Firefighting foams contain toxic PFAS. Could soybeans be the answer?
Jeff King has served on the volunteer fire department in Corydon, Kentucky, for over 30 years. He is well aware of the dangers of the job — including one that may be hiding in the supplies he and his crew use to keep others safe.
Many of the foams firefighters spray to extinguish blazes contain per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, or PFAS. Known as 'forever chemicals,' PFAS are a class of human-made chemicals that repel water and oil; it's this quality that makes them effective at battling tough-to-put-out fires, like those started with diesel fuel. The chemicals are also tied to a host of human health problems, from reproductive issues to high cholesterol to certain types of cancer. King admits that some of the foams he's used over his career 'may or may not be good for us.'
That's why he visited Dalton, Georgia, last year to meet with representatives from Cross Plains Solutions, a company that developed a PFAS-free firefighting foam made from soybeans. After seeing the foam in action, he was impressed. 'The product performs just fantastic,' said King. And because it has been certified as PFAS-free, he figured, 'there's nothing in it that could potentially make me or any other firefighter in this country that uses it sick. I just thought, 'Wait a minute, this is almost a no-brainer.''
There's another upside for King in all of this: In his day job, he's a soybean farmer himself. A new application for the humble soybean would be good for business.
The search to find a PFAS-free firefighting foam is relatively new, as a growing body of research illuminates the harmful impact that these chemicals have on humans and the environment. Soybean farmers have presented their crop as a surprising solution to this problem. Although more research and development are needed to ensure soy-based firefighting foam holds up under the toughest circumstances, the product is catching the attention of local fire departments.
'There is a good bit of interest,' said Alan Snipes, CEO of Cross Plains Solutions. He estimated that his company's product, aptly named SoyFoam, is now being used in 50 fire departments around the country, mostly in the Midwest. That's not a coincidence: Snipes pointed out that many rural fire departments in the middle of the country depend on volunteer firefighters. 'A lot of the volunteers are farmers, and a lot of the farmers grow soybeans,' he said.
Cross Plains began to look into creating a PFAS-free, soy-based firefighting foam after being approached by the United Soybean Board. Snipes was first in touch with the board more than 30 years ago, when he worked in the carpet industry and started using soy-based compounds to manufacture backing for commercial carpets. He started Cross Plains Solutions about 13 years ago to produce a bio-based cooling gel for mattresses. Then, three years ago, the United Soybean Board offered the company funding to develop and test a biodegradable firefighting foam.
The board, whose members are appointed by the US Department of Agriculture, exists to collect one-half of one percent of the market price of every bushel of soybeans sold by US farmers. This congressionally mandated process, called the soybean checkoff program, is used to fund research into new markets for soybeans.
The United Soybean Board partners with both public and private actors, like universities and corporations, to fund research into and commercialization of new soybean uses. Often, this looks like investing in more sustainable alternatives to fossil fuels — like using soybean oil as a petroleum replacement in tires, straws, and shoes. In a partnership like the one with Cross Plains, the checkoff program is hoping to create a business opportunity that might help farmers sell more bushels down the line. The result is a 'win-win,' said Philip Good, chair of the United Soybean Board.
After King returned home to Kentucky, his fire department voted to exclusively use SoyFoam going forward; according to King, it was the first in the country to do so.
SoyFoam is not unique. There are other alternatives to PFAS-based firefighting foams on the market with different formulations and applications, said Danielle Nachman, a senior staff scientist at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory. 'They can span all kinds of chemistry,' said Nachman. Some are bio-based, like a gel made with canola oil, while others try to replicate the chemical properties of PFAS without relying on fluorinated compounds.
The big hurdle for SoyFoam and other PFAS-free firefighting foams is meeting requirements set by the Department of Defense for military firefighting and training activity. PFAS-containing firefighting foams were first patented by the United States Navy in the 1960s, following a series of devastating fires on aircraft carriers and other ships. In the 1970s, virtually every US military base began using these foams for emergencies and training exercises — leading to dangerous contamination in the surrounding areas.
'The majority of the headache when it comes to PFAS [in firefighting foams] is the military application,' said Mohamed Ateia Ibrahim, an adjunct assistant professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering at Rice University, 'because of all of the military bases and the training activities.'
The Department of Defense has been working to transition away from firefighting foams that contain PFAS — but SoyFoam has a ways to go before it could be fully embraced by the military. The Pentagon has not tested Cross Plains Solutions' product, but Snipes said the agency has encouraged the company to seek further funding to continue its R&D.
The Department of Defense didn't respond to Grist's request for comment.
Ibrahim said he supports the development of bio-based, PFAS-free foams, but that companies need to be more transparent about what exactly goes into their products. 'We need more clarification about the other components and whether they are, as a whole, really better or not' than PFAS-based firefighting foams, said Ibrahim.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Winnipeg Free Press
6 days ago
- Winnipeg Free Press
Choking smoke in city ranks worst in Canada; health expert sounds alarm
Much of Manitoba had the worst air quality in Canada Thursday, as researchers warn the long-term effects of the smog are not yet fully realized. 'We know that there's increases in things like heart attacks and out-of-hospital cardiac arrest when it's smoky outside. We are learning about the neurological symptoms and we are learning more about the metabolic effects,' said Sarah Henderson, the scientific director of Environmental Health Services at the BC Centre for Disease Control during a virtual Thursday news conference to provide an update on Canada's wildfire situation. 'The key message here is that smoke affects the entire body.' MIKAELA MACKENZIE / FREE PRESS Smoke hangs over the Red River as people walk the River Trail at The Forks on Thursday. AQMap, a site which compiles data on air quality from Environment and Climate Change Canada, showed parts of Winnipeg registered 269 Fine Particulate Matter (PM 2.5) Thursday afternoon. Areas in Saskatchewan registered second at 239 PM2.5. Anything above 100 PM2.5 is considered very unhealthy. Winnipeg set a record for it's smokiest year to date. The city had recorded 306 smoke hours as of Tuesday, compared with 304 in 1961. People with medical conditions such as asthma, COPD, chronic heart diseases and chronic kidney disease are all at a heightened risk for complications, but birth outcomes could also be affected. 'We know that there are birth outcomes associated with smoke exposures, so there is a higher risk of pre term birth for infants who were exposed to smoke well in utero. We know that there's a higher risk of potential stillbirth,' Henderson said. With drought-like conditions fuelling wildfires across Manitoba and smoke in the long-term forecast, Henderson said the only option is for people to protect themselves against exposure. 'The No. 1 piece of information that you will hear is go inside and close the windows and doors. That may help to protect people somewhat, but it is not enough,' she said. Using indoor air purifiers and wearing masks are good ways to reduce smoke exposure, Henderson said. Andrew Halayko, a professor of physiology and pathophysiology at the University of Manitoba's Max Rady College of Medicine and Canada Research chair in lung pathobiology and treatment, said areas in Manitoba that were historically polluted could be greatly affected. Halayko pointed to communities such as Flin Flon, which has a long history of mining and resource extraction and has polluted the nearby ground with heavy metals such as lead, mercury and selenium. A fire in the region in late May forced the evacuation of the city, located about 760 kilometres northwest of Winnipeg. 'What happens to those metals when they're released from the soil? Do they somehow chemically interact with particles that we're inhaling? So now there's an element to that particular smoke that's more toxic,' he said. 'These are questions we don't know.' MIKAELA MACKENZIE / FREE PRESS Winnipeg had recorded 306 smoke hours as of Tuesday, compared with 304 in 1961. Halayko is in the process of acquiring grants to further research how wildfire smoke interacts with other toxins, such as vehicle exhaust, and how it affects human health. The professor said he's also worried about how wildfire smoke will affect people psychologically; the directive to stay indoors is reminiscent of the COVID-19 pandemic and is changing social behaviours. It also adds a layer of stress to those who live near wildfires but not close enough to be evacuated. Weekday Mornings A quick glance at the news for the upcoming day. 'I think you would just increase the all these stressors on your day-to-day life. People think, 'That fire, although not in my backyard, is it actually going to take out the electricity to my town?' 'And what about people who are displaced? Maybe you've never been to Winnipeg. Never been in a large city. You're now being asked to sleep in large rooms like the convention centre on cots (alongside) people that you don't necessarily know. It's incredibly devastating to those people. It's got to be traumatic.' Halayko speculated that there could be some urban migration in Manitoba due to repeated wildfires in the North, but Henderson stopped short of telling residents to make moving plans. 'We know we cannot predict where and when smoke will be, and so it's really about learning to live with smoke when it occurs and developing that population scale resiliency, and thinking through all of the ways that we can reduce our exposure,' she said. Nicole BuffieMultimedia producer Nicole Buffie is a reporter for the Free Press city desk. Born and bred in Winnipeg, Nicole graduated from Red River College's Creative Communications program in 2020 and worked as a reporter throughout Manitoba before joining the Free Press newsroom as a multimedia producer in 2023. Read more about Nicole. Every piece of reporting Nicole produces is reviewed by an editing team before it is posted online or published in print — part of the Free Press's tradition, since 1872, of producing reliable independent journalism. Read more about Free Press's history and mandate, and learn how our newsroom operates. Our newsroom depends on a growing audience of readers to power our journalism. If you are not a paid reader, please consider becoming a subscriber. Our newsroom depends on its audience of readers to power our journalism. Thank you for your support.
Winnipeg Free Press
02-08-2025
- Winnipeg Free Press
Dropping the ball on home care
Opinion There are moments where one realizes just how badly a situation has deteriorated. Take home care in Manitoba, for example. For months, health-care providers have been sounding the alarm that the system was breaking down. 'Absolute chaos', blared one Free Press headline from April; Home care chaos in store, workers say, declared another in mid-July. And now, to close out the month, the sad tale of Seth Wigderson and his wife, Julie Guard, who were forced to go without important home care for five weeks … because they moved to a new home a 10-minute drive from their old one. MIKE DEAL / FREE PRESS Health, Seniors and Long-Term Care Minister Uzoma Asagwara It's the sort of thing that makes you take stock of just how bad the situation has become: how does a move to a new location slightly further away completely upend the accessibility of home-care services? It should have been a simple matter: just call the care provider, provide a change of address, and that's it. And the upsetting thing is, it did indeed seem to be that easy — once the provider felt properly motivated to do it. 'Guard said it was only after speaking to a Free Press reporter on Tuesday, who began making phone calls to the government, that home care called her Tuesday night to say workers would be assigned to fulfil the new schedule,' this paper reported in its July 31 story. We can't know for sure why there was such a long and significant disruption in services. Certainly, home-care providers in Manitoba have spoken repeatedly about the backlog they face as a result of understaffing. But given how quickly a little poking around by a reporter changed things for two Winnipeggers, it certainly looks like a situation where no one felt much of an urge to help Guard and Wigderson until they thought it might make them look bad. That cannot be the way this works. For their part, Health Minister Uzoma Asagwara said the move had nothing to do with the loss of service and that 'the system failed this family and that is unacceptable.' Asagwara is correct, but the buck stops with them. Asagwara has held the health portfolio for going on two years, and repairing the province's flailing health-care system has supposedly been a major priority of the Wab Kinew government since it captured the legislature for the NDP. Yet, after all that time, not only does the system seem to be struggling in all the same major ways, it continues to struggle to handle simple things, too. Wednesdays What's next in arts, life and pop culture. The salt in the wound here is the indication that Manitobans are in for more of the same: Asagwara's office is supposedly 'looking into the matter,' and will ask the Winnipeg Regional Health Authority to prevent something like this from happening again. It's not a useful request, because you can only demand so much of an overstretched system. 'Don't let it happen again,' only goes so far when saying that is not followed by more people in the offices to take the calls and handle the details, or more people to do the actual home-care work. And yes, it's true those people will not show up trained and ready overnight. But it's not about 'overnight' — it should have been done by now, at least to a degree better than this one. It's time for Asagwara — and for that matter, the premier — to come clean about where the situation really stands with health care and its related services in this province, and what they're actually going to do about it. Or else someone else is going to be in the same spot at Wigderson and Guard. Maybe they already are.
National Observer
28-07-2025
- National Observer
Homeowners question government over PFAS contamination cleanup
Edward Sheerr didn't know much about per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances until they were discovered in his drinking water. He, his wife and their two children moved to their home in the town of Torbay, Newfoundland and Labrador, in 2017 and found out from neighbours that the water in their area was not safe to drink. He recalls feeling afraid, angry and desperate for answers: 'What are the possible implications from that? And what really can we do about it?' Eventually, he learned that the per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) contamination was coming from St. John's International Airport before spreading and seeping into the household well water in his neighbourhood. PFAS are a group of synthetic chemicals used since the 1950s in everything from clothing to food wrappers to cookware. But one of the most problematic uses is at airports and airport firefighter training facilities, where aqueous firefighting foams (AFFF) contain PFAS. These 'forever chemicals' build up in the environment and in people who come into contact with them. The St. John's airport is one of 33 PFAS-contaminated airport sites for which Transport Canada is responsible, according to the department's own data. Some of these sites have been identified as PFAS-contaminated for over 20 years, but have not yet undergone complete environmental remediation to clean PFAS out of the soil and water. All of which has added another question for Sheerr: What's taking so long? 'They don't go anywhere' The Torbay site was classified as contaminated by Transport Canada in 2005-2006 and, 20 years later, just under 19,000 tons of contamination has been cleaned up. Other sites are also seeing sluggish progress. A site in Sept-Îles, Quebec, was identified seven years ago but is still in the planning stages for a cleanup which hasn't been performed yet. Watson Lake in the Yukon was added to the list in 2005-2006 — and current information shows that no remediation work beyond planning has happened. The St. John's airport is one of 33 PFAS-contaminated airport sites for which Transport Canada is responsible, according to the department's own data. Some of these sites have been identified as PFAS-contaminated for over 20 years. A research paper from 2018 assessed that of 2,071 airport and heliport sites across Canada, 420 sites likely have PFAS contamination from firefighting foam and 25 of these sites were between 200 metres to 2.5 kilometres from surface water such as streams, lakes or wetlands. Their ubiquity is a direct consequence of their utility. 'On one side, they're amazing chemicals,' says Johan Foster, an associate professor with the University of British Columbia's chemical and biological engineering department. 'They're wonderful for what they do.' And because they're so effective, they're used a lot, he says. But their chemical structures mean they don't break down. 'That's why they're the 'forever chemicals,' because they just kind of sit around, they never degrade, and then they build up,' he says. Also, PFAS don't stay local — they travel, sometimes long distances away from the original polluted area. They spread via groundwater, surface water, run-off, soil, rain and wind. They evaporate into the air and drop somewhere else. They can spread with activities, like water bombers scooping up water from a contaminated lake and dumping it on a forest fire elsewhere, says Foster. Because they spread easily, water-soluble PFAS are the ones most frequently found in nature, he says. 'If it rains, they get into the groundwater,' he says. 'We can eat them, they get into our bloodstream, they cause all sorts of problems inside the human body and also with animals and nature. We don't break them down inside of our body, and they don't go anywhere.' The chemicals had been widely adopted because of how cheap and easy they are to use — but cleaning them up is precisely the opposite. 'Truly, once the cat is out of the bag, cleanup of PFAS is wildly expensive and very complex work,' says Cassie Barker, senior program manager for toxics at nonprofit Environmental Defence. 'I think that these municipalities and/or private well-users are left holding the bag on trying to find expensive water treatment solutions at the end of the pipe.' There isn't yet a good remediation method, either. There are two main technologies available, Foster says. One is absorbative, which uses a filter to remove PFAS from water, but those filters are then contaminated. If they're sent to a landfill site, they'll just transfer the contamination to the ground. There's also electro-oxidation and supercritical water methods. For the latter, a container of water is heated to 374 degrees Celsius under a lot of pressure that ultimately destroys the PFAS. This is what engineers like Foster call a 'very dilute problem.' If you were to throw half a wooden toothpick-sized quantity of PFAS into an Olympic-sized swimming pool, that would make it undrinkable. Now imagine cleaning that up. 'You just can't take that swimming pool of water and heat it up. You have to be able to concentrate it and then destroy it,' he says. 'That creates an issue of being able to do this at scale.' Where are the PFAS? Even before the difficult work of remediation can begin, the PFAS need to be found. However, Canada lacks comprehensive records about PFAS contaminations or its presence in water systems or groundwater. While over 100 federal sites have been identified as PFAS-contaminated, the Federal Contaminated Sites Inventory does not yet include all of them, according to a 2025 report from Environment and Climate Change Canada and Health Canada. PFAS was only added to the inventory in 2024-2025. Further, environmental releases of PFAS are reported to the national spill registry, which is better suited to capture spills of substances such as oil or diesel — not something that can contaminate a swimming pool with a couple of drops — so small but still consequential amounts may not be reported. As well, not all types of PFAS get picked up by standard commercial analyses, says Kela Weber, professor of chemistry and chemical engineering at the Royal Military College and co-author of the 2018 paper. That's been, he says, 'a fundamental challenge from the start.' 'There are so many different types of PFAS, most labs can't even analyze for them,' he says. And if we don't know what was present in the first place, we can't know whether it's really been destroyed, he points out. Additionally, the PFAS being dealt with now are from 30-odd years ago, not the current variations, which are ever-expanding — one estimate puts global annual PFAS sales at $55 billion a year. As if the problem weren't already complex enough, PFAS can transform as they move through the world, evaporating, condensing and encountering other chemicals. 'The challenge of remediation is not the removal of the parent compound that you're interested in,' Weber says. 'It's the removal of all PFAS, including what that parent compound is transformed into.' He says that's what happens with all removal technologies, 'whether it's detected there's transformation happening or not.' Who's going to pay? As evidence mounts of the chemicals' harms, individuals and governments are taking PFAS manufacturers to court. Transport Canada is suing chemical manufacturers 3M and Mueller Water Products, while British Columbia filed a class action against manufacturers last year. But governments are also facing lawsuits for their part in allowing the chemical contamination to go so far. The Sheerrs are part of a class action lawsuit launched against Transport Canada last fall, accusing the department of negligence and seeking damages, among other things. They say the department has never performed a hydrogeological study, even though the Department of Environment and the Town of Torbay have both recommended one. 'We're at somewhat of a loss as to why it is that Transport Canada hasn't committed to doing that yet,' says Alex Templeton, the lawyer heading the lawsuit. Transport Canada declined to provide a representative for an interview and instead sent a comment that reads, in part, 'Transport Canada takes its responsibilities related to human health and the environment seriously, especially with respect to Per- and Polyfluoroalkyl Substances (PFAS). … When test results at an airport property boundary indicate exceedances of the new PFAS objective, Transport Canada has been contacting neighbouring residents with residential drinking water wells to test their water.' But the Sheerrs found out about their water when Transport Canada tested other homes in their neighbourhood. Eddie Sheerr contacted the department himself to request a water test. 'I had to reach out to them. They didn't reach out to me,' he says. In-home filtration systems promised last fall have yet to materialize, he says, and as with other homes in their community that found PFAS presence in excess of 30 nanograms a litre, the Sheerrs are now receiving 15 five-gallon bottles of water a month from Transport Canada. There are many start-ups and researchers trying to solve the PFAS removal problem. Foster has a PFAS-cleaning start-up being tested, and Weber is working on a method that's scheduled for a field trial in Ontario next year. The Sheerrs and others in their community would like more transparency and help, and Foster would like more regulations and plans. 'This is our generation's leaded fuel,' he says. 'It's in the environment. You can't see it. You can't smell it. It's creating all of these health problems. And we're going to have to deal with it.'
