Brenda Hampton’s story begins nearly 1,000 miles away from her Alabama home and almost 90 years ago, with an Ohio farm-boy-turned-chemist fresh out of graduate studies. The postdoctoral student, Roy Plunkett, had taken on his first job at a New Jersey laboratory of E. I. du Pont de Nemours and Company—which was also known as DuPont.
3M Water Tower in St. Paul, Minnesota. (Doug Wallick, Flickr)
In 1938, Roy was seeking out an alternative for the hazardous refrigerants that were used to keep food cold at the time. As part of this process, he stored a gas called tetrafluoroethylene (TFE) in cylinders at very low temperatures—assuming that he would still find a gas afterwards. Yet when he sawed open the cylinder, he found a white powder instead. Roy’s initial reaction was one of disappointment; Now we’ll have to start all over again! he thought.
What had happened was that the substance had gone through a process called “polymerization,” in which a double bond between two carbon atoms in one TFE compound came apart in such a way that it could “attack” other TFE compounds.
“One of them hooked up with another one, with another one, with another one, until there were hundreds, thousands, millions of tetrafluoroethylenes,” said Kathy Davis, an associate professor of chemistry at Indiana’s Manchester University, Roy’s alma mater.
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Roy noticed that the powder was heat resistant, chemically inert, and so low in surface friction that most other materials would not stick to it. Yet the young scientist hadn’t yet realized what he had stumbled upon: an entirely new chemical that would eventually become a cash cow for DuPont—and one of the biggest environmental problems the world has ever seen.
The company ultimately trademarked Roy’s white powder, called polytetrafluoroethylene (PTFE), as Teflon in 1944. Teflon had unique properties that made it particularly appealing to the U.S. military: it was persistent, nonstick, nonreactive with other chemicals and resistant to both high temperatures and corrosion. In fact, one of its first uses was to contain highly reactive materials, like uranium, in the making of the atomic bomb. Collectively, PTFE and chemicals like it came to be known as PFAS.
Though these chemicals had early roots in World War II, their military application took off in the 1960s. At that time, the U.S. Navy partnered with the Minnesota Mining and Manufacturing Company (3M) to develop a PFAS-based foam that could suppress jet-fuel-based fires by smothering the flammable liquids responsible for their ignition. The primary PFAS ingredient in the new “aqueous film-forming foam” (AFFF) was for many years perfluorooctanesulfonic acid (PFOS), one of the most notorious types of forever chemicals.
PFAS provided armor not only on the battlefield, but also in the kitchenware and in other consumer products—with the surge in popularity of a Teflon-based nonstick coating. Before mass production of the material could occur, however, scientists had to overcome a tremendous hurdle: figuring out how to bond a nonstick powder to other solids. Techniques that ultimately proved effective included heating the PTFE to high temperatures, blending it with hydrocarbons and mixing it with solvents that extracted some of the fluorine atoms. Early on, Teflon was used for insulating electrical equipment, coating industrial valve and pump components, and eventually, commercial food processing.
Though Roy Plunkett may have been the brains behind the Teflon chemical, the scientist “had nothing to do with putting it on a frying pan,” his daughter-in-law, Susan Plunkett, wrote in a February 2022 text message. She did recall, however, that “a man approached Roy at a social event and told him that his discovery had saved his life because he had received an artificial heart valve made of Teflon.” And when Roy received a medal for his invention in 1951, each guest went home with a nonstick muffin tin.
The first person to commercialize nonstick pans coated with the material was actually across the Atlantic, in France. Engineer Marc Grégoire’s invention was the result of a friendly marital challenge. An avid fisherman eager to avoid tangles, Grégoire decided to heat Teflon powder just below its melting point to coat his aluminum fishing gear. When his wife, Colette, got wind of his new hobby, she challenged him to coat her cookware with the material as well. He patented the technology in 1954 and the couple launched a company, Tefal, in 1956.
Soon after, Tefal opened a factory in Rumilly, a small town in the French Alps near the Swiss border. It attracted employees by offering relatively high salaries, even if the working environment was far from ideal. Bernard Truffet, the second-ever employee at the Rumilly factory, recounted “difficult conditions” from his first days on the job, lamenting how they “were building things cheaply.” He recalled one situation in which he was tasked with acquiring dozens of meters of bicycle chains for a conveyor belt and another in which a flood of Teflon erupted from a centrifuge. But the company’s eventual transformation into an industrial titan brought significant change to the verdant Alps community, and many residents relished their boost in lifestyle. Henry Bouvier, an employee from 1967 to 2007, described the factory as “somewhat of an institution” in the region, noting that salaries were “obviously much higher” than those paid by small pharmacies or artisan shops in town.
The forever-changed village still houses the Tefal global headquarters and continues to boast the coveted title of “the world frying pan capital.” In 2016, officials erected a monument of a giant metal frying pan at the town’s entrance for the company’s 60th anniversary, while celebrating with festivities along “Tefal Street”—the original home of a product that unexpectedly became a post–World War II phenomenon.
Nonstick pans became a major hit, both in Europe and across the pond. Tefal’s products made it to the U.S. market in December 1960, with stores ordering a million pans each month by mid-1961. That year, a photo of First Lady Jackie Kennedy holding a Tefal pan caused a significant boost in company sales. Historic promotions for the cookware introduced a so-called happy pan as an “amazing new concept in cooking” and the savior from getting “stuck in the kitchen.”
A 1968 ad from Mirro Aluminum Company, a former cookware giant, promises “Hard-Bond Super-Tough Teflon” pots and pans, as a woman with a ’60s-style flip-do glances flirtatiously at a man from the stove. A tagline trumpets the products as “for ladies who want more than just slickness from their Teflon.”
Another ad, this time from DuPont, depicts a glowering woman, struggling to scrub off layers of grease from a steel pan.
“What a way to start married life,” the ad declares in bold print. “There are better things in life than being married to a sink. Talking, walking, having a night out with your bread-winner. Anything, rather than scrubbing leftovers out of a pan.”
The ads worked, and soon, nonstick pans became a cookware staple in households across America. Yet with heavy demand also came heavy manufacturing.
In 1951, DuPont opened a major plant called Washington Works, in Washington, West Virginia, along the Ohio River. At the plant, the Teflon manufacturing process also made use of a chemical called perfluoro- octanoic acid (PFOA), which DuPont bought from 3M. The mining and manufacturing giant, meanwhile, opened several plants of its own, including a facility in Cottage Grove, Minnesota, in 1948.
Irene Dalbotten, who began her 40-year tenure at the plant shortly after it opened, told a local newspaper in 2008 that the factory started out small “but it grew fast.”
One of the products the company manufactured there was Scotchgard, a fabric protector that repels water and prevents stains. Like Teflon, Scotchgard was also synthesized by accident—when a lab assistant spilled a liquid rubber concoction, which then splashed onto chemist Patsy Sherman’s shoes. As the scientists scrambled to clean her shoes with water and other substances, every attempt was repelled by the mixture. Sherman and fellow chemist Sam Smith transformed this inadvertent discovery into a product of its own, and sales of the Scotchgard stain repellent kicked off in 1956. What they didn’t know, however, is that in addition to generating a lot of sales, this product would also turn to have deadly consequences.
Over time, 3M grew, eventually launching plants all around the world that made not only PFAS but a wide range of products—from office supplies to electrical equipment to masks used during the Covid-19 pandemic. And one lucky spot to gain a massive manufacturing branch was an industrial complex just outside of Decatur, Alabama, right in Brenda Hampton’s neck of the woods.
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About 20 miles upstream from Courtland, Decatur was once a sparkling Southern city replete with dress shops, cab service and culture, as Brenda recalled from her grandparents’ lore. They, and their parents before them, worked as sharecroppers in the surrounding farm fields and came into Decatur to enjoy the vibrancy of urban life.
“They would hang their head in shame—they couldn’t believe it,” she said, of the current landscape.
In its early days in the 1800s, Decatur’s location along the Tennessee River at the intersection of two railway lines made it a hub of trade and transport, while the creation of the Tennessee Valley Authority in 1933 and subsequent construction of the Wheeler Dam brought further development to the region. In 1953, the Alabama Municipal Journal deemed Decatur “Alabama’s fastest growing industrial empire,” and a Chamber of Commerce pamphlet from 1961 proclaimed, “Nowhere in America can be found a better balance between agriculture and industry,” nothing that the city’s seven-mile waterfront included 33 industries representing a total investment of over $100 million.
The City of Decatur and the larger Morgan County made things easy for companies and manufacturers, offering and industry-friendly environment to those interested in entertaining a move to this corner of the Deep South, particularly in unincorporated rural areas.
“That’s how these plants come in here—they sit on the outskirts of the city,” Brenda said.
It was during this period that residents of Decatur first became acquainted with 3M. Phil Raths, who would end up managing the Decatur plant until his retirement in 1984, began eyeing the spot in 1959, and the company opened its factory within two years. Among the lures of the city was the presence of manufacturing giants—legacy chemical company Chemstrand, as well as Wolverine, Goodyear and a flour mill—employers that had made the region ripe for industrial expansion while promoting river development and job growth.
“Those were all significant workplaces for Decatur,” Raths told the Decatur Daily. “Before that, people had to leave Decatur to make a living.”
The local news story attributed much of the plant’s early successes to Raths, surmising that “perhaps his years as a plant manager at 3M made him a problem-solver, or maybe it was growing up on a ranch in Roundup, Montana, or rearing ten children.” After his retirement from the company, Raths also “put his business and family skills to work to improve Decatur in many ways: as a city councilman.”
Historical literature commissioned by the mayor and city council of Decatur in 1968 and published in 1970 hailed 3M as “a great and nationally famous corporation.” Noting that 3M specialized in a broad range of industrial chemicals, the literature explained that the plant hosted a division, managed at the time by Raths, that produced materials like plastics and textile-treating compounds. Another part of the company with a major Decatur presence was a separate division responsible for manufacturing film.
The number of workers at the Decatur 3M plant continued to grow over time. Beginning with 100 employees in 1961, the factory rapidly expanded its workforce—employing more than 1,000 people for a collective $11.3 million in wages and salaries in 1975.
But back in 1961, when this tenfold rise in employment was just a dream, the Alabama Chamber of Commerce declared in its pamphlet that this “Fresh Water Fishing Capital of the South” had “every reason to look forward to a glorious future,” thanks to the combination of an “enlightened citizenry” and “devoted community leaders.”
“Decatur’s future growth and success can most certainly be assured,” the pamphlet boasted.
For a while, during Brenda’s childhood, those golden promised seemed to materialize. “People were able to afford better homes and better transportation,” Brenda said. “And in the area where 3M is at, once that comes in, CEOs always talk to another plant to find out how the area is, so it brought in other plants.”
The lure of jobs kept 3M popular in the community. Yet as the chemical giant grew and grew, decades-old-mom-and-pop businesses, along with legacy industries, eventually began to shut their doors. When, for example, the International Paper mill closed down in 2014, it was Lawrence County’s largest employer, taking with it 1,096 jobs and $771,000 annual tax revenue from Courtland.
As of mid-2022, manufacturing still made up a significant share of both Courtland and North Courtland’s economies, responsible for about 35% and 39% of jobs, respectively, while Decatur clocked in at about 20%. Yet the dream of middle-class livelihoods appears to have gone up in smoke alongside the plumes from the manufacturing plants. Courtland’s median household income was almost $40,000, while North Courtland’s was nearly $31,000 in a 2022 federal survey. Decatur, less reliant on manufacturing jobs, was higher at more than $55,000—but still a good $20,000 below the national average.
The economic push and pull of the chemical industry was already a significant burden for Brenda and her neighbors to shoulder. But whether 3M and its compatriots were creating jobs or hurting the community’s other financial prospects, they were certainly producing vast amounts of waste—byproducts that ended up in landfills that were unequipped to handle them and in waterways that carried pollution to nearby towns. And although that waste was there to stay, the same could not be said for all the companies and the jobs they provided. That eventual emptiness and contamination, Brenda said, caught up with the area and “everything just died out.”
“It changed the landscape here,” she recalled. “Then the stores and things closed—no grocery store, things like that. That’s what happened in this area. … It was devastated.” And in the case of PFAS, the threat wasn’t just to neighborhood stores and historic town centers but to the residents themselves.
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As the Decatur 3M plant was ramping up production of PFAS and the popularity of products like Teflon surged in the middle of the 20th century, evidence was emerging that the substances also had a dark side.
In the 1950s, researchers inside and outside DuPont started to see an odd phenomenon: people exposed to heated Teflon developed flu-like symptoms, feeling chest discomfort, followed by a dry cough, increased heart and breathing rates, fever, shivering and sweats. A 1951 paper in The Lancet documented four such cases—including two that involved DuPont employees. The accounts continued to trickle in, with an internal memo from 1959 discussing the experience of employee John Kropenski, who came down with a case of the “shakes.” Earlier in the day that he developed these symptoms, Kropenski had cut a Teflon pipe while he had an open pack of cigarettes in his pocket. The tremors began after he smoked the cigarettes later that evening.
About a year later, a New York–based doctor documented a similar phenomenon in one of his patients, a middle-aged man who worked with Teflon. The doctor, Henry Wharton, said in a letter to the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) that the man was experiencing “angina-like” chest pain as well as dizziness and shortness of breath. The patient noticed that his co-workers had similar symptoms, and his foreman told him that these symptoms were “caused by Teflon and that they all know about it,” the doctor wrote. Wharton took a chest X-ray of the patient, observing abnormalities and questioning whether “Teflon might be carcinogenic or whether it might produce” a lung disease. In reply, an FDA official said the agency had “relatively little occasion to consider” Teflon’s health effects—a response that foreshadowed years of regulatory neglect to come.
By the early 1960s, stories about what came to be called “polymer fume fever,” along with other ill-effects of inhaling Teflon, were circulating beyond company walls. One account, published in a letter to the Canadian Medical Association Journal, alleged that a person who smoked a Teflon-contaminated cigarette had died—though the writer later retracted the story.
Nevertheless, in response to these stories, DuPont published a pamphlet called “The Anatomy of a Rumor,” decrying the accusations. The pamphlet’s author, DuPont toxicologist John A. Zapp Jr., acknowledged the existence of polymer fume fever—likening it to influenza—but stressed that there are “no lasting physiological effects” and linked the symptoms to soot pollution, as opposed to gases related to Teflon. In addition to redirecting blame for polymer fume fever, Zapp also emphasized the safety of Teflon pans.
A manager at a company that used Teflon wrote to the Journal of Teflon in June 1962 to praise the missive as “extremely informative”—and he requested 30 copies to distribute to his employees, who had regular contact with the material. “We have all been exposed to these rumors in various forms, and possibly unknowingly some of our people have assisted in passing some of them as impressions along to our customers,” he wrote.
Despite these assurances, even prior to the 1960s scientists were beginning to demonstrate that the impacts of PFAS exposure might extend beyond a temporary “flu.” In a 1956 paper, researchers with Stanford University found that PFOA could bind to human blood. It was also during this era that evidence began to emerge about the potential of these substances to harm animal organs. For example, a 1955 study published in the journal Cancer Research found that embedding Teflon under rats’ skin could trigger the growth of cancerous tumors.
As alarming findings began to accumulate, DuPont’s own personnel also started to discover adverse health effects in animals. Toxicologist Dorothy Hood wrote in a 1961 company memo that several PFAS, including PFOA, were toxic and could cause the enlargement of rat livers in low doses. She described another PFAS, known by the acronym AHT as “a very toxic compound.” “It is recommended that all three materials … be handled with extreme care,” Hood wrote. “Contact with the skin should be strictly avoided.”
By the following February, and at the same time in 1962 that Dupont was downplaying health hazards associated with inhaling Teflon, company scientists documented additional health issues stemming from PFOA. DuPont pathologist G.W.H. Schepers wrote that month in an internal company memo that rats fed PFOA had moderately enlarged livers, shrunken pancreases, and slightly enlarged kidneys, adrenal glands, and testes. A few days later, Schepers followed up to explain that in three experiments, rats fed PFOA were killed by damage to their stomachs, intestines, brains, lungs, and pancreases. Meanwhile, another company document suggested that the problem might apply to an entire group of PFAS compounds known as surfactants—substances such as soaps, detergents and lubricants that decrease a liquid’s surface tension and, in the case of PFAS, enable water and oil to mix into a foaming agent.
Following these initial findings, DuPont researchers extended their experiments to also include dogs, noting that the canine research “might be useful in detecting liver injury in personnel.” Sure enough, the studies found liver enlargement. By 1966, DuPont was trying to figure out how to get rid of waste from its Teflon plant. While acknowledging that some of the solid wastes contained “toxic” PFAS, the company claimed to have found a suitable method of disposal—as long as the toxic parts were “reduced to an acceptable level.” All one needed to do was bake the waste for five hours. Without taking this action, it warned, some of the toxic PFAS “would be leached into the groundwater.”
Sharon is an award-winning staff reporter for The Hill, covering Western climate and policy from her home base in Boulder, Colorado. She was the recipient of a 2022 SEAL Environmental Journalism Award, and she spent the 2019-2020 academic year as a Ted Scripps Fellow in Environmental Journalism at the University of Colorado Boulder. She has also reported for The Jerusalem Post and The New York Jewish Week. A graduate of both the University of Pennsylvania and Columbia Journalism School, Sharon was honored by The Heschel Center for Environmental Learning and Leadership and the Pratt Foundation in May 2013 for her significant contribution to environmental journalism in Israel.
Rachel covers energy and environment policy for The Hill: that’s everything from climate change to gasoline prices to toxic chemicals to renewable and fossil energy. She is originally from South Florida, and she studied journalism and political science at (the very cold) Northwestern University. Previously, her work has appeared in the Chicago Sun-Times, The Daily Beast, the Tampa Bay Times, and The Palm Beach Post.
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