By Terry Gips,
President and Co-Founder,
Alliance for Sustainability
My name is Terry Gips from St. Louis Park and I volunteer as the President of the Alliance for Sustainability, a nonprofit I co-founded 41 years ago with the mission of co-creating sustainability on a personal, organizational and planetary level.
I’m proud of the work we’ve done with the MN Legislature over the past four decades to pass the toughest organic standards in the US, ban hazardous pesticides and other toxics, approve landmark groundwater protection legislation and so much more.
We are grateful to you for taking the huge step of passing Amara’s law, the most innovative and far-reaching effort in the world to address the growing scourge we’re facing from PFAS forever chemicals.
We totally support your important leadership in passing this critical, long-overdue legislation that should be a standard throughout the US.
We work closely with business to develop win-win-win sustainability solutions that benefit business, people and the planet.
Consequently, we are disappointed by HF1627 as industry attempts to exempt products for commercial and industrial use from PFAS restrictions, thus weakening Amara’s law, which is essential to protecting people and our planet. Current law allows the Commissioner to grant an exemption if no alternative is available so no change is needed.
In most cases, there are excellent alternatives to PFAS chemicals and we need industry to embrace them or discover them for their own self-benefit and bottom line, as well as the health of their customers and the water we drink.
At a time we have to make massive public clean water infrastructure investments in Minnesota, it doesn’t make sense to allow even more polluting PFAS forever chemicals into our water systems.
I can say that as an economist, we must look at the real costs of our actions, including hidden costs that my fellow economists often call “externalities”, which is a euphemism because they actually show up in our bodies and environment, which we sadly see with PFAS being everywhere and in all of us.
The Alliance has been through this numerous times with pesticides and other chemicals. We’ve succeeded in banning them, which has provided a net benefit despite the previous cries of industry. The same is true with PFAS forever chemicals.
If we had to pay for all the impacts and both direct and indirect costs of using PFAS forever chemicals, no one would be able to afford them.
According to the MN Pollution Control Agency, PFAS chemicals cost $50 to $1,000 per pound. However, they cost between $2.7 million and $18 million per pound to remove and destroy from municipal wastewater. That makes the water clean-up 18,000 times greater than the product itself.
But that doesn’t count for a range of other health and other costs. Those costs would be so great that business would immediately choose to switch to a safe alternative. These businesses would ultimately do better and contribute to our communities, rather than cost them.
For this reason, we ask that you do not alter Amara’s Law for the memory of Amara, Minnesota’s important legislative model for the world and for all of us and our children.
Thank you.