In 2021, James Kenney and her husband were in a large -scale store buying a piece of furniture when the sales partner asked if they wanted to add a fabric protector. Kenney, the secretary of the cabinet in the New Mexico environment department, asked to see the technical sheet of the product. He and her husband were shocked to see chemicals forever listed as ingredients in the protector.
“I think of your normal and daily new Mexican who tries to get out of it, to make their furniture last a little longer, and they think:” Oh, that's, great! ” It's not sure, ”he says. “It turns out that they tried to sell it to the secretary of the environment.”
Last week, the New Mexico Legislative Assembly adopted a pair of bills that Kenney hopes to help protect consumers by his state. If it is signed by the Governor, the legislation would possibly prohibit consumption products which added APF – to permanence and to polyfluored alkyl substances, known colloquially under the name of “chemicals forever” because of their persistence in the environment – from sales to new -mexic.
While the concerns of health and the environment concerning chemicals forever rise to the national level, the new -mexic is joining a small but increasing number of states that move to limit – and, in some cases, Ban – PFAS in consumer products. New Mexico is now the third state to adopt a ban on the PFAS through the Legislative Assembly. Ten other states have prohibitions or limits of additional APFs in certain consumer products, including kitchen utensils, carpets, clothing and cosmetics. This year, at least 29 states – a record number – have bills linked to the PFAS before states legislatures, according to a analysis Bill by safer states, a network of state defense organizations based on the state working on potentially dangerous chemical problems.
The industries of chemicals and consumer products have taken note of this new wave of regulations and mount a counterattack, lobbying the legislatures of states to defend the safety of their products – and, in one case, the prosecution to prevent laws from taking effect. Some of the main exemptions made to the new mexico highlight some of the great fights that industries hope that they will win in household houses across the country: fights that they already take to a new American US environment protection agency.
The PFAS is not only a chemical but a class of thousands. The first PFASs were developed in the 1930s; Thanks to their non-stick properties and their unique sustainability, their popularity has increased in industrial and consumers in the post-war period. The chemicals were soon omnipresent in American life, coating kitchen utensils, preventing furniture and carpets to stain and act as a surfact on fire fighting foam.
In 1999, a man in Virginia-Western trial Against American the Dupont chemical giant alleging that pollution of his factory killed his cattle. The trial revealed that Dupont had hidden evidence of the negative effects of the PFAS health on government workers for decades. In the years that followed, the chemical industry has paid billions of settlement costs around the legal proceedings of the PFAS: in 2024, the multinational American 3M agreed to pay Between $ 10 billion and 12.5 billion dollars to American public systems that had detected APFs in their water supply to pay for repair and future tests, although the company has not admitted responsibility. (Dupont and his company with separate chemicals shirts continue to deny any reprehensible act in the proceedings which implied them, including the original combination of Virginia-Western.)
