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Ron Lisnet: Per or polyfluoroalkyl substances. It’s a word you almost have to see to be able to pronounce it. You probably know it by its initials, PFAS. It seems to be everywhere in our world these days and in the news just about every day.
Where can you find it? Well, if you got takeout recently, you probably got a box like this. If you cooked an egg in a nonstick pan or used a paper plate and it didn’t leak onto your lap, it probably has PFAS in it.

Why is it there? It resists grease, oil, water, and heat. The problem is it never breaks down. It’s called forever chemical for a reason, and it causes all kinds of health problems. Maine is definitely in the crosshairs of this situation. Every water system tested in Maine has shown the presence of PFAS.

Maine is also a leader in tackling this problem. Here at the 91����, PFAS is the mission of a lot of researchers and folks trying to work on this very complex problem. That’s what we’re here to talk about today as we welcome in our guests. We appreciate you all being here.

Maybe let’s just start with a quick round of intros. If you could tell us who you are, what your title is, and what is your angle on this story? What bite are you trying to take out of this huge pie that’s called PFAS? Chris?

Christina Murphy: Sure. I’m Christina Murphy. I am a USGS Cooperative Research Unit, assistant unit leader for the Maine Unit. We are housed at land grant institutions to help support research and education.

I’m also in the Wildlife Fisheries and Conservation Biology department at the 91���� as an assistant professor. My work on PFAS focuses on fish, especially fish of interest to anglers and to the state inland fisheries and wildlife.
We’re focused on how to help inform folks as they make choices about their daily lives, and so we can all enjoy the things that we would normally enjoy. When I think about PFAS, I try to look at the P and the F because we have a whole bunch of different kinds of PFAS.

I know we’re going to talk about, but we work a lot on PFOS and PFOA, which are really common in fish.

Ron: Rachel?

Rachel Schattman: Sure. Thank you so much for having me. My name is Rachel Schattman. I’m an associate professor of sustainable agriculture here at the 91����, and I’m a faculty member with the Maine Agriculture and Forestry Experiment Station.

I am an agroecologist by training. I do both field-based studies, mostly in commercial ag cropping systems, but I’m also trained as a social scientist, so I look sometimes at policy and governance issues and qualitative and quantitative social science.

My work in PFAS has been from both of those angles. I’ve worked with some great students, as has Jean. We have some students in common who have done uptake studies into crops, mostly vegetable crops and a little bit in forage.

Then I also have done some mentoring of students who are interested in PFAS from a policy perspective, most recently what’s going on in Maine and how Maine is leading the way in governing this really tricky issue.

Ron: Wow. That’s a lot. [laughs] Caroline?

Caroline Noblet: Hi. Thanks for having us here today. I’m Caroline Noblet. I’m an associate professor in the School of Economics and the Maine Agricultural and Forest Experiment Station, like my colleague Rachel. I’m also affiliated with the Senator George J. Mitchell Center for Sustainability Solutions.

By training, I think a lot about how people process and use information to make decisions. Certainly, PFAS is a fascinating and tricky place to do that work because there’s a lot of information out there about PFAS, some of it correct, some of it less correct, and then sometimes there’s gaps in the information.

When we think about people making choices and how they might change their behavior related to PFAS, I think that that’s where my work comes in. If you drink water in Maine, if you eat food grown in Maine, if you eat wild game and fish, like my colleague Christina thinks about, that’s all a place where human behavior comes in. That is where my work is happening.

Ron: Great. And Jean?

Jean MacRae: Cool. My name is Jean MacRae. I’m an associate professor in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering. I primarily work on…I’m going to back up a little bit.

I’m an environmental engineering professor, but my work has been overlapping with the agricultural sector, recently starting to look more at treatments for how to deal with PFAS once they’re in the environment and in materials that are difficult to manage.
One of the big issues with PFAS is that they’re present at these really low levels in the environment, and they still have an effect, which means that it’s extremely hard to treat them.

From a treatment perspective, it’s cheaper and easier and more technically feasible to remove things from water or soil when they’re present at really high concentrations, and it’s much more difficult to deal with them at the levels that are relevant for PFAS contamination.

Ron: Let’s maybe do a little bit of PFAS 101 so we just get some of the basics down. We talked about some of this, but if anybody has further insights, why was it created? Where is it used, or where is it not used might be an easier question to ask. What is sludge? Let’s start there. That might be a question for you, Jean?

Jean: Let me hit you with the sludge. Sludge is the solid-liquid mess of material that you get when you are treating water or really anything to try to remove contaminants from the water.

Water is the universal solvent, which means that all kinds of things want to dissolve into the water. Sludge is a solid, massive material that is produced either when you precipitate things or force them into the solid phase from the dissolved phase. Dissolved in water means you can’t separate it, and suspended in water means you could settle it or filter it out.

In wastewater treatment, sludge is a mix of bacterial biomass — it sounds really gross, and it is slimy and smelly — that we use it to consume the dissolved organic matter in all of our waste materials, and so the bacteria are growing. They’re full of stuff that is really good for soil, which is why people were applying sludge to soil.

Ron: Sludge has been applied on farms for many, many years as a fertilizer.

Jean: Millennia. Yeah, forever. It’s really good, actually, as a plant fertilizer, but it’s not so good when we have an industrial society that uses a bunch of chemicals and things that are in our materials, they’re in our infrastructure, and they get into the water because it’s a universal solvent.

Once they’re there, a lot of them want to stick to that sludge. The biomass has materials, pollutants attached to it, and that is what we are concerned about when you apply it to especially soils that are being used to make food that people are going to eat.

Ron: Why is it so good at what it does, which it’s a barrier to oil and grease and water? What is it about it? We don’t need to have a chemistry lesson necessarily, but does it repel it? What’s going on there?

Rachel: I can give a very brief and then I’m going to pass it off to you. [laughs]

Jean: Sure. [inaudible] .

Rachel: I think one of the things that’s really unique about PFAS molecules is that they have a head, which is either carboxylate or sulfonic head, one of them, and then it has a chain of carbons as a tail. You can think of it as like a tadpole.

One side is hydrophobic, meaning it’s afraid of water and it’s repelled by water, and the other side’s hydrophilic, which means it’s attracted to water. It’s very unique, in my understanding, for compounds like that to be both hydrophilic and hydrophobic at the same time.

Obviously, as Christina mentioned, there are lots of different types of PFAS. They vary in terms of the head group and the number of carbons that are in the tail, so they have those different properties to different degrees based on those variations.

Different types of PFAS have different uses and utilities, depending on whether or not you’re trying to keep your paper plate oil- and water-resistant, or make your nonstick pan stick less to food, or have a firefighting foam that is uniquely well-suited to putting out flames. These have so many different uses because of the variety.
I bet Jean has something more precise to add. [laughs]

Jean: What Rachel described is surfactant, so detergents and stuff are surfactants.

Ron: Soaps.

Jean: Yep. The cool thing and awful thing about PFAS is they’ve got this…where normally there would be hydrogens on those atoms, there’s fluorines instead, and that makes it also repellent to oil.

In the case of using it as a firefighting foam, you use it to put out a solvent fire or a gas fire because the little ends will accumulate on the surface because they don’t want to be associated with the solvent.

The head group also doesn’t really want to be there, so it’ll spread out over the surface and make this foam that then blocks oxygen from getting in. Cool. Works like a charm, but then you’re stuck with this material that doesn’t get broken down by the fire because that carbon-fluorine bond is super strong, and it just is difficult. It’s really hard to break.

Ron: Major health concerns. We’re talking cancers, other major diseases, heart disease. Where else is it having an effect on the human health?

Caroline: One thing that we’re learning more about is actually vaccine resistance. As a society, we all take a lot of vaccines for a lot of different things. There is some evidence that shows that the vaccine is not as effective in people with high levels of PFAS serum in their blood. That’s another place of concern, and it’s interesting.

Some of the literature also looks at the fact that we can be exposed from PFAS in a variety of different ways. All of us are very different people, and then we can also think about our more vulnerable population.

If you’ve got a baby crawling on the floor and you have a PFAS-resistant carpet, excuse me, a nonstick carpet that would have PFAS in it, that’s going to be a different exposure. I think when we talk about human health, it’s just such a broad topic to talk about, and we just have to think really carefully about there’s different populations out there, too.

Ron: What do we know about how far and how extensive this has spread? I saw something about there was a dairy farm in Arundel in 2016 where this was discovered to be a huge problem. It was in the milk and all the dairy products, and that set off the chain of events that have led us to today where PFAS is a major problem.
Did we know about this 20 years ago? We obviously knew the chemicals were there, but not the effect it was having.

Jean: That’s a good question. 20 years ago, we knew some of the toxicology, the health effects were known. There had been some experimentation in animals, and near the production facilities, there had been some evidence of toxicity to animals that lived in the area.

There was concern, but not enough to stop the use of these materials, and it really wasn’t clear where it was going in the environment. More recently, they’ve been found at, again, super low levels, but everywhere in the world, the poles, the highest points, it’s in rainwater, it’s everywhere.

It’s more a matter of degree of contamination. Those findings are much more recent. Really high level where they’re being produced, and that’s not a big surprise, but the fact that they are everywhere.

Ron: Spreading. I’d like to dig into what each of you are looking at with this issue. Maybe what is the big question you are trying to chase right now? I know that the state, Department of Agriculture and Forestry, gave 2.25 million for research into PFAS last year to 91���� folks to study some of this.

Maybe Chris, let’s start with you. What’s your big question? What’s keeps you up at night that you’re looking at in regarding this issue?

Christina: I think that’s interesting. For us, we have a few different projects that are focused around understanding fish because that’s what our lab specializes in. How consistent are the samples?

We’re just now getting the analytical capacity to look at levels. Are those levels going to be the same if I measure the right side and the left side? Are they going to be the same if I measure in the spring or the fall?

I don’t work with human behavior, but people certainly make different choices. They do different things at different times of the year. Animals are the same. They’re doing different things. They’re metabolically different.

Just getting a handle on when we look and we take a measurement, what are we measuring? What does that represent relative to what we know might be risk thresholds? If you take an average, does the average represent the actual average?
We’ve looked in the literature from around the globe to try to get a handle on whether if you composite samples, so you can put pieces. The samples are very expensive to run. They can be four or five hundred dollars for an individual sample, so you’re not going to be able to sample every fish you touch.

Do you put a whole bunch of those together and approach a true average, but then there’s one really scary one that you missed? [laughs] What are the chances that that’s happening?

Just trying to take all the information that we have, lay it out in a more understandable fashion, get more information on that individual and population variability, how that changes with all these different variables.

Then whether there are simple things like taking the skin off your fish that anglers might be able to do, that could reduce what are typically pretty low levels of these chemicals. They are in everything.

We always point out Teflon and paper cups, and they’re in our waders, they’re in our…We’re probably all wearing it.

[laughter]

Christina: We’re probably sitting with it, it’s keeping our stuff from sticking together. Just having a better idea of those different attributes is where we’re focused.

Ron: Rachel, I know you have a lot of irons in the fire, but I know one is what is happening to crops on farms. Are they uptaking PFAS, and are there ways to mitigate that? I want to ask you about that.

Sue Hunter is a farmer who I know you’ve worked with in Unity, and we paid a visit to her farm. We’re going to take a visit there during this podcast in just a bit, but maybe just give us the cocktail napkin pitch. What’s your big question?

Rachel: I will say working with Sue was a real honor. As you know from talking with her, she and her family have been through quite the gauntlet with discovering PFAS on their farm and the impact that it had on their livelihood.

I find that Sue’s dedication to using her experience for broader public learning and the public good to be very, very inspiring. Yes, one of the projects that my lab has worked on that was led by then master’s student, now PhD student, Alexandra Scearce, was looking at tomatoes and lettuce and fescue as potential uptake crops, and looking at the differences between them.

She chose those crops specifically because they are quite different physiologically.
There has been evidence in the past that suggests that there’s higher degrees of accumulation of certain types of PFAS compounds in vegetables that have a large leaf area because it’s thought that as it’s carried, especially short-chain compounds, as they’re carried up through the plant with water, and then the water evaporates through the leaves, that they then accumulate in the leaf material.

She was looking at that compared to tomatoes, which is thought to have a little bit more of a physical barrier between water moving up and specifically into the fruit. Then fescue is a forage crop that Ellen Mallory and her team and several other researchers at the 91���� have looked a lot into, so we were using fescue as pretty much a reference crop.

Ron: There, Ellen and her team are using charcoal to mitigate uptake. Is that right?

Rachel: Biochar.

Ron: Biochar.

Rachel: That’s a different group.

Jean: Ling Li.

Rachel: Ling Li, yes.

Ron: If we had a bigger table, we’d [inaudible] .

Rachel: There are so many people. I’ll just finish by saying that I think Alex has some really interesting findings, which show that not all crops take up PFAS to the same degree, but she also uncovered a lot more questions, as any good scientist does, so there’s a lot to do there.

Ron: Caroline, safe to say your umbrella is looking at this from the human dimensions of this problem?

Caroline: Yeah. That’s correct. I always love hearing what everyone’s working on because we’re all working on so much, and everything’s happening fast. I would start by saying that Maine has a reputation of being a place where we care very much about the environment. We’re very careful about what we do.
People from outside of Maine may look at Maine as this beautiful, untouched territory, if you will.

When we run into a situation like this where people from outside of Maine and inside of Maine are hearing that there’s a problem, I just think what our work is looking at is how can we do our best job of communicating all this wonderful work that people are doing to people so that they can take appropriate behavior changes if they want to, to mitigate their exposure, but not overreact.

One thing that my research group has been looking at is if you read “The New York Times,” “The Boston Globe,” you would think that the only place on Earth that has PFAS is Maine because we’ve been used as the exemplar.

They’ll say, “PFAS shut down Maine farms.” Yes, that is 100 percent true, and it’s been devastating, and Rachel’s shout out to Sue is so important, but other places in the United States and around the world also have a PFAS problem.
How can we communicate to consumers of Maine products that Maine’s the best place to be looking at because we’re testing and we’re being proactive? How can we communicate to Maine citizens that, as Christina said yes, there is PFAS in some of our fish, but we’re testing and we’re understanding that?

These bodies of water, the PFAS level looks like this, and in this body of water, it looks different, and so you can make your choices appropriately. It seems really broad, and I’m happy to share some specific things as we talk more, but that’s what we’ve been thinking about.

Ron: Jean, what’s your end of this?

Jean: So many things. I am working with Ellen and Juan Romero. Ellen’s been looking at uptake of PFAS from soils into forage crops that are used to feed forage animals, animals that we then eat or get dairy from.

Juan has been looking at feed additives to try to reduce the uptake of PFAS into the animal, in which case they are going to excrete more of the PFAS that they were taking up in their food. The goal, really, is to reduce the risk to the food system.

My end of this is then you’ve got all this waste material that is contaminated. What can we do with that, or what can we do about it? Anybody who’s living on a contaminated farm is going to, A, want to get as far away from it as possible, and B, have some solutions, what can they do if they’re really attached to this area?

You don’t want to leave your home. So many issues for the farmers. What I’m interested in looking at is how do we manage all of this stuff?

In one project, I’m looking at anaerobic digestion of manure to try to recover energy from it, reduce the overall amount of material that’s left over, and then maybe from that, we can work on some destruction methods that would be economical to use.
There’s three approaches that I know of that people are looking at on campus. I’ve been working with Sampath Gunukula, who’s an expert on high-temperature methods of managing organic matter.

There’s a hydrothermal treatment, so high temperature with water present to break down PFAS and other materials, and you get a char material from that, which interestingly, can also bind to PFAS. You can use that to try to make them not move around so you can add them to soil and prevent the PFAS from leaking off the site to get into the wildlife.

He’s also working on pyrolysis method, which is like incineration, but you just don’t add any air to that incineration, and you get a solid material, also useful for treating the soils.

There’s another researcher on campus who’s looking at plasma technologies, which is adding a really high voltage into a system, which releases electrons and bashes up the molecule and hopefully breaks it down.

Fancy methods, maybe more weeds than you want to hear about, but people are working on trying to actually destroy them so that we can get rid of the problem rather than just moving it from one place to another.

Ron: By any means necessary. Whatever tools you need. Speaking of what is happening on farms, we’re going to just cut away right now and take a visit to UNITY at Sue Hunter’s farm and get her story about what has happened to her farm with PFAS and how the university is helping her and what is going to be done about it.

Sue Hunter: This is my farm. I have owned it for about 17 years now. We’re all organic here. I work with an organic farmer down the road. We had a great relationship going. They were testing milk at that time. His milk got tested and it was high in PFAS. He ended up finding out that the feed came from my field.

That’s how we first initially knew that there was heavy PFAS contamination on the land. Never heard of it. Never heard of it at all. Didn’t know anything about it. At that point, I couldn’t do anything. I had a greenhouse that I had vegetable seedlings in. I couldn’t water them. The water was contaminated.

Income pretty much came to a halt. It was obviously very disappointing, very depressing. What am I going to do? I had bills that needed to be paid and I had no way to pay them. What people don’t understand is, which I have learned now, you got something that doesn’t leak, it’s probably got PFAS in it because it’s that binder in there that causes it not to leak.

We contacted the state of Maine. The state of Maine got us in contact with Diane Rowland from the university. We ended up having lots of meetings and just talked about different ideas. They said, “Do you want to do research?” I said, “Yes, I do.”

What we have realized that on some of the highly contaminated land, the only thing we can grow is grains. Not only do we want to bring the land back to being able to use it, but let’s find out what we need to use to be able to make it so we can sell our product. This farm here will keep going, and we feel very positive about things.

I didn’t want to give up. Somebody said, “Well, why didn’t you just give up?” I had been approached with Solar. I could sell the land as a development. Farming’s in my soul. I wanted it to stay as a farm. It’s a beautiful, beautiful piece of property.

Ron: Thanks again to Sue Hunter for sharing her story with us. Chris, you had something you wanted to add?

Christina: Yeah. I think Caroline brought up a really important thing, which is that the media coverage and PFAS has been so heavily focused on PFAS alone, but actually for Maine, PFAS isn’t what sets fishing regulations in most places. It’s mercury.

The PFAS levels are comparatively, as far as we set the thresholds for risk now, much lower. I think just having that broader context both in terms of locally, but also globally is probably important before people panic.

Ron: True.

Christina: Because there’s no need to panic.

Ron: Going off what you mentioned, Caroline, that Maine seems like it’s ground zero for PFAS. I did do a little bit of online Googling, what have you, and Maine didn’t rank in the top 10 states for the problem, but in a lot of ways, Maine is a leader in the country in dealing with it. Your research is reflective of that.

Caroline: With solution. Not top 10 in the problem. We’re top 10 in the solution.

Ron: That’s right. I know Rachel, you had a student, Eddie Nachamie. Is that how you say his last name?

Rachel: Eddie Nachamie.

Ron: Nachamie. He is an undergrad and did a paper that has blown up. Maybe you could just tell his story and what he’s brought to the table with this issue

Rachel: Sure. Yes. Eddie Nachamie is an undergrad honors student in the EES program. I have been lucky to work with him on a couple different projects.
He took a class paper for my sustainable food systems class and turned it into this really comprehensive look at Maine’s policy approach to managing PFAS and put it in the context of the greater federal response.

We actually haven’t had the paper published quite yet. It’s almost ready for submission, but it has garnered a lot of interest. I think it represents some of the best tallying and analysis of what the different types of policies are, whether they are geared towards victim support, or mediation, or holding companies accountable for contamination.
Yes, very interesting and good work.

Ron: One thing I noticed from the story that was done on, and you can see it on the 91���� News website, is Maine is a leader in a couple of different areas in dealing with PFAS. One, on January 1st, 2026, all products containing PFAS were banned for sale in Maine. They banned sludge, correct? Also, there’s a PFAS fund for farmers.
Like you said, Maine has a serious problem, but is also taking a serious look at remedying as much as possible. Just had a question about the product. It has so many uses, all the things we talked about with these different products here. Are there other ways of doing this?

I know some chemical engineers and some engineering folks here at the university are looking for safer alternatives. Is that on the horizon, or is that a wish, or where are we at with that?

Jean: I think it is on the horizon. There are quite a lot of companies that are interested in this. We are moving away from using PFAS in regular consumer items. There are places where I think you can’t substitute them, so you don’t want a biofilm to grow on a catheter that’s in your body.

Chances are there’s going to be a bunch of medical uses that aren’t going to have a substitute, but single-use cups and things, we don’t have to have them treated with now known to be dangerous chemical and use it one time and then throw it into the environment. We can do better.

There’s definitely people who are working on alternatives that are less problematic to the environment. There’s a load of research and many, many companies that are working on alternative materials.

Ron: I know, and as part of the process development center, they’re working on using cellulose nanofibrils, which are basically very small parts of the cellulose in trees to perform the same task. Chris, I wanted to ask you about the wildlife end of this.
Maine obviously has a great reputation as a place for hunters and fishermen and just general outdoors. Does this cause a problem in terms of that reputation? Is it a big deal yet, or might it be?

Christina: For me, I would say it should enhance that reputation because we are testing and we care. I think that there are places, and those are highlighted by the state. It’s amazing how transparent a lot of the data are. If someone was interested, they can go to the main DEP website. They can look at the water test results.

IF&W has been really transparent in the samples that they have for wildlife and for fish. Having that information means that you know what you’re actually eating. I think that I would worry more about being in a place where we know this contamination is global, not just even specific to the United States, and many places have little to no data.

Caroline: I would follow on with that with what Chris was saying and some things that Rachel said, too. Part of the reason I think that Maine has been so successful is it’s been such a huge collaboration.

In talking right now, we’ve mentioned five different state agencies and I don’t even know how many different departments on campus. I really appreciate that.

One of the things that our colleagues at Maine Department of Inland Fisheries and Wildlife are doing is they have consumption advisories in place, as Chris mentioned. They have maps up for you to see, and they update the advisory every year.
That’s a project that we’re working on with them right now, is actually to see how are anglers and hunters responding to this changing information? I think that’s such an important step that we’re taking.

We’re doing the good science, we’re communicating the good science, and we’re understanding how people are changing their behavior in response to the good science. I applaud everyone for doing that kind of work.

Ron: Rachel, Maine’s farming community, any thoughts on how they’re coping, how they’ve been affected? I did see one piece of information that 90 farms were contaminated as of 2025. I don’t know if that’s current, and the Maine Farmland Trust had been buying up some farms. How is the farming community faring with all this?

Rachel: I think people are rightfully concerned, but I also think that they have felt the genuine support of the Department of Agriculture, Conservation and Forestry.
DACF has invested really heavily in not only understanding the extent of contamination related to specifically sludge spreading is the main mode of contamination on Maine farms, but assisting farms to navigate a world where some prime farmland is now contaminated.

The big question that I have heard from farmers is that understanding the level of contamination is important and is good, but unless the levels are very, very high, as they have been on some of the farms that have been purchased by Maine Farmland Trust and the state, it’s a little unclear what it means to have contamination there.
Maine does lead the way in regulating a few food products, mostly related to animal production, but there are no plant products or crop products that have threshold limits at this point. If you are operating on a contaminated piece of land, it’s very unclear what the result may be in terms of what’s going on with your food.

Ron: I’m going to ask the economist in the room here. Is there any set of data that talks about the economics and overall cost of dealing with this, or could you even figured that out?

Caroline: I feel like because we learn so much and because there’s so many different components, the data that I’ve seen is usually very specific to a specific situation. We know this contaminant happened, and so the decrease in property value is x.

That doesn’t take into account the fact that my colleagues have mentioned that means people might have to leave their homeland, their area that their families might have lived in forever. There’s some emotional pieces of that that are also economically valuable, then what about the rest of the community?

We know these farm lands have been impacted, but that means that that’s one less farm perhaps producing in that area, so there’s impacts in the community. I’m not personally aware of anything that takes into account all of that piece.
Sorry to be the disappointing person here, but I’m just being honest.

Ron: The answer is it depends. It’s a lie.

Caroline: I think there’s a lot to think about, and we’re still thinking about it.

Ron: Is there a chance that some of this affected land will ever be suitable, can be brought back for farming, or recreation, or some other use that it used to have, or is it just going to be…You’re nodding your head?

Rachel: I can’t imagine that it wouldn’t. You look like you have something to say, too.

Jean: I think people are working on it. It’s really hard to predict how treatment, say, like phytoremediation. We were talking a little bit about how PFAS can be taken out of the soil and moved into plants.If you can harvest the plants and do something to it, get it away from the land, then that is removing some of the PFAS that was contaminating the land. Over time, if you have the right kinds of plants, potentially, you could come up with a phytoremediation — that’s a fancy word for planting up of the land.

The trick is you have to have plants that want to take up a lot of PFAS, and again, they’re present at a really low concentration, so how long is it going to take for this to go away? The answer seems to be, so far, quite a long time, so it’s hard to say.

Can we manage it by adding something that is going to stick the PFAS to the soil and keep it there forever? Maybe. We just don’t really know the answers to how long is that treatment going to last. Do you have to repeat it? There’s a lot of questions.

Ron: What can members of the public do to reduce their exposure? Hopefully, there’s more products coming down the line. Will this be made with something that’s natural, and does it need that chemical to do what it does?Jean: It doesn’t. In the olden days, they were just made out of wax. There would be a wax coating instead of PFAS. It’s cheaper and lighter and probably less material and less stick togethery if it’s not made with wax.

[inaudible]

Ron: stick together.

[laughs]

Jean: How would you characterize the overall effort that the 91���� is putting into this problem and leading the state? Is this a model for what other places should be doing? Are we leading in this respect?

Caroline: I’d like to say yes because we’re all here, and we’ve mentioned all of our colleagues at state agencies, we’ve mentioned nonprofits, we’ve mentioned how involved the legislature has been. I just feel like it’s been such a concerted effort.
All of us have been to conferences nationally and even internationally where us and our state colleagues have been asked to talk about Maine’s response, and people are frantically taking notes. I feel like we should collectively as a state be proud of our actions.

Ron: What does success look like? What’s a win in, however, a year, five years from now? Any thoughts as to where we might be? Will we be “successful” in battling this, or are we just going to learn to live with it somehow and try to reduce it as much as possible?

Jean: That last bit makes sense. We are going to have to live with it, everyone is, but actually managing what we have and understanding what it means, so what level of contamination really is important. There’s definitely questions that need answering to figure out how we can manage the situation we’re in.

There’s a lot of other things out there in the environment that we also need to worry about, like mercury and plastics, you name it.

Ron: Plastics. Who knows what else?

Jean: It isn’t the only thing out there, so fixing this problem isn’t going to fix everything, but we do need ways of management.

Caroline: I would say, too, putting my economist hat on, as consumers and citizens, we are able to drive some of this. If you now know, Jean has told you that’s maybe not the cup that you need, what options are there?

Getting information for yourself. What are some of the alternatives out there for you? Would you be willing to spend a little extra for something that is not…We use PFAS, but, again, we know we’re talking about the huge class chemicals, but it’s PFAS-free.

Ron: Any last words?

Rachel: I would just add to that and say that I think that oftentimes, we put a lot of responsibility onto consumers to fix large-scale societal problems like environmental contamination, and that isn’t usually the best way to fix them.

I think there needs to be a stronger federal intervention that prioritizes protecting the health and safety of the most vulnerable people, but really everybody

Ron: Chris, last word goes to you.

Christina: I think that this is a really exciting time. I think that the University of Maintenance is in many ways leading the charge, but as you mentioned, there are groups all around the world.

One of the advantages that we have here is that we can work together with people from everywhere, and as a global community, learn a lot more.

I have been remiss in mentioning Guillermo Figueroa-MuÒoz, who’s one of the students in our lab that’s led 99 percent of the PFAS research that we’ve been doing, but pulling together from all of these other sources and learning from each other.
I think that even as the university moves forward as a leader, we are also part of a large community. That that opportunity is promising and will bring not just Maine and the United States forward, but all of us as global citizens for a problem that does not respect boundaries or borders and that moves with water and air.

Jean: Air.

Rachel: We didn’t even talk about that.

[laughter]

Ron: That will the next one.

Jean: Can I just say one more thing about what people can do? Individually, there are lots of sources of information that people can turn to when they want to know how to reduce their personal exposure.

The Environmental Working Group, ewg.org, puts out a lot of information out there. Personal care products is something we didn’t really mention, but PFAS could be in your shampoo.

You can get lists of things that don’t have PFAS and other harmful chemicals there, but really, legislation is going to be required to regulate the kinds of compounds that go into products that we have in our society in general.

We’re part of a bigger, complex system. We need to be thinking more seriously about the chemicals that we make that don’t normally exist and therefore don’t have any pathways to destruction naturally in the environment. We have to think about whether we should be using these things at all.

Ron: It’s a daunting task, but a fascinating story. We thank you so much for coming and sharing your work with us, and continued success to all of you. Appreciate it

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Jean: Thanks. Thanks so much.

Ron: That’s going to do it for this episode. If you have any questions or comments, you can send them along to mainequestion@maine.edu. You can find all of our episodes on YouTube, on Spotify, Apple Podcast, and the 91����’s website. Till next time, this is Rob Lisnet.

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