By Terry Gips,
President and Co-Founder,
Alliance for Sustainability
My name is Terry Gips. I’m 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 Sen. Seeberger for proposing SF 2129, an innovative and far-reaching effort to address the growing scourge we’re facing from PFAS forever chemicals.
We work closely with business to develop win-win-win sustainability solutions that benefit business, people and the planet.
We are pleased that most industry is recognizing the need to develop alternatives to PFAS chemicals and we feel this bill will further move them forward and ultimately save them money while protecting the health of their customers and the water we drink.
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 euphenism because they actually show up in our bodies and environment, which we sadly see with PFAS being everywhere and in all of us.
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.
We feel this bill will help create the real incentive for business to rid the world of dangerous PFAS forever chemicals, while using the funds raised to cover the clean-up.
It is sound economics to have the polluter pay for clean-up of toxics and this bill will help assure this will take place. While it may increase costs in the short-term for consumers, just as cigarette taxes have, the benefit for these consumers in saved health costs and municipalities in water clean-up far outweigh the minor increase in costs.
This bill is an important and innovative next step in building on Amara’s Law, Minnesota’s important legislative model for the world and for all of us and our children.
Thank you.