This timeline of events related to per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFASs) includes events related to the discovery, development, manufacture, marketing, uses, concerns, litigation, regulation, and legislation, involving the human-made PFASs. The timeline focuses on some perfluorinated compounds, particularly perfluorooctanoic acid (PFOA) and perfluorooctanesulfonic acid (PFOS) and on the companies that manufactured and marketed them, mainly DuPont and 3M. An example of PFAS is the fluorinated polymer polytetrafluoroethylene (PTFE), which has been produced and marketed by DuPont under its trademark Teflon. GenX chemicals and perfluorobutanesulfonic acid (PFBS) are organofluorine chemicals used as a replacement for PFOA and PFOS.

PFAS compounds and their derivatives are widely used in many products from water resistant textiles to fire-fighting foam. PFAS are commonly found in every American household in products as diverse as non-stick cookware, stain resistant furniture and carpets, wrinkle free and water repellent clothing, cosmetics, lubricants, paint, pizza boxes, popcorn bags and many other everyday products.

Timeline

19th century 1802 Éleuthère Irénée du Pont, who had emigrated from France after the French Revolution, founded a company to produce gunpowder called E. I. du Pont de Nemours and Company (commonly referred to as DuPont) in Brandywine Creek, near Wilmington, Delaware.

20th century 1902 John Dwan, Hermon Cable, Henry Bryan, and William A. McGonagle co-founded Minnesota Mining and Manufacturing Company (3M) in Two Harbors, Minnesota in 1902 as a corundum mining operation. The men did not know at that time that their supposed "corundum was really another low-grade mineral called anorthosite." 1930 General Motors and DuPont formed Kinetic Chemicals to produce Freon. 1935 On 22 January, E. I. du Pont de Nemours & Co., Inc., formally opened the Haskell Laboratory of Industrial Toxicology on the grounds of the Experimental Station of the company. It was at that time, "one of the first in-house toxicology facilities." It was established on the advice of a DuPont in-house doctor named George Gehrmann. According to a 1935 news item in the Industrial and Engineering Chemistry journal, the purpose of the du Pont facility was to thoroughly test all du Pont products as a public health measure to determine the effects of du Pont's finished products on the "health of the ultimate consumer " and that the products "are safe" "before they are placed on the market". The Haskell Laboratory facilities were "not to be employed in the development of compounds useful in therapeutics.". W. F. von Oettingen was the first director of Haskell Laboratory of Industrial Toxicology. The laboratory was named after Harry G. Haskell, du Pont's vice president, 6 April 1938 Roy J. Plunkett (1910–1994), who was then a 27-year-old research chemist who worked at the DuPont's Jackson Laboratory in Deepwater, New Jersey, was working with gases related to DuPont's Freon refrigerants, when an experiment he was conducting produced an unexpected new product.—tetrafluoroethylene resin. He had accidentally invented polytetrafluorethylene (PTFE), a saturated fluorocarbon polymer—the "first compound in the family of Perfluorinated compounds (PFCs), "to be marketed commercially."(Lyons 2007) It took ten years of research before polytetrafluorethylene (PTFE) was introduced under its trade name Teflon, where it became known for being "extremely heat-tolerant and stick-resistant." In 1985, Plunkett was named to the National Inventors' Hall of Fame for the invention of Teflon, which "has been of great personal benefit to people—not just indirectly, but directly to real people whom I know." Plunkett described the discovery and development at the 1986 American Chemical Society symposium on the History of High Performance Polymers. He said that he and his assistant, Jack Rebok, had opened a tetrafluoroethylene (TFE) cylinder to examine an unusual white powder that had prevented the TFE gas from flowing out. Upon opening the cylinder, they found that the white powder was "packed onto the bottom and lower sides of the cylinder." The sample of gaseous TFE in the cylinder had polymerized spontaneously into a white, waxy solid. The polymer was polytetrafluoroethylene (PTFE). In 1945, DuPont commercialized PTFE as Teflon. They found that PTFE was resistant to corrosion, had low surface friction, and high heat resistance. Tetrafluorethylene (TFE) can cyclize with a wide variety of compounds which led to the creation of a range of organofluorine compounds. 1950s For decades—beginning in the 1950s—3M manufactured PFAS at its plant in Cottage Grove in Washington County, Minnesota. 3M, with 10,000 employees in Maplewood in Ramsey County where it is headquartered—is the largest employer in Maplewood. 1950s According to the 2016 lawsuit brought against 3M by Lake Elmo, Minnesota, 3M had "disposed of PFCs and PFC-containing waste at a facility it owned and operated in Oakdale, Minnesota (the "Oakdale Facilities")" during the 1950s. 1951 "The DuPont chemical plant in Washington, West Virginia, began using PFOA in its manufacturing process." 1954 R. A. Dickison, who was employed at DuPont, received an inquiry about C8's "possible toxicity." 1955 A study undertaken by Gordon I. Nordby and J. Murray Luck at Stanford University found that "PFAS binds to proteins in human blood." 1960s DuPont "buried about 200 drums of C8 on the banks of the Ohio River near the plant." 1961 A DuPont in-house toxicologist said C8 was toxic and should be "handled with extreme care." 1962 3M moved its headquarters from Saint Paul, Minnesota—where it had been located since 1910, to its headquarters at 3M Center in Maplewood, Minnesota. Marjorie Pearson, the author of the article worked for Summit Envirosolutions, Inc. 1963 The United States Navy scientists began to work with 3M to develop aqueous film-forming foams (AFFF). The US military began to use AFFF since its development in 1963 and patented AFFF in 1967. 1965 John Zapp, who was then director of DuPont's Haskell Laboratories, "received a memo describing preliminary studies that showed that even low doses of a related surfactant could increase the size of rats' livers, a classic response to exposure to a poison." 1967 In the wake of the 1967 USS Forrestal fire, which happened off the coast of north Vietnam—"one of the worst disasters in U.S. naval history"—in which 134 people were killed and the U.S. Navy aircraft carrier was almost destroyed, the US Navy began to make it mandatory for its vessels to carry Aqueous Film Forming Foams (AFFF) on board. A rocket, that was accidentally launched by a power surge, caused a fire that burned all night when it hit a "fuel tank, igniting leaking fuel and causing nine bombs to explode." October 1969 In a laboratory that he shared with his father, Bill Gore, while experimenting with ways of "stretching extruded PTFE into pipe-thread tape", and after "series of unsuccessful experiments", Robert (Bob) Gore (1937–2020), accidentally discovered that a "sudden, accelerated yank" caused the PTFE to "stretch about 800%, which resulted in the transformation of solid PTFE into a microporous structure that was about 70% air." At the time Bob Gore was working with W. L. Gore and Associates, a company established by his father Wilbert (Bill) Gore (1912–1986), who had worked at Remington Arms DuPont plant in Ilion, New York, during World War II as a chemical engineer. early 1970s According to court documents in the lawsuit against 3M, the company had "disposed of PFCs and PFC-containing waste at the city of Lake Elmo's Washington County Landfill". 1970s The Quartz said that according to a document on file with the US Environmental Protection Agency and discovered by The Intercept's Sharon Lerner in June 2019, reported that the document was on file with the US Environmental Protection Agency, that Minnesota Mining and Manufacturing Company (3M) "knew as early as the 1970s that PFAS was accumulating in human blood." 3M's own experiments on rats and monkeys concluded that PFAS compounds "should be regarded as toxic." 1970s In the 1970s researchers at 3M documented the presence of PFOS and PFOA—the "two best-known PFAS compounds"—in fish. 1970s In Australia, firefighting foams containing PFAS had been used "extensively" since the 1970s, because they were very effective in "fighting liquid fuel fires." 1978 3M scientists, Hugh J. Van Noordwyk and Michael A. Santoro published an article on 3M's hazardous waste program in the Environmental Health Perspectives (EHP) journal, which is supported by the United States Department of Health and Human Services's (DHHS) National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS), an institute of the National Institutes of Health (NIH). The authors said that 3M considered "thermal destruction of hazardous wastes" as the "best method for their disposal". By 1978, 3M had built seven incineration facilities throughout the United States on "3M manufacturing plant sites at Brownwood, Texas, Cordova, Illinois, Cottage Grove, Minnesota, Decatur, Alabama, Hartford City, Indiana, Nevada, Missouri, and White City, Oregon." 1983 Following approval by the Federal Environmental Protection Agency and the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency in July, 3M, described by The New York Times as a "diversified manufacturing concern" announced their $6 million cleanup of what would become known as the Oakdale Dump. The Times said that it was the "second major clean of a hazardous waste area in Minnesota to be financed entirely by a private company." The three dumps, that had been abandoned by 3M, had "contaminated ground water and soil with hazardous chemical wastes", according to environmental officials. 1998 Cincinnati, Ohio-based Robert Bilott, an American environmental attorney with Taft Stettinius & Hollister, took a case representing Wilbur Tennant, a Parkersburg, West Virginia, farmer, whose herd of cattle had been decimated by strange symptoms that Tennant blamed on DuPont's Washington Works facilities. 1998 The United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) "was first alerted to the risks" of PFAS—human-made "forever chemicals" that "never break down once released and they build up in our bodies". The EPA's Stephen Johnson, said in Barboza's 18 May 2000 Times article that The EPA first talked to 3M in 1998 after they were first alerted to 3M's 1998 laboratory rat study in which "male and female rats were given doses of the chemical and then mated. When a pregnant rat continued to get regular doses of about 3.2 milligrams per kilogram of body weight, most of the offspring died within four days." According to Johnson, "With all that information, [the EPA] finally talked to 3M and said that raises a number of concerns. What are you going to do?" Summer of 1999 Bilott filed a federal suit in the Southern District of West Virginia on behalf of Wilbur Tennant against DuPont. A report commissioned by the EPA and DuPont and authored by 6 veterinarians—3 chosen by the EPA and the others by DuPont—found that Tennant's cattle had died because of Tennant's "poor husbandry", which included "poor nutrition, inadequate veterinary care and lack of fly control." The report said that DuPont was not responsible for the cattle's health problems.

21st century 2000s