic, local opposition to pipelines that feed such facilities, and public concern about the tidal wave of waste choking oceans and landscapes mean that even the region’s second proposed ethane cracker may never materialize. Additional plants look even less likely. The question mark over the industry’s once-grand hopes for Appalachia reflects larger doubts about its plans for dramatically increasing worldwide plastic production.

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Free wooden bellyboard hire scheme aims to cut plastic pollutionSurf Wood for Good aims to tackle waste caused by polystyrene bodyboards by lending beachgoers UK-made wooden boards A new initiative is offering free bellyboard hire across England, Wales and Northern Ireland to discourage the use of polluting plastic boards.Surf Wood for Good aims to tackle the waste caused by polystyrene bodyboards, which are usually imported and single-use, by lending beachgoers British-made wooden boards.The environmentally friendly alternatives will be available to borrow free of charge from stockists in 24 coastal sites until October, including in Bournemouth, Cornwall and Grimsby.It is estimated that more than 16,000 polystyrene bodyboards are left on UK beaches each year, according to environmental charity Keep Britain Tidy.The low-quality boards are said to last as little as a few hours before they are often discarded across seafronts, and can release thousands of tiny polystyrene balls into the coastal ecosystem.Jamie Johnstone, founder of Surf Wood for Good, was prompted to act after seeing the volume of broken polystyrene bodyboards left at his local beach in Newquay daily last summer.“We hope that the scheme will inspire people to think about what they are riding in the waves and promote a positive change away from disposable plastic in general,” Johnstone said.“I love the idea that each board handed out represents the potential for a cheap alternative to be saved from landfill.”Environmental charity Surfers Against Sewage added: “Plastic pollution is a huge issue, with 8m pieces of plastic entering the ocean every single day. Not only is Surf Wood For Good kinder to our planet, it provides endless fun in the water, where you can use the board over and over again.”Last year, a ban on sales of single-use bodyboard sales was introduced in North Devon to eliminate waste.A list of participating sites can be found at a dedicated website.TopicsPlasticsMarine lifenewsReuse this content