This is just one in a huge series of proceedings that are being conducted against the producers of the so-called PFAS, chemicals that are all around us today
The company "3M", a chemical giant from SAD, agreed to pay $450 million to the US state of New Jersey for a long-standing environmental pollution "eternal chemicals", as PFAS organic substances are popularly called.
This is just one in a huge series of court proceedings that are being conducted due to pollution by these chemicals. According to current estimates, there are over 15.000 such procedures worldwide, says Climate 101.
The company "3M" reached a settlement with the state of New Jersey, which is otherwise the most advanced in the US in terms of legislation on PFAS chemicals, and thus avoided an upcoming trial in which other big polluters - also industrial giants such as DuPont and Chemours - will participate.
The settlement comes two years after 3M agreed to pay one of the largest damages in environmental law history - over $10 billion to US water authorities for contamination of water with PFAS chemicals.
But experts say these amounts are just the tip of the iceberg – cleaning up and protecting US waters from PFAS alone requires about $400 billion. The price chemical manufacturers will pay for PFAS pollution may be greater than the price the tobacco industry paid at the end of the 20th century.
They are not called "eternal" chemicals for no reason
The reason lies in the nature of "eternal chemicals" - they got that nickname because they are extremely stable. PFAS stands for per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, and they are man-made chemicals based on the bond between carbon and fluorine, which is the strongest covalent bond among all organic molecules.
This stability and inertness has made these chemicals extremely popular in industries around the world, from the production of paints and varnishes, through plastics, cleaning preparations, various industrial equipment... One of the more famous examples of "eternal chemicals" is polytetrafluoroethylene, i.e. Teflon.
However, the world's largest manufacturers have been hiding some other important insights for years: that these chemicals easily "move" through ecosystems, and that some of them can have harmful effects on human health.
As Dr. Konstantin Ilijević from the Faculty of Chemistry in Belgrade wrote in the author's text in 2024:
"Until now, it has already been proven that certain molecules from this group of compounds cause obesity in children, have an impact on cholesterol metabolism, interfere with the immune system in the fight against infections... Due to their stability, PFAS can travel thousands of kilometers through the wind, even to areas of untouched nature."
This means that not only the places where PFAS are produced, and where contaminated waste is produced, are polluted - they are found all over the world today, and they have also been detected in Antarctica. At the same time, although they are not literally "eternal", their stability means that their removal from the environment, either naturally or by human hands, is complicated and slow.
"There is no significant production of PFAS in Serbia," stated Dr. Ilijević in his article, "but that's why we import large quantities of these substances that appear in a wide variety of products from everyday use: from plastics and various waterproof coatings to clothing, cleaning or fire extinguishing preparations."
The problem, in other words, is almost unfathomable, and the agreed sum, which is unimaginably large for us, is only one part of the global fight against these harmful compounds. Even in the best scenarios, this fight will last for decades.
In the night between Friday and Saturday, Iran targeted central and southern Israel, Tel Aviv retaliated with strikes on missile positions. Israel claims the strikes killed a senior Iranian commander responsible for funding and arming Hamas before October 7, 2023.
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