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Over 99% of all humans, regardless of where you live in the world, have PFAS in our blood, in our bodies, and it has been, uh, linked to all sorts of of medical issues. Retail Unwrapped is a weekly podcast hosted by Shelley Cohan from the Robin Report. Each episode dives into the latest. Trends and developments in the retail industry.

Join them as they discuss interesting topics and interview industry leaders keeping you in the loop with everything retail.  Hello everyone, it’s Shelley Cohan. Welcome to Retail Unwrapped. And today we’re talking about a very important issue in celebration of what I like to say, earth Month. I know it’s Earth Day.

Earth Month. Earth Week. We should always be concerned with the earth. But one of the things that is one of the most pressing concerns in the retail space is the issue of ps.  So this. PFAS issue will be super impactful affecting consumer behavior, shopping choices, supply chains, pricing, inflation, consumer trust, and the PFAS.

Free labels in our industry will probably become more important than GMO Organic Green or other labels in a consumer importance in terms of sustainability. The reason is, is because they are scientific variable by nature, so. We are going to have a great conversation today on Forever. Chemicals will change retail for forever, and are you ready for that today?

I have two great guests with me. I have Michelle Lanka, CEO, founder of Claros Technologies. We’ll tell you more about Claros in a minute. She was also former senior executive at 3M and we have Eric Rson back with us on our podcast. He’s the former advisor to New York City, mayor Mike Bloomberg, Emmy award-winning producer columnist on political and societal impacts on PFAS.

And of course, I have to mention, Eric, I hope you don’t mind that you are also one of the esteemed writers at the Robin Report, so let’s jump right in and get started. First, welcome.  Thank you, Shelly, for hosting us today.  Absolutely.  So first thing I wanna do is I, let’s start from the beginning and talk about what is PFAS and why should we care about it?

Sure. Uh, I’ll jump in with, with an explanation in terms of what PFAS is. So to start with these. Compounds that are known as forever Chemicals. It’s a carbon fluorine bond. It is one of the strongest manmade bonds, therefore, the term forever, it’s very, very difficult to break. Uh, the properties of these compounds are significant in terms of the durability, the lubrication properties.

There’s about 14,000 of these PFAS compounds out there. This is one of the points that many times the public is so surprised. When you go and you talk about PFAS, because in the United States we hear often about PFOS and PFOA. Now 3M and DuPont are the ones that produced those compounds. When you look at Gore-Tex, you look at Teflon non stick pans.

You look at 3M Scotchguard, right? But there’s actually a host of compounds that are PFAS. Well beyond that, that total around 14,000, uh, these applications are ubiquitous in our society. Many of the applications are essential. So when we talk about PFAS and what to do with it in terms of some of the, the negative effects, uh, you’ve got essential applications and non-essentials.

So it ranges in everything from semiconductor applications that make all of the chips. Two medical implants, uh, that go into your body. Heart stents, uh, many of our, our very important drugs such as, uh, anti-depression, medication, cholesterol, heart medication, uh, and then you’ve got it in a lot of consumer applications, uh, where there’s much debate.

Is it essential or not, right? Waterproof, mascara, makeup, baby food, clothing. Uh, very prevalent in, in clothing and textiles, uh, for the unique properties. And so it really spans the continuum of our, our everyday lives. Right? Uh, over 99% of all humans, regardless of where you live in the world, have PFAS in our blood and our bodies, and it has been, uh, linked, uh, especially the long chain, those PFOA and those PFOS where the studies.

Are, are, uh, the most comprehensive because they’re the longest in our societal applications. They have been linked to all sorts of, of medical issues ranging, um, from fertility problems, to immune disorders, to development issues, cancer, many different types of cancer, as well as delayed puberty.  Eric, do you wanna add in to your kind of.

View on PFAS and why it’s specifically related to retail.  Well, you know, I don’t wanna go head to head with Michelle on anything scientific, but I will say this from a journalistic perspective, I mean, this is the, I wouldn’t go head to head with her on that either, Eric, for sure. Please do. Like, no way.  But from a journalistic perspective, I mean, this, PFAS is the issue that, it’s the gift that keeps on giving because, I mean, it’s a, it’s an environmental issue, it’s an economic issue.

Uh, it’s a public health issue. It’s really at the crossroads of all the. Uh, the major issues that we’re talking about today and, and I think it’s just fascinating to think about how little the American public and frankly the world, you know, knows about this issue. I mean, I’ve had, uh, experts that I’ve talked to that have equated this with  the asbestos issue

The lead poisoning issue, the nicotine issue, and some people actually said it’s those three, uh, combined times two or three. I mean, this is a real massive issue. I was talking to, uh, a lawyer and we’ll probably get into this a little bit later in the, in the, in the podcast, but I was talking to a lawyer out of Houston who’s a, uh, mass tort litigation, uh, type guy.

Uh, and he was telling me that there are over 300,000.  Companies in the United States that have PFAS Litigation Exposure, exposure. Um, and, and so this is gonna be a massive economic story. Um, obviously as Michelle said, this is a human health story. Uh, and of course, uh, it’s an environmental story at the end of the day.

Absolutely. Well, I have to say, um, I actually took a trip out to Minneapolis in January. Why I decided to go there in January is beyond me, but I did,  and um, Michelle, I actually got to visit Claris Technologies and I actually got a tour of the labs. So I would love for you to tell our listeners what is Clarus Technologies?

What’s your goal, and kind of how you ended up there. Sure.  Um, so when you look at these forever chemicals that are out there, claros goal is to really take the forever out of forever chemicals, right? And so, you know, where we have to start is what can we do to prevent. The PFAS from ever getting into the water tables, the ag fields, et cetera.

And one of the best places that we can start is preventing it from leaving the industrials and the users and the makers in the industrial facilities in the first place, right? Because the biggest issue that consumers need to be aware of, of how this problem really spreads. It’s not necessarily the making and the using of these chemicals.

It’s what’s done afterwards. And so when these industrials use these. Products, uh, they’re leaving the plant in the wastewater flow. So how do you eliminate it in the wastewater? So it never ends up in the water tables or in our ag fields. The problem right now that compounds this is historically for the last five decades, the way that it’s been handled is it hasn’t mitigated.

In the wastewater flow. So it does go out into the water tables and the ag fields, but the two main types of disposal that are prevalent right now, particularly in the United States, uh, Europe is ahead of the United States in terms of regulatory, in this respect. The two ways that it mainly gets into our envir environment is what’s used today to capture the PFAS is like an activated carbon or an ion resin in the treatment train in these facilities.

Once that ion resin or that activated carbon is spent, what do you do with it? Right? Well, you dispose of it in landfills.  It then leeches into the environment, uh, or you incinerate it. And the problem with incinerating at these high temperatures is unless you get that incineration just right, you’re actually perpetuating the problem because you’re breaking wow.

These longer chain PFAS into the shorter chain PFAS.  They’re emitting out of the smoke stack and they’re settling on our ag fields and our, our waterways, and they’re ending up back into the water tables, et cetera. That’s compounded because many of our societal products, like our carpet and our housing, our clothing, uh, et cetera, have PFAS.

And so when we landfill. All of these items, the PFAS over time is leaching out in many of these landfills that aren’t up to the standards that we would build today. So where Claros comes in is really hitting hard at the point source, the the big makers, the big users of PFAS and. Ensuring that we have a cost effective and a high performance solution that takes it out of their wastewater so that it never leaves the facility.

And so, uh, at a base level, what we basically do is we use uv, uh, light, uh, photochemistry, and we destroy the PFAS. So basically think of zapping. Mm-hmm. All of those PFO s compounds until you’re left with nothing in terms of that carbon flooring bond in the water. Mm-hmm. At very, very high speed. So we’re doing this at 200 gallons per minute as it’s flowing through the industrial waste treatment process, and we’re zapping and destroying all of those PFAS.

And so what’s leaving the facility is containing, uh, very, very low levels of PFAS that are well under, uh, what drinking water standards today would be.  So lemme ask you a, so that’s the solution that Claros provides. Uh, but  it does go hand in glove with analytical, right? Because at Claros what we like to say is you can’t destroy what you can’t detect, right?

And so think about this, if there’s 14,000 of these. How do you know whether or not you’re successful at destroying? And so when we founded Claros, uh, our very first seed funding went to building a world class analytical lab. And our ana, our analytical lab, has the capability of testing the full spectrum of compounds because when you break one of these compounds.

From a long chain, it doesn’t automatically go away. It breaks to a shorter chain. So think of it as a domino effect. Yeah. So you’ve gotta be able to have the analytical finesse to be able to track that you’ve broken all the way down to the final harmless elements. And that’s destruction. And so the way that we ended up winning a lot of these large companies was they either didn’t believe they had a problem or they knew they had a problem, but they didn’t know how bad it was and they wanted to do something about it.

And so we went in there with our analytical. And it’s confidential, and we were able to show them where they were starting and then to run Claros UV destruction system and to show them where they were ending. And that had become a very powerful hand in glove, uh, with our, our customer base.  That’s really interesting.

If you could clarify, so when we talk about PFAS, just for our audience who are probably not as advanced as you are in the knowledge of PFAS and everything, but, um, does this, does the PFAS occur in, I know, apparel and, and home furnishings, cosmetics, cookware, electronics, it all has it, is it occurring in production?

Or post-production or is it occurring in waste materials from production? Like where do you see the biggest impact where these chemicals are being treated or added to textiles and garments products? Right, right. That’s a, that’s a great question.  It’s in a couple of different places. So in applications, think of semiconductor or down drilling and oil and gas.

It’s a phenomenal lubricant, and so when you’re making a chip in the wafer planarization process, or you’re down hole drilling where you need lubrication in the fracking process, PFAS is actually used. As a additive or an ingredient in the process. And then the waste from that then goes into, uh, the waste stream water in an industrial semicon facility or in the down hole drilling.

Contrast that to an application like textiles, where it’s actually used in the finished good. Right? Because you want a property like superior water protection, right, which would be Goretex, right? Or your waterproof mascara. The reason that it doesn’t come off is because. There’s PFAS in there, right? And so that is a product that you are wearing because it is in that final garment.

The same with your carpet. Uh, anything that is stain free, like your sofa, fabrics, uh, contain, uh, P ffo s because it’s a Scotch Guard type of product. And so that product stays with the product. So those are the two main ways, Shelly, that it gets into the human body and the environment, the. Other way is actually our drinking water, right?

Mm. Because, uh, if you look at it within the United States, uh, we don’t regulate that many compounds of PFAS yet.  It varies, but right now there’s about six in general out of the 14,000. Wow. And so you do have about 16 states that have gone ahead of federal and said, Hey, we’re gonna protect our communities.

We’re going to regulate. And so states like Minnesota, New York, California, Maine. They regulate more than that, but they don’t regulate all of them. And so when you look at drinking water, for example, uh, there’s the compounds that we track and the compounds that we don’t track. And so that’s another way that it also gets into the human body.

That’s amazing. I, I would just add to that too. I don’t know if you’re following the, the big bruhaha that’s happening in the Netherlands right now, but the government is actually warning people about, uh, eating eggs that are sort of, uh, home sourced because they’ve discovered that these eggs have PFAS in them and how do they get, so the food supply is also heavily affected by this, and this is in the Netherlands, where it’s much more heavily regulated.

Imagine what, you know, what’s, what’s in our eggs and what’s in our basic, basic staples in our, in our. Our supermarkets that we’re not aware of here in the United States.  Yeah, it’s clearly issue. Oh yeah. S That’s a real, oh, I’m sorry. No, no, you go. I was gonna say, this is, this is where my passion comes from on this, and it’s not necessarily related to Claros, but I am a big, big proponent of consumer awareness and education, right, because.

Once the consumer is educated and aware, let them make their decisions. But if they’re making their decisions or not making decisions because of lack of awareness and there’s easy low hanging things that the consumer can do to protect themselves, that is  where. I am really driven. And so Eric is absolutely right.

It’s your water source and how you can protect there. It’s your food, right? So right now your listeners can go out and Google South Carolina Mill. I.  And this just hit front page of the New York Times, uh, a South Carolina textile mill, uh, has now, uh, been discovered to not only have high uh, PFAS emissions coming out of the facility, but.

They have, as a result, contaminated about 10,000 acres. Because what has happened, just like in Maine, is that for a long time, folks thought that biological, uh, fertilizer was healthy. And one of the ways that PFAS is, is the most highly emitted is in human waste.  So what happens is we take the waste from these facilities and we think it’s a healthy biological fertilizer, and we fertilize fields, ag fields, and it’s contaminated with very high levels of PFAS.

And so there’s actually an article right now on this conundrum in South Carolina. Where this 10,000 acres of Ag field is basically unusable. And so they’re proposing that the su, that it be included in the Superfund funding in order to clean it up. And that’s just one example within the United States of how this is getting into the environment.

To your question,  I. Yeah, and I, I do believe, like if you can get consumers behind it, I don’t think the consumers are in front of PFAS right now. I think yes, you probably have a collective advocacy out there that knows about it, but I don’t think general consumers that there’s enough awareness out there, and I do believe consumers are the ones that can ultimately drive more change.

So we know that retailers have to act, they have to act fast, they have to kind of get ahead of it, you know, try to get ahead of the consumer, try to get ahead of the issue. But you know, I’m looking at what retailers are going through right now, tariffs, the economy, what’s happening politically in the us, what’s happening globally, globally, policies that are happening.

I mean, how, how, how can we make this a priority?

One thing I would say about, you wanna start on that one? That Jill, is that, uh, that is that, um,  you know, I think you, you mentioned obviously all these headwinds that retailers and the CPG industry in general, uh, uh, you know, uh, fashion industry, all these major, you know, channels into retail are facing. Um, but I would, I would, I would characterize all these things even though they seem nearly existential in some respects right now.

The truly existential threat facing retail, you know, writ large are PFAS. Why? Because there is so much potential liability that’s facing these companies. I mean, imagine if you’re a, a Macy’s.  Not to pick on Macy’s love Macy’s. But anyway, let’s say you’re Macy’s and you happen to have clothes that you’re selling in your stores that, that are saying that they’re PFOS free or they’re made PFOS free.

We know for a fact that they’re probably not PFOS free, and the reason we know that is because there are lots of. Uh, companies that go to places like Claros and others and they say, Hey, can you find out if we’re really, we’re really PFOS free? And it turns out they’re not. And so then they’ve been marketing something that’s, that’s not correct or it’s untruthful or it’s a half truth to their consumers.

And, and suddenly by Macy’s being the purveyor of these goods is putting themselves in the line of fire. There’s over already, and we’re not even talking about this as a kitchen table issue, Shelly. There’s over, already over a trillion dollars, trillion with a t that’s set aside by the insurance industry ready to settle some of these mass litigation suits that are gonna be coming down the pike towards companies that have this type of exposure.

Um, there are people that are out there. There’s a, there’s a study that came out. A year or two ago from a, a major think tank in Sweden that says that just to clean up the, the, the PFAS issue would cost $13 trillion a year. This is a huge issue. And so if you get caught on the wrong side of this, if you’re a Macy’s or you’re a McDonald’s, or you’re anyone that plays anywhere in the retail landscape, you have a huge issue that you’re looking at down the barrel.

Maybe not, it’s not as pressing as the tariff issue right now, perhaps, but you know, long term, if you’re doing your five, 10 year plan, you have to be thinking about this issue. Right. I think part of it, well, first of all, just to clarify with, you’re just using Macy’s as an example. There’s nothing that, uh, Macy’s has done.

Absolutely. That was, it came up just to my thought. Yeah. Just to clarify that. I know that you, um,  uh, I know that there’s a lot of companies that use Claros to kind of test what you just mentioned, and we don’t name those companies of course. But I think, Eric, to be honest with you, I think it’s the urgent versus the important.

Right. And so retailers have a tendency of focusing on the urgent as opposed to the important. I’m not saying that PFAS isn’t urgent, but right now, uh, it’s very hard to get retailers to think beyond, you know, the tariffs and the price increases and cost of goods and supply chain and on and on and on. So the question is, you know, how can we shift this because we do feel this is a critical, and I important long-term issue for the environment.

Yeah. You know, another thing I would say is there seems to be this, what I would call an AB reaction where the, the, the, the, or a gut reaction is probably the better term where we say, let’s just ban these PFOS. But the problem is that in very few instances there are some, there are some actual instances where you literally can substitute it for something else, but in many cases there is no viable substitute and it affects everything.

Michelle was talking about the semiconductor industry. Um, you know, a lot of military equipment, there’s a lot of sort of high tech equipment that depends on these things, and there is real no, no viable alternative. So the question is how do you deal with these things more responsibly? And that’s where I think companies like Claros and others come in, come into play.

Right. And I, I think that I, I wanna go back to Michelle, something you said earlier, and you know, the European, um, European countries are always ahead of us, ahead of the US in terms of global regulations within the countries. And so tell us a little bit about what’s happening there. And also, if I could just build on that for a second.

In addition to the US being a bit behind in regulatory practices.  I’ve seen a lot of kind of pulling back away from environmental money, funding issues, et cetera. So we kind of have like a two-pronged issue here in the us.  Oh, that’s so true. And um, it, it really is interesting, Shelly, because pretty much every region of the world that we’re working with takes on a different personality, right?

So our big pockets of activity customer-wise for claros are Asia, predominantly Japan, Europe, all over in the us. And each one of these has different personalities. And so if you start with your first point on the European side.  Not surprising. The Europeans hit it early and aggressive in terms of this PFAS issue and regulatory.

Uh, the EC ha’s proposed reach restrictions, cover over 10,000 PFAS compounds,  and they’ve really targeted it aggressively for those non-essentials.  So for those non-essential applications, like when you get a hamburger at fast food and it’s wrapped in leak proof paper, right? Deal with the leaks, get an inferior product, even if it doesn’t work as well, you don’t need PFAS in the wrapper.

So those are gone. They’re moving to completely restrict those, they’re putting the hammer down on the industrial makers and users and, and saying, you’re gonna be tamped down on the volume you’re allowed to produce. I. Unless you’re able to hit this level coming out of the facilities, which is deemed a safe level.

So for consumers out there, the lingo that you’ll start to hear is parts per trillion, right? So parts per trillion, very, very low. Studies have been done that have said anything below that. Alright, that’s safe for the human body. So Europe is, is all over this. Just in the last six months we’ve seen our business.Surge in Europe, uh, because you’re starting to see the government come down as, as Eric talked about, you know, in terms of even unannounced going into facilities and testing their water and closing them down, right? So they’ve got a very, uh, advanced approach to this and they’ve really, pragmatically looked at it and said to Eric’s point, alright, there are essential applications out there.

Beware of unintended consequences. So for those essential applications like, uh,  a medical implant that goes into your hip replacement, uh, you probably want it to have the characteristics that PFAS provide that implant. And until there is something better with the r and d money spent on that, we’ve gotta use it.

But how do you keep it out of the environment and how do you clean it up in the environment? So they’ve taken a real holistic approach. Uh, I would say they are more regulatory driven. If I had to use one word to describe them,  I. The US is more litigation driven right now. Right. You’ve seen rollbacks at the EPA.

Uh, we’ve been slower historically, regardless to adopt, uh, regulatory efforts around PFAS. Um, and part of this I feel like consumers, as we get educated, have  the responsibility like the Europeans who protest. This to really get out there and, and demand higher accountability and solutions because they exist like claros.

So in the United States, where you see the movement happening is primarily around companies that are involved in massive litigation, right? Mm-hmm. Uh, they’re either involved in it or they want to avoid it. But what’s really interesting is many of these companies want to do the right thing.  They didn’t know that the right thing was possible and it existed.

And so whether it’s Claros or it’s other companies that are working out there in PFAS destruction, the more that we can get the word and awareness that there are solutions that are economically viable. And high enough performance that allows these companies to do the right thing, uh, the better off we are in advancing this within the United States because what they learn by working with a company like Claros is, wow, this is actually cost effective.

You know, when I look at incinerating. On one hand and burning the stuff, or I look at using an inline destruction at the end of the day, my cost economics are actually pretty close, if not the same, and I risk mitigate my liability exposure in the future. And so that’s the real difference. It’s almost two different animals that we’re dealing with in the value proposition in the cell within the US versus within Europe of why they’re motivated to do something about this issue.

So I’m interested, you said something about how, um, Japan’s doing a lot of work with this. Can you quickly highlight what Japan’s doing and what their emphasis is on  that? That’s an interesting one. They’re, they’re almost a blend of the two, right? They are, uh, many of these Jap, so number one, Japan typically not always, is about five years behind the US and regulatory.

So they watch.  Very attentively at the US because they know that they’ve got a little bit of lag time, but they’re, they’re gonna trend in the same direction historically, and so their eyes and ears are already paying attention to. Mm-hmm. This is moving in that direction within the United States, even if it’s slow.

The other facet for Japanese, uh, culturally is this whole, uh, societal. Community orientation of doing good, doing right by the people. And so what’s interesting is even if it’s not being regulated in Japan, think about all of these massive Japanese companies that have their industrial facilities all over the world, including Europe and the United States, where they are regulatory driven.

Or liability driven. And so it emanates back to the parent company in Japan and they say, Hey, we’ve gotta do something about this.  So right now that’s they, our second largest  region in terms of customer wise is Japan.  Yeah, I found that interesting.  So the other thing is, um, so when you were speaking Michelle and you were talking about the leak leakproof, uh, hamburger wrapper as an example, it’d be great to have consumers.

There’s, there’s a, I think there’s a small subset of consumers that are always questioning, oh, a leak proof. Wrapper. Okay. Why is it leak proof? What is, what is, you know, what makes it leak proof, right? But it’d be great to get more awareness out there so consumers begin to question things and ask questions.

And I think the other thing that retailers have been better at.  Is transparency in the supply chain and knowing where things are being made and knowing where things are coming from. And there’s this very, you know, with blockchain you can really get down to the details of where raw materials are coming from, where things are being produced.

Is there any type of like, um, uh, system that allows us to have visibility into the trail of clothes that might be, uh, more, uh, susceptible to pfas chemicals or less susceptible? Is there any type of.  Anything out there that consumers can start getting educated about  in terms of a tool, Shelly, or a link that you could click on that talks about the different brands and the historical exposure that they’ve had within their textiles to PFAS?

Not that we’re aware of. Right. I think that it really starts more with the consumer awareness and understanding of what types of products in general. Uh, have PFAS in them, not that are used in the process because then that’s hard to track. But as we look at the products that we have starting to understand what are the ones that do have PFAS in them or are likely to, and I think for the manufacturers, like in the textile industry, to really start to have more critical thinking around.

Their supply chain.  And so, you know, maybe I’m going out on a limb here, but with the current environment, the economical environment, uh, that a lot of these companies are now navigating with, with tariffs or potential tariffs,  is it actually an opportunity as they are, they have to look at their supply chains now anyway.

Right, right. So as they look at those supply chains, to start to bring more awareness to those of what are they actually getting raw material wise and what’s in that raw material? And the reason I bring this up is because  we have company after textile company after textile company, big major brands that thought they were doing the right thing that went PFS free.

And as Eric mentioned earlier, the hang tags even.  Announced that they were PFAS free and they had the hard position of realizing that somewhere way down their supply chain, that one of the raw materials that they had from place X, Y, or Z actually had PFAS in it. And they had no awareness of that. Right?

And so with many of these companies, we actually do our analytical and work all the way back. It’s almost like detective sleuthing to figure out where in your, where in your supply chain did that unintended PFAS enter the stream.  Because they are motivated to eliminate it and to get it out, but they didn’t know they had it.

They thought they were PFAS free. So is this an opportunity for these companies with this awareness and having to look at their supply chains now to a larger extent, to really ask those questions and to do some of this testing if they really are trying to go in the direction of reducing or eliminating PFAS in their textiles.

Yeah. I love your approach because I have to say, you know, retailers right now, a lot of ’em are doing this skew optimization. They’re really looking at their inventory holdings. It’s a cost issue, right? Trying to trim down how much inventory they’re holding, and maybe that decision can be products that have PFAS or products that don’t, I don’t know.

But SKU optimization might be another opportunity for retailers. Mm-hmm. To kind of dig a little deeper into that issue. Right.  And textiles pose a particular, uh, place in our heart, right? Because, I mean, a, they’re beautiful. Uh, there’s, there’s just such a, a magical world out there in terms of the combination and the fabrics and the, and the nap and the feel.

Um, but that also poses a health risk because guess what? It’s the closest to our skin. Right. Yeah. And one of the things consumers need to understand, like when you hear Michelle and Eric talking about textiles with Shelly in particular of why this is important is we all generally wear clothes every day, right?

And if those clothes have PFAS in them, they are the closest to our body. And the way that PFAS, one of the ways that it enters the human body is through our lymph nodes and our sweat glands. Right. And so the smaller that PFAS compound, the more easily  it can enter the human body. And so, you know, I’m a mother, I think back to when my kids were little and they were wearing their jammies 24 7.

Right. You know, until Yeah, of course. You know, in the early months of their lives. Right. And many of them have PFAS in them. Right. And so from the time we’re born today, we’re wearing these products that have PFAS in many cases in them, and we’re in contact with them 24 7 for most of us. And so for me, textiles is near and dear to my heart for all of the reasons that I’m mentioning, but it’s also one of the most important in terms of if we as consumers wanna be educated and and to say, Hey, this is important and I want change.

This is one of the areas that’s an important one.  And, and don’t forget, Michelle, the day we’re born, literally we’re wrapped in a blanket, right? Right. It starts from our first day of  birth. Mm-hmm. Right.  Um, so it, so very interesting on the textiles and I know that our at Fashion Institute of Technology, the assistant chair of textiles and uh, a great professor at the college is very interested in working with you.

So we’re gonna make that happen. Because I think one of the best things we can do is educate the future, right? The students, the up and coming students. So we’re gonna try to make a small difference in the lives of students by helping to educate them.  Any closing remarks? Obviously it’s a very critical issue.

It needs to be addressed. There needs to be a game plan in terms of how companies can go about this. But Eric and Michelle, do you have any closing thoughts for today?  I guess the, the one closing remark I would say is I think that you, you’re seeing that, um, there’s more and more, uh, articles coming out in major and mainstream media.

Um, Hollywood is Star is started to take an interest in this. Mark Ruffalo, the actor, um, starred in a movie that came out about four or five years ago called Dark Waters. That was a fictional, fictional depiction of real life events that occurred, uh, with the DuPont plant, um, and the community that was affected by, um, by the pollution, uh, stemming from PFAS.

Um. And that ended up being, being, being one of the first landmark, uh, sort of litigation liability cases. Um, and I say I think that, you know, we’re starting to see the snowball effect. The, the snowball is still quite small, but it’s, it’s rolling down the hill and I think that we’re gonna see more and more of this.

So I think it’s definitely something that everyone should be paying attention to.  I think really encouraging consumers, Shelly, that there’s a big part of this that’s within our control. I.  You know, the reality when you look at Europe, if, if people wanna go out and really look at how this groundswell effort started in Europe, it was the consumers, they were protesting, they were advocating, they were pushing.

There was not complacency. Right.  But in order to do that, we have to be aware and we have to be educated and understand. Right. And then as Eric said.  Not just have the knee jerk reaction to swing the other way of it’s all bad bant, because guess what? There’s unintended consequences of that. And so, you know, I would say here in the US really caution against complacency and encourage your listeners to just become more aware and educated on this and, and start.

Looking at ways that you can really, number one, protect your health and the health of your loved ones, right? Um, like put a reverse osmosis system under your kitchen sink for your drinking water, right? That’s a, that’s an easy step. Um, but there’s also other steps such as, really. Uh, scrutinizing and voting with your dollar.

Right. You know, right. There’s, there’s cookware out there now that is, that is, uh, non-stick. That is PFAS free, right? There’s makeup that’s PFAS, free, uh, textiles, right? Start supporting these designers and companies that are really on the forefront of advocating and doing the right thing.  I love that.

That’s great advice. Thank you so much Michelle and Eric for being here. It’s a very important topic and I know our listeners learned a lot today, so thank you both.  Thank you for listening to Retail Unwrapped. We’ll be back in one week with another podcast. Please subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or any podcast service.

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