3M Submits Plans to Minnesota for Cleaning Up PFCs in the East Metro

By Bob Shaw, Pioneer Press, St. Paul, Minn.

Apr. 8–Call it the $56 million spill.

That’s the maximum the 3M Co. will pay because its chemicals leaked into Washington County’s water, as tallied last week from state and company documents.

The company has now completed formal proposals to clean up sites contaminated with PFCs, or perfluorochemicals.

Plans for each site include several ways to get rid of PFCs in water and soil. The Minnesota Pollution Control Agency is evaluating the options and will make recommendations in early May.

“They propose, and we pick,” said MPCA spokesman Ralph Pribble. The choices could bring the total of 3M’s expenses to anywhere from $50 million to $56 million.

Feasibility studies to clean up three sites include maximum costs of:

— $15 million for the former Chemolite plant in Cottage Grove.

— $10.6 million for a dump site in southern Woodbury.

— $7.4 million for an Oakdale site.

In addition, 3M has already spent or is committed to spend:

— $8 million to help clean up the Washington County Landfill in Lake Elmo.

— $10 million for installing filters for Oakdale city water and connecting some Lake Elmo homes to city water.

— $5 million to the MPCA to analyze the effects of PFCs on humans and the environment.

As costly as the cleanup is, it won’t bankrupt 3M.

The company set aside $147 million in 2006 to deal with “environmental liabilities,” including the PFC spills. The company stopped making PFCs in 2002, but in 2000 alone the manufacture

and sale of PFCs was a $300 million business for 3M, according to the company.

“3M has adequate resources to do the job right. That is my main message,” 3M spokesman Bill Nelson said.

The $56 million figure does not include 3M’s cost of defending lawsuits — still pending — from potentially more than 1,000 plaintiffs who claim the chemicals hurt them.

Lawyers for those plaintiffs have compared their case to one in West Virginia in 2005. There, a judge ordered the DuPont Corp. to pay $300 million to remove PFCs from water and to monitor the health of the people who drank it.

Nelson said the Ohio case isn’t comparable. “The facts are different and the law is different,” he said. The 3M cases are scheduled to go to trial late this year.

Also not included in the figure is what the state will spend to clean up the Washington County landfill in Lake Elmo.

The site has soil with leftover PFCs, but 3M is not obligated to clean it because the state took legal responsibility for the landfill years ago.

Still, Nelson said 3M will contribute $8 million for that site, out of the total cleanup tab of $23 million. The Legislature is now considering a bill authorizing the remaining $15 million.

Pribble said other pollutants in the Washington County Landfill site would be removed by a cleanup effort, “but the PFCs are what’s driving it.”

HOW CLEANUPS ARE DONE

At each cleanup site, 3M is proposing to pump out groundwater and filter out the PFCs. The water then would be piped downstream, often into storm sewers.

Treating the contaminated soil is more complicated.

The company proposes sealing some contaminated areas with a waterproof blanket to keep rainwater from seeping through the soil.

Elsewhere, the company would strip the soil and truck it to custom-made lined landfills — like enormous bowls — to keep chemicals from leaching into groundwater.

These new landfills could be built near the dumpsites. One other possibility, said Pribble, is the construction of an addition to the SKB Industrial Landfill in Rosemount.

The amount of soil involved in the four sites would be enormous, filling as many as 12,000 trucks.

WHY 3M IS PAYING

The company produced PFCs beginning in 1947 for use in products including Teflon and Scotchgard stain repellant. The company legally disposed of PFC byproducts in landfills, a normal practice at the time.

In the 1980s and ’90s, scientists found traces of the chemicals in people and animals around the world, and 3M stopped making PFCs in 2002.

Traces of the chemicals were found in drinking water in Washington County in 2004. But it was never clear how much of a health threat the chemicals posed.

In megadoses, PFCs cause cancer and other health problems in rats. But the traces found in drinking water were so small that officials called them harmless. Experts once calculated that a person would have to drink 500,000 glasses of Woodbury water a day for life to match the dose deemed barely harmful in rats.

That ambiguity makes the vast cleanup effort unusual. If the PFCs are harmless, why is the company spending more than $50 million to clean them up?

“The answer is consistent with 3M values as a company,” said 3M’s Nelson. “These are not a risk to health, but going forward we think it is better to control the migration” of PFCs into the environment.

“We do not want to continue to be a source of these materials getting into the environment further,” he said.

The cleanup of the former Chemolite plant in Cottage Grove will cost as much as $15 million. Contaminated soil around the plant includes a sandbar near a discharge pipe, made of dirt and sludge from the PFC manufacturing process.

NEARING AN END

With the completion of the cleanup feasibility studies, some officials expressed relief.

“We are reaching an end point,” said the MPCA’s Pribble. “The cleanup is coming to a head.”

Local officials, who were alarmed when the news of the PFC pollution broke in recent years, seemed satisfied by the cleanup plans.

“It’s premature to say it’s over,” said Lake Elmo Mayor Dean Johnston, himself a 3M employee until 1988. “But the big picture is that 3M has treated Lake Elmo fairly.”

Johnston said there are still “less than 50″ homes in Lake Elmo with PFC levels in their well water that exceed state-established safety limits. He assumes 3M will take measures to help those well owners.

Sandy Shiely, mayor of Cottage Grove, said she still worries that polluted water may damage the city’s reputation, but she seemed to forgive 3M.

“When you look at the large chemical companies in the country we could be working with, we are fortunate to have 3M as a partner,” Shiely said.

She said the company is paying for mistakes made innocently years ago.

“I told the people from 3M, you must absolutely wish you could go back 40 years,” Shiely said. “We all do.”

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