this jacket is made from one of the most poisonous chemicals known to man P forever chemicals forever chemicals harmful forever chemicals toxic forever chemical the inner membrane is made of pretty much pure posos chemical in the form of a fluoropolymer compound and the outer waterproof coating is another toxic posos cocktail posos is considered so toxic that just this year the EPA determined that there is no acceptable level of posos in human drinking water no parts per million or parts per trillion no acceptable levels at all yet gortex and other outdoor brands have been making these
jackets by the millions and outdoor enthusiasts like you and I have been buying them now gortex claims it's stable at Gore we use a very stable floral polymer expanded PTF to make our gortex membrane that in their finished form no P5 can leak out of or Shed off the jacket but if I'm being honest I don't trust gortex so I built this this is my homemade rain chamber it's just big enough to fit a mannequin I bought off at Amazon you guys remember Fred right my plan is to run the water through the system for
a full 24 hours just in case Fred or any of the components have posos in them I'm going to test the water and then put a brand new gortex jacket on Fred and run it for another 24 hours and test it again if posos levels go up gortex and similar jackets are actively shedding posos but even if it isn't even if gortex is completely stable and the dwr doesn't seep into the environment the manufacturing of posos chemicals certainly does at 5302 major corporations have agreed to nearly $700 million settlement in water contamination Dupont and a
successor company called chemor agreed in principle to pay $670 million to more than 3500 parkerburg area water customers who claimed that the drinking water was contaminated and made them ill posos is what is known as a forever chemical it is a man-made compound so strong it takes a force equivalent to the power of lightning to break it or thousands of years for it to break down naturally for all practical purposes once it gets into the environment into your bloodstream into water sources it never goes away and has been shown to cause some pretty harmful side
effects the chemicals have been linked to some cancer kidney problems and developmental damage liver damage high cholesterol and liver damage weakened immune systems and cancer posos has been manufactured and used in consumer products since the 1940s it's most commonly known as Teflon the non-stick coating on your mom's favorite fry pan but it's also been used in food packaging stain resistant carpets firefighting Foams makeup and even dental floss but the outdoor industry has primarily used it in rain jaggets this particular rain jaget happens to be posos free but it is the exception most of the jackets
that you and I have owned and used have been heavily dependent on posos and this got me wondering if these chemicals really do last forever and if they are as prevalent as they seem I ought to be able to prove that pretty easily so this is my plan I'm going to do a variety of tests to see just how prevalent posos really is I'm going to test my blood my hometop water the ocean a major water reservoir and just to be 100% sure I'm going to go to the highest most remote stream I can find
to see if it too is contaminated with posos to find out if there's anywhere left in the world not contaminated with peos starting with my home tap because this poses the biggest threat to humanity before water pours out of your kitchen sink it goes on a long journey through pipes water towers water treatment facilities and more eventually beginning at a place like this this is the dilum reservoir it is one of the main sources of drinking water for the city of Denver Colorado it's basically a damned up creek that collects the water before it gets
piped over to Denver if a reservoir like this is contaminated with posos there's not much to keep it out of the drinking water because until this year there was no federal regulations requiring water treatment plants to remove posos from drinking water so water treatment plants simply aren't equipped to do so for right now at least water treatment plants like the one behind me are just hoping that posos isn't present in their water sources which is what I want to find out how how contaminated are the water sources you and I enjoy hiking to drinking from
and how much is The Outdoor industry contaminating these sources are you and I part of the problem by taking posos rle gear and clothing to these pristine water sources because just about everything we take into the back country has been treated with some type of posos chemical in the form of dwr or durable water repellent finish our rain jackets our pants our tints even the down in our sleeping bags have been treated with a dwr and if you think about it getting wet is one of our biggest fears in the back country we rely on
our gear to keep us warm safe and dry and that is part of the problem posos is so good at repelling water oil and stains the companies are afraid not to use it because if a competitor has a better performing product you're probably going to buy it instead that's why despite the fact that we've known since the 1980s that these chemicals are toxic Brands continue to use them so much so the brands who have started to make pasos Frey products can't completely guarantee their products are posos free one of the things you may have noticed
especially if you're a regular viewer of this channel is that these aren't the typical clothes that I hike in because according to the lab that I've been working with and talking with it's actually very easy to contaminate your sources with the gear that you're wearing and so I went looking for all posos free clothing and something very interesting that I discovered during that search is that Brands refuse to say posos free because they can't guarantee that it's posos free instead what they say is they are not intentionally using posos and the reason why they say
that is because it's very easy to contaminate the machinery and so FAL Raven has said we're not intentionally using posos but we can't guarantee the posos isn't in our products it's this cross-contamination that makes me believe our gear is actively shutting posos into the environment and why I've hiked multiple miles to get to a part of the ocean that isn't near civilization this is about as far from Human civilization as I know how to get and still be on a beach in the United States so let's go make camp and let's go get a sample
now the ocean is such a large body of water and the sample that I took is so small the likelihood of posa showing up is not very high but all streams eventually lead to the ocean which means any posos contaminated water will also end up there it's not a matter of if the ocean has posos it's a matter of how much I'm curious to see what the results show but first I have one more water source I want to collect okay I am on my way to one of the higher more remote streams that I
could find I've hiked in several miles I'm headed off Trail up above tree line to see if I can find a stream that doesn't see very many people inevitably where there's a trail there are hikers and where there are hikers there is posos which is the reason why I'm headed this direction there are no Trails up here there are no prominent Peaks so track Peak Baggers there is a lake but Lakes are a dime a dozen out here and so there's very little in this remote corner of the mountains to attract people which means if
there is a stream left on the world that doesn't have posos this is a goodest candidate as any okay I'm I am at the location where there should be just the tiniest little stream but there's so many rocks and boulders that I can't see any streams but I can just hear the the faintest sound of water running and so one of the reasons why I picked this location specifically is because between this Lake and those glaciers there really isn't anything else and so this should be our best bet getting an uncontaminated stream and it is
just barely a stream I think I'm gonna have to dig down a little bit just to get to it let's see all right let's get this back to the lab okay so I sent the samples off to the lab and I've got the results right here so let me try to break this down in a way that isn't going to bore you to death first I need to clarify that posos is a blanket term used to refer to a group of chemicals that includes more than 15,000 different chemical compounds to the best of my knowledge
Every posos chemical that has been studied has been found to cause health concerns but there are two really big ones pfoa and pfos these two chemicals are considered so toxic the EPA forced them out of production all the way back in 2002 these are the two chemicals the EPA has said there is no acceptable level in human drinking water but eliminating the chemicals altogether is viewed as an unrealistic expectation for water treatment plants so the EPA has said they are issuing an enforcable standard of less than four parts per trillion to give you an idea
of just how small of an amount this is four parts per trillion is equal to four drops of water inside not just one but 20 olympic size swimming pools so that small of an amount of posos has been shown to cause human health concerns but how much are in the samples that I took well my tap water had the most with five parts per trillion of pfoa and 3.1 parts per trillion of pfos the reservoir had the next highest levels at 1.3 parts per trillion of both pfoa and pfos the ocean came back with only
75 parts per trillion of pfoa but again it's a huge body of water that's all as inter interesting as it is concerning but what really caught my attention is the gortex jacket test as I mentioned I ran water through the system for 24 hours prior to introducing the jacket this system recirculated the same distilled water for the entire time and the prejack sample of distilled water was the only sample to come back with no posos detected I then added a brand new gortex jacket recirculated the same water for another 24 hours and tested again and
that water came back with five different posos chemicals including 65 parts per trillion of pfoa that should have been phased out in 2016 but the jacket also shed 21 parts per trillion of pfba that's by far the highest amount of any P found in any of my samples now two really interesting and concerning things about pfba one it's not going to be regulated by the EPA but the EPA has cited studies showing pfba is likely to cause thyroid liver and developmental issues so is gortex shedding toxic chemicals into the environment well based off of what
I'm seeing it seems so but what's even more concerning than that is that same chemical that shed off the gortex jacket was the only chemical that I found in the high Alpine stream at 4.7 parts per trillion and at first I thought this is too much of a coincidence the same chemical that is shedding off a rain jackets is the only chemical at an isolated outp stream but after looking into it some more it seems that paa is one of the most likely chemicals to be found at remote locations because unlike a lot of posos
chemicals it can evaporate with water and fall with snow helping it spread throughout the water table so our hikers helping to contaminate streams and other pristine water sources by taking Pros riddle gear to these remote locations probably not to the extent that makes a significant difference posos is such a widely used chemical and the number of backcountry users going to any one location is so small most of the pollution is probably coming from other sources but this is an outdoor Channel and I wanted to focus on the part the outdoor industry has played and what
we can do about it and the good news is things are starting to change both California and New York have passed legislation restricting posos and clothing and REI has announced that they will no longer sell products that contain posos this has put a lot of pressure on a lot of major outdoor Brands including gortex to finally stop using posos and gortex has already started producing and marketing its epe membrane that is posos free this is all good news but we aren't out of the woods yet REI only represents about 177% of the outdoor gear sold
worldwide which means there's still a lot of Brands and gear being produced and sold potentially containing posos and so what can you do well you can do all the typical things you hear at the end of a video like this you can write to your representatives you can write to these Brands and tell them that you want to to see more posos free gear you can donate to posos awareness Charities and you can share this video so that even more people are aware of these toxic and harmful chemicals that we use every single day I
hope you appreciate this video I've been working on it a really really long time so be sure to like subscribe and do all those other things and as always thanks for watching if you're concerned about my blood I did mention that I had it tested I just didn't have a good place to talk about the results it came back showing that I've got about a thousand parts per trillion of pfoa going around in my blood but the lab also tells me that is below the national average of less than 4,000 parts per trillion so I'm
hoping that it's not a big deal because there's not a lot I can do about it
