Side of Design

Taking on PFAS in Design: BWBR Sheds Light on the Cost of “Forever Chemicals"

• BWBR • Episode 55

Share episode

The latest Side of Design podcast pulls back the curtain on PFAS, the infamous "forever chemicals" making headlines for their carcinogenic and environmentally damaging properties, and their widespread presence in many common finishes and materials—from stain-resistant couches to flame-retardant clothing to nonstick pans.

Host Matt Gerstner welcomes BWBR specialists Sara Biedenbender (Interior Designer), Kat Lauer (Project Planner), and Rachael Spires (Associate Principal and Performance Design & Quality Manager) for a lively conversation.

If you like what we are doing with our podcasts please subscribe and leave us a review!
You can also connect with us on any of our social media sites!
https://www.facebook.com/BWBRsolutions
https://twitter.com/BWBR
https://www.linkedin.com/company/bwbr-architects/
https://www.bwbr.com/side-of-design-podcast/

Matt Gerstner: 0:00 

This is Side of Design from BWBR, a podcast discussing all aspects of design, with knowledge leaders from every part of the industry. 

Matt Gerstner: 0:03

Hello and welcome to Side of Design from BWBR. I'm your host, Matt Gerstner. While aesthetics are obviously an important component of good design, safety and well-being are key to a space that functions well and preserves the welfare of its occupants. One big conversation around this topic is PFAS, the forever chemicals that are in the news for their carcinogenic and environmentally damaging properties, and their widespread presence in many common finishes of materials. On today's episode, we'll be exploring this real-time intersection of materiality, safety planning, and sustainability. Joining us today from BWBR is interior designer Sara Biedenbender, project planner Kat Lauer and associate principal and performance design and quality manager, Rachael Spires. Welcome everybody.

Kat Lauer: 0:58 

Thanks for having us. Thanks, Matt. Yeah, Thank you.

Matt Gerstner: 1:01 

We're just going to get right into this. PFAS it's a big, scary word. It's been in the news, we know it's in the ground, we know it's in all sorts of products that we use every single day. So, can somebody here give us just a quick overview of what PFAS is and why it's such a hot topic right now?

Rachael Spires: 1:21 

So PFAS stands for Per and also Polyfluoroalkyl Substances, so Perfluoroalkyl Substances and Polyfluoroalkyl Substances. So these are a group of chemicals that are all man-made these are not naturally occurring chemicals and they're in a wide range of products because they have very important properties that we value, which are water resistance, grease resistance and stain resistance, and then they also help with fire suppression. So you see them in firefighting films. So think of everything in your life that has stain fighting properties. Maybe your rain jacket is probably coated in PFAS. Children's pajamas have PFAS in them to help keep them flame retardant. So PFAS is everywhere you want to be, but also they're everywhere we don't want them to be yes, like in your cookware too.

Sara Biedenbender: 2:17 

Once you start looking around and thinking about all these things, they are pervasive and everywhere, and inside our bodies now too. They're saying everyone's got a level of them in their bodies ,because they don't go away they bioaccumulate, so they don't break down in human tissues or nature. Yep, that's the big problem with them. What I remember from my college organic chemistry is it's the fluoride, the fluoride ion in there, or not ion, element in there?

Kat Lauer: 2:44 

That's the real problem. Yeah, the atom, thanks. Is it an atom? Is it a fluoride atom? There's multiple fluoride atoms in them and those are the ones that make them different than our typical organic chemicals we'd find in nature.

Rachael Spires: 2:58 

And I did a search and I believe there's over 10,000 versions of PFAS chemicals and there's more made every day, depending on what people are trying to do with the science.

Sara Biedenbender: 3:08 

That's one of the biggest problems too, is they're just such a large class of chemicals. It's not just like a couple of things. There's just an ever-expanding kind of group of chemicals that are named different things and are everywhere, and they can change like one atom in it, in the molecule, and it's suddenly something different.

Kat Lauer: 3:25 

And so then it's sort of like a game of whack-a-mole in a way. It's like they can regulate one chemical by name, but then you just change the name or change one thing about it and it's something new. So I know like for a while it was the chain of eigh. Eight carbons long was the really bad one, and so they're like oh well, we'll shorten it, and the shorter it is, the less it bioaccumulates, but it's still a problem. So you know, without getting too much into the chemistry, there's a huge number of these chemicals and they keep coming up with more.

Rachael Spires: 3:55 

So what are the problems when it bioaccumulates, Like if we can't flush it out, if we can't process PFAS in our system, what are the results, what are the results of that?

Sara Biedenbender: 4:02 

Well, there's lots of studies now that the chemicals are linked to, you know, cancer, immune system effects, developmental issues, reproductive problems, just kind of a whole list of human impacts. And then environmental impacts. You know, it just contaminates the water, the soil and doesn't go away, as Kat was saying. So once it gets into our systems it just doesn't leave and it keeps expanding out into the atmosphere.

Matt Gerstner: 4:26 

All right. So, this just … this just opened up all sorts of questions for me, and you already said something that just totally surprised me. When I heard PFAS, I thought, ok, we got a chemical, and now I'm hearing thousands of chemicals that are falling into this category. That's craziness, and the fact that they just keep changing it and adding more to it and not stopping doing this makes me a little more unnerved. So, let's unpack why these chemicals would have an impact on our design work. One piece of this involves our science and tech work, with labs and designing spaces to study and detect PFAS contamination. So, can you talk about what's involved with that sort of complex planning?

Kat Lauer: 5:07 

Yeah, so we have worked with a couple of clients who are the folks who study PFAS and to study them right you need to isolate them. So if you're taking a water sample to find out how much PFAS is in there, you don't want to bring it into a lab that's contaminated with PFAS. We'll probably talk a little bit more about this later in the podcast. But because these chemicals are everywhere and they're used for their stain repellent and water repellent finishes or properties, you know we historically have put them in a lot of interior finishes.

Kat Lauer: 5:36 

So if you're trying to build a lab building that can study down to like the parts per trillion, how many PFAS chemicals are in this water sample, but your flooring material and your wall material and your ceiling material all have PFAS, then you can have background contamination in your data and so you won't be able to know what's noise in terms of like just coming from the room that you're doing the work in, versus what's coming from the environmental sample you collected. It takes a lot of down to like the piping that's coming into the room, like O-rings, and plumbing fixtures are frequently made of a PFAS material because it's durable, it's flexible, it'll last over a long time, but then your water that's going through there if you're using that as part of your data collection might be contaminated. So, in terms of designing lab spaces to study PFAS, you just have to think through what are all of the potential chemicals or materials in this room that could contribute to that background noise that you want to minimize.

Rachael Spires: 6:34 

If you're not able to get the PFAS out of, essentially that, the room in the supply, is there a way to treat the water before it's studied? Would reverse osmosis treatment or anything help with that or no?

Kat Lauer: 6:47 

You know, I'm not sure. The instruments that are used to study these are like mass spectrometers and chromatography machines and they're so sensitive and they have, you know, a lot of the solvents that they're using to run the samples through probably are coming from outside the building. You know you're not necessarily mixing it with water that you're using in the building, but it's just, you know, people handling it and there's a risk there that if you contaminate the samples then you're not knowing what the true answer is.

Rachael Spires: 7:17 

Because cleaning products even have PFAS in them, don't they?

Kat Lauer: 7:20 

Yeah, cleaning products or food wrappers. You know. You don't usually want to eat in a lab anyway, right, it's not great safety, but if somebody brought their hamburger wrapper into the lab, like there's another and it's on their hands when they're doing the work, it's a potential problem. But when we were looking into this for those clients and digging into the rabbit hole of like, where does this contain? It comes everywhere, like when you lubricate, like electrical wires to pull them, when you're wiring a building, like that, lubrication has a PFAS chemical right, and so there's some things that maybe aren't going to impact once the walls are sealed up and the buildings built. But if, once you start digging into where these are in our building industry, they're in everything, or it seems like they're in everything.

Matt Gerstner: 8:01 

Right, it sounds like the deeper we dig, the more we find in this one.

Sara Biedenbender: 8:07 

Unfortunately, yes.

Matt Gerstner: 8:09 

Okay, so in clean room spaces, where we're trying to do some serious investigation into chemicals and we're finding PFAS is in so many products that we're trying to use in buildings floorings, paints, whatever it might be. Then, on the interior design side of this, how does PFAS come into play when we're selecting finishes and materials? I mean, clearly there's sounds like there's going to be challenges, but are there opportunities we're seeing? Are there products out there that are beneficial and don't have this?

Sara Biedenbender: 8:42 

Yeah, there's definitely substitutes for PFAS that lots of companies have come up with. There's a lot of work to do still, but just in the last five years I guess that I've been doing materials research and we as BWBR have been developing our process for vetting out different materials. Different companies have really come forward with coming up with new products and just knowing what we need and what we're looking for. We at BWBR we've been developing a system that coincides with the AIA Framework of Excellence Materials Pledge that we signed. So this takes a look like a holistic look at material selection for what we call the five impact categories. So it's like human health, ecosystem health, social health and equity, climate health and circular economy and all of these categories do overlap and coincide.

Sara Biedenbender: 9:28 

But we really take a look at the human health and ecosystem health categories when we're selecting materials that are trying to target things like PFAS. So we require transparency and documentation for our materials and finishes. It's called a health product declaration or an environmental product declaration, where they have to list what's in the materials and finishes, and we also try to avoid different toxins such as, you know, PFAS as well in our products and we try to have a lot of red list free materials on our projects as well, which the red list encompasses PFAS, but it's just a list of kind of worst in class chemicals that have been determined for building materials, and so we really try to vet out a lot of that and we track as well how we're doing for each of these impact categories for every project in regards to our finished selections. So that's how we're really trying to vet out a lot of this with our research.

Matt Gerstner: 10:25 

Are we seeing more companies coming up with newer products that don't include PFAS in them? I mean, is this, is this happening more frequently now?

Kat Lauer: 10:35 

Yeah, there's definitely more like just general awareness in the interior design and construction industry but also just in the general public, right, knowing that it's in our nonstick cookware and everything. But I, you know, thinking about the marketing emails that I get from some of. But I, you know thinking about the marketing emails that I get from some of our interior materials. You know more and more of them are saying, hey, we've removed PFAS, we're taking these chemicals out of our products. Companies are becoming more aware that it's that's a selling point to not have that.

Rachael Spires: 11:03 

In addition to the companies, the states, I think, are also getting more savvy on this. We're seeing governments start to have an impact on these. As of January 1st, in the state of Minnesota, a law went into effect that PFAS cannot be added to a number of products, and I believe the intent is that by 2032, it will be a comprehensive ban with no products that have intentionally added PFAS in them. So as of January 1st, when Sara and Kat are looking at products for their projects in Minnesota, carpets and fabric treatments, textile furnishings, cannot have PFAS added in the state of Minnesota.

Matt Gerstner: 11:40 

Okay, okay. So are we seeing any impact to our work already, or do you think it's going to have a bigger impact as this all starts to play out?

Sara Biedenbender: 11:49 

I think we're already doing our process that we have in place with the materials pledge and with our process. We really are already doing this, trying to vet out a lot of toxic chemicals and such. I think in the future we'll just hopefully have more options and selections from companies, because right now we are looking to vet out all that stuff and we are talking to our reps and asking them and telling them what we want to have in our products. So hopefully it'll just continue to shift the market to what we need.

Kat Lauer: 12:18 

I was going to say, and I think, like for our clients, for the end users, like hopefully for them, there's no difference. They don't they? I mean, they're entrusting us to design a healthy building environment and they're not necessarily looking down at the nitty gritty of like, okay, what chemicals are in this fabric on that chair. But as long as we're doing our due diligence and selecting the products that don't have that, their end result should be the same.

Sara Biedenbender: 12:42 

Right, and we do we healthier. Oh sorry, Keep going.

Kat Lauer: 12:44 

No, no, just healthier Right, so less chemicals.

Sara Biedenbender: 12:47 

Yeah, absolutely, and some of our challenges are that we do have some clients that you know been using their standards and their same products for years and years and it's their go-tos, it's what works well for them, it's what they know. But we've been doing a lot of research with our tracking so hopefully in the future we can take a look at those products that may not be the healthiest for certain companies and inform them and educate them to be able to swap it out for a healthier alternative that still gives them the same performance that they're looking for.

Rachael Spires: 13:12 

I think it's interesting, right? So there's this idea like, if we relate this to our diet, I kind of think it's similar to our diet, right cause we're not supposed to eat ultra processed foods, those are really bad things, right.

Rachael Spires: 13:22 

So Michael Pollan has the whole thing of eat plants not too much, something like that and don't eat anything that has an ingredient that your grandma wouldn't have recognized. Well, when we look at what the list of products are that do not have PFAS on it, it's mostly plants, which just kind of cracks me up a little bit. So, for example, using wool carpet instead of plastic made carpet is going to be something better. Using a bio-based wax or coating for water resistance rather than a chemically made product. Mother Nature gave us a lot of really great things that we can use for our products that are also better for people. Wood, cork, wool, you name it. And using what is available, what is renewable, what is sustainable, is actually going to help us not use PFAS.

Kat Lauer: 14:12 

Yeah, PFAS is really trying to make all of these developed plastic fake materials that we've come up with last longer, when the materials that have been around since forever last long enough on their own. We just sort of got used to like one size fits all cleaning regimen for building maintenance, which is simple and great, but maybe it came with a cost right, chemicals added, and so sometimes you know there's a little bit of education right about like you might not be able to treat your floor and your chairs and your walls all the same anymore in terms of maintenance, but the chemical impact to the users of the building is better.

Rachael Spires: 14:53 

The other interesting thing, so the chemical, so cleaning stuff, right, that also is not just doesn't go into just the embodied carbon, right, or the materials that we use to make our products or our buildings, our designs, that sort of thing, but then it also gets into the maintenance and the longevity of everything that we design. And I was chatting with someone who was talking about flooring and I've never been to Louvre. I don't know if anyone here has been to the Louvre but he said that the Louvre has a wood floor, an unfinished wood floor, and it has held up for decades and you don't have to worry about cleaning products. Now, is this true? I don't know. I should probably verify it before it ends up in a podcast for all of America to hear. This product rep was telling me about that. So I really like this idea of using these materials that don't require really complicated, scary chemicals to keep them bright, shiny and new and we can also enjoy the beauty and the aging and the character of the materials that we're selecting.

Matt Gerstner: 15:54 

And along those same lines. One of my favorite things is when I'm in an old historic building that has stone floors.

Rachael Spires: 16:01 

Oh yeah.

Matt Gerstner: 16:01 

And then you start walking up stone steps and you see the wear patterns in those steps and you think about the thousands of people that have traversed these steps, that helped to cause that slow wear over time, and just how beautiful everything still is, and no PFAS. And no PFAS it's stone.

Rachael Spires: 16:21 

Yeah.

Matt Gerstner: 16:22 

Are there like big picture implications in all of this? If the states, if the rest of the states aren't getting along we're talking about everybody out there If they're not jumping on board and helping to get rid of these forever chemicals, what kind of sustainability impacts are we going to see?

Rachael Spires: 16:42 

I would actually take the other kind of side of that. I think you know how, like California has like the most strict car things on the planet, so that because they want to sell in California and that's probably like 25 percent of the market they just change their cars to match whatever California needs, and that's what we get in Minnesota is a car that would also be able to be sold in California. Okay, and I think that's the direction that things are going to go, because there are some other states that are that are moving in tandem with us. Maine is another state that is putting in PFAS bans. My hunch is that the manufacturers like Shaw, whatever that's making flooring they're going to want to sell their product in Minnesota and not have it custom for Minnesota. They're going to reformulate it so that it can be sold in Minnesota, it can be sold in Maine, it can be sold in Wisconsin. So I'm actually optimistic that when one, one or two, three, four states take the lead, the companies follow that lead and then all the other states benefit from that.

Kat Lauer: 17:40 

California, is a great example. Kaiser Permanente is one of, like, the big health systems out there and they I don't know if they've banned PFAS from their materials lists, but I know they a while ago said no more vinyl. Right, and I wouldn't be surprised if they've also already said no PFAS from their materials lists. And they're a really big health system and there's other health systems in the US that say well, we'll follow the Kaiser standards for materials. I think you're right. I think it's going to spread.

Sara Biedenbender: 18:08 

Yeah, and there's about 30 states that have approved some sort of PFAS-related regulations in the last five years, so that's good.

Matt Gerstner: 18:16 

It's definitely good to hear.

Rachael Spires: 18:18 

And I think those regulations that was just the first foray, right, Sara, you're going to actually get stronger. And we were talking about the hamburger wrapper in the science and tech lab and I believe Minnesota now has one for PFAS to be removed from all food packaging. If that goes through, no more PFAS in our hamburger wrapper that would be good.

Matt Gerstner: 18:41 

Or a french fry, that would definitely be good. It's just there's already too much of it around us.

Rachael Spires: 18:45 

We don't need it in our food either yeah, I think the holy grail would be to come up. You know, like I know they're working on what enzymes and microbes to eat styrofoam to deal with that essential problem that we have. It'd be nice if they had a way to treat PFAS, and I remember hearing some options of boiling at one point, but I don't know, I think that was all just a hoax. But if, eventually, if they could find a way to treat PFAS in our systems, especially like our soil, like we didn't even get into the soil, one which is destroying farmland all across the country.

Matt Gerstner: 19:18 

But if we find a way. Oh yeah, that's why.

Rachael Spires: 19:20 

Maine actually enacted it.

Matt Gerstner: 19:22 

In what way does it destroy the soil? What's happening?

Rachael Spires: 19:25 

What happened is so we're taking a PFAS all of our things that we use wash scrub. Imagine every chemical cleanser blah, blah, blah. Right, there's PFAS in all of our things that we use wash scrub like. Imagine every you know chemical cleanser blah, blah, blah. Right, there's PFAS. And all that we use it. We wash stuff, we clean stuff. It goes down our drains and then it goes to central sewer treatment systems.

Rachael Spires: 19:42 

Now remember, PFAS doesn't go away, it just builds. So what they did back in the oh, I can't remember if it was the 60s, 70s or 80s but the sewage treatment plants would say, hey, look at all this great fertilizer we have, we'll give it to you, you know, for free or at a reduced rate for your fields. So people would buy all this poo, I don't know what works on a podcast, but they would buy all this poo from these sewage treatment plants and spread it over their fields. So then all of that PFAS full poo would go into their fields and it would soak into the ground. And then now you've got people 20, 30, 40 years later that are buying property to start an organic farm, getting their soil tested and finding out it's completely contaminated with PFAS. They cannot sell the food that their property would grow.

Matt Gerstner: 20:31 

Oh my goodness, that's a serious thing.

Rachael Spires: 20:34 

It's huge. That was one of the big instigators for a bunch of the Maine laws the laws in Maine in the United States like some crazy stories. 

Matt Gerstner: 20:48 

Well is there anything we haven't touched on regarding PFAS here that that anybody wanted to talk about? Because I think we've given a lot for our listeners to think about and be concerned about, for sure, when they're thinking about products, when they're thinking about whether it doesn't just have to be architectural products, doesn't have to be. Flooring can be your kids pajamas, it could be the bottle or glass that you're drinking out of, or even your cleaning chemicals. But is there anything else that we wanted to talk about?

Rachael Spires: 21:12 

I'm optimistic I had mentioned earlier. I'm optimistic especially now that we're starting to see some significant movement with the companies, with the states putting in bans for PFAS, and then I'm also very optimistic because of the AIA Materials Pledge, where BWBR is one of the inaugural signers to the AiA Materials Pledge and we are working on removing these items from the products that we are using to design with. So I think we actually have a pretty great future ahead of us.

Sara Biedenbender: 21:40 

Definitely, and I was going too say items, I guess, that come in contact with humans or yourself most often, like your cookware or the things that you drink out of, or like for us in building projects, the textiles and upholstery things that humans are really coming into contact with every day. Those are good places to start if it can seem really overwhelming.

Kat Lauer: 22:09 

I agree. I think there's lots of room for optimism and there's lots of simple steps we can take, like on an individual level. You hear about PFAS contamination in water, especially here in the Twin Cities metro area. But they figured out how to like, filter and treat the water and clean it up. And so to what Rachel was talking about. You know, we'll figure out a way to clean the soil. It's going to take us time and it's going to take lots of smart scientists doing their job, but it'll get there. And then, in the meantime, you know, we in my house we switched out all our nonstick cookware for stainless steel and it's just, we don't think about it anymore. It takes a little more cleaning sometimes, but I also don't burn as much food.

Rachael Spires: 22:49 

We installed a reverse osmosis drinking water system because we're a well, so whatever is in our water. So that makes me feel better too. We know that there's no PFAS in our drinking water.

Matt Gerstner: 23:03 

We have done the same. Where we are, we are a well as well, yeah.

Rachael Spires: 23:07 

It makes a big difference.

Matt Gerstner: 23:09 

Well, I can't thank each of you enough for being on today. I know you've got a lot of great info that you've given us to think about and I appreciate every single one of you being here today. 

Rachael Spires, Sara Beidenbender, Kat Lauer: 23:12 

Thanks, matt. Yeah, thank you. 

Matt Gerstner: 23:14 

This has been Side of Design from BWBR, brought to you without any paid advertisements or commercials. If you found value in what you've heard today, give us a like, leave us a comment or, better yet, share us with your network. You can also reach out to us if you'd like to share an idea for a show or start a discussion. Email us at sideofdesign@bwbr.com.