黑水

今天看了马克叔（ Mark Ruffalo）的新片《黑水》，看得毛骨悚然。

并非恐怖片，却胜似恐怖片，因为片中涉及到的污染至今依然存在。

马克叔演的很像是《永不妥协》（Erin Brockovich）中的大嘴姐姐，为了很多人面临的威胁向大公司发起挑战。

但是，不同的是，马克叔出演的这个律师，他的工作尚未完成，20年来他依然在斗争，而且面对的问题似乎更加艰难。

本片基于Nathaniel Rich在《纽约时报》上发表的文章《The Lawyer Who Became DuPont’s Worst Nightmare》，围绕马克叔出演的律师罗伯特·比洛特展开。

为了他生活的土地上人民不再受到污水的威胁，他代表一位农民对化工巨头杜邦公司提起了环境诉讼，这场官司揭露了几十年来杜邦公司化学污染的历史。

如果现在查新闻，才发现这个故事从2017年才开始被大量报导，去年也有一部纪录片《恶魔你知我知》（The Devil WeKnow）同样讲述了杜邦公司一直隐藏的罪行，及这家工厂产生的废物造成了多少人身患癌症及生出的孩子有残缺。

本片更告诉你，这场斗争背后的推动者其实从20年前就开始着手调查，只是始终没有引起足够社会重视。

问题在20年前就被发现，但是这些年来，马克叔演的律师及很多人都费劲力气寻找各种证据，甚至采集了当地数万人的血样，也没能扳倒杜邦。

最终2017年，人们才看到化验结果，证实了当地人民的水被污染，杜邦公司生产的一些用品也有毒。

比如1945年起他们就推出了特氟龙品牌，带有特氟龙（聚四氟乙烯）涂层的不粘锅，而生产特氟龙涂层时，需要加入活性剂 PFOS 和 PFOA。

其中 PFOA，又被称为 C8对人体是有毒的，可以导致癌症和婴儿畸形。

特别是生产不粘锅过程中接触这些化学物质的人最容易被影响。

其中该公司一名员工剩下的孩子面部就是畸形的，类似我们看过的《奇迹男孩》里的小男孩。

但是因为杜邦公司很强大，他们只是做了很多和解与赔偿，并没有受到应有的惩罚。

虽然PFOA近年来被禁，但曾经用它生产的东西已经在过去这些年来遍布全世界各个角落，很多人都无形中已经被污染而尚不知道。

这位律师的事迹很感人，但真正这类电影拍摄的主要目的是让更多人知道生活中潜在的危险，并让观众回家后可以多做研究，了解更多背后的故事。

影片也证实推翻这些为了利益而牺牲人们健康的大集团有多么不容易。

正如很多之前的调查类型电影，为了能与有权人士对抗，往往需要媒体、执法机关的配合，且最终要的是调查人员的上司一定要给力，才能继续推进事件发展。

本片中出演上司的是久违的Tim Robbins. 另一位搭档律师也是久违的老演员Bill Pullman出演。

Anne Hathaway则出演了马克叔的妻子，主要展示这位律师在于大公司对抗时给家人带来的压力。

今年另一部类似题材的电影《The Report》也是如此，只是调查的对象是CIA，也是下属得到了上司的支持才最终完成了这个危险的任务。

以及之前的奥斯卡最佳影片《焦点新闻》（Spotlight）也是。

这些电影都说明，正直、有原则的领导层真的重要。

不然小人物再怎么努力都是白搭。

马克叔在作绿巨人之余，最喜欢参与这类根据真实事件改编的调查类电影，从记者到侦探再到律师，他都演过，将很多鲜为人知的真实事迹带给了观众。

马克叔本人也是环保积极分子，平时会经常积极关注一些与环保和时政有关的事，发挥公众人物的影响力。

只是这个角色不像大嘴姐姐的Erin Brockovich那么有戏剧性和看点，他真的就是一个很平凡的人，调查过程也比较乏味，因此没有太多空间展示演技。

但故事依然值得一看, 而且来的正是时候，各方面证据更为清晰，很多参与者也依然在世，能让故事有更多依据可寻。

反正看完，我真的不想用不粘锅了

原载「虹膜」几乎所有的政治惊悚片都在试图回答一个问题：我们看似美好正常的生活如果是个假象，那背后到底是什么力量在控制着这一切？

托德·海因斯执导的《黑水》便可被归类其中，影片在烂番茄得到了评论家和观众的双高分，豆瓣也有8.3分的好成绩，它所触及到的话题，在我们每个人的生活中可能都还继续存在，就像一颗颗定时炸弹，躺在你的平底锅涂层，又或者是地毯表面，甚至是饮用水里，悄无声息地扼杀着我们的生命。

《黑水》改编自律师罗伯特·比洛特和世界化学巨头公司杜邦长达数年的抗争。

这绝对是一场历史性战斗，不仅仅因为它牵涉的时间长达几十年，也因为它几乎危及了全世界的人类，更因为这场战斗几乎是一个人与世界上最大的资本主义公司巨头的战斗。

杜邦公司在化学领域的巨头程度，差不多就等于苹果之于全球手机厂商，麦当劳之于连锁快餐产业，全球有无数人都在为杜邦公司工作，而比洛特就是其中一员。

为杜邦公司做常规辩护的他在偶然的机会下接触到了杜邦公司的受害者。

由于杜邦长期在当地排放化学污物，农场主坦南特的牛牙齿腐烂，双眼充血，性情发狂，身体器官肿大，成群死去。

坦南特自己和妻子，也都患上了癌症，大家都知道是杜邦的问题，但没有一个人敢接这个案子。

因为杜邦的势力实在是太大了，它不仅决定着无数社区居民的工作、生计问题，更和当地环保部门有着盘根错节的关系，它之所以能逃过环保部门的督查，是因为其涉及到污染的化学物质，根本就没有相应标准被报备。

面对一个比监管者还懂得多的违法者，普通人什么也做不了。

问题出在一种叫「特氟龙」的化学物质上，它由3M公司研发，由于抗水性极强而被用作坦克的涂层，后来这项技术转到了杜邦手里，它们开始想法设法把这项技术从战场上扩大到平民百姓家中。

于是涂层不粘锅诞生了。

伴随着解放家庭主妇的宣言，这项技术走进了千家万户，也为杜邦带来了年逾十亿美元的收入。

早在几十年前，由于特氟龙生产线上的工作人员接二连三出问题，甚至罹患癌症，产下畸形儿，杜邦就已经做过长足的调查，证明了特氟龙对人体有直接危害，但巨大的商业利润让它把这一切掩盖了下来，继续推动着这台商业机器往前运行。

而《黑水》，就为我们展现了律师比洛特和杜邦公司长达数十年的抗争历程，在这之前，他自己家里甚至也在使用平底锅和有特氟龙成分的地毯。

这就回答了我们一开始说的那个问题，在一切出现，假象被打破之前，比洛特甚至自己就是杜邦共同体中的一员，踩着法律和道德的边界线为杜邦进行环境辩护。

一切看起来都很好，他还刚刚成为律所的合伙人，而直到那个陌生的农夫找上门来之后，他才发现，原来这一切都是被控制下的假象。

《黑水》基本以年份为节点线性构建起全片的时间脉络，在体现真实性的同时，也带来一种让人倍感无力的、事态毫无进展、阴谋始终在继续的延宕感。

从发现和拿到杜邦为害的证据，到说服律所的其他合伙人，再到真正和杜邦对簿公堂，每一个关口都走得极其艰难。

即便是已经打赢了官司，走到研究特氟龙与杜邦受害者疾病的直接关联上，都花了七年的时间。

而当科研报告出来后，杜邦又否认了之前的一切行为，比洛特甚至需要面临具体到每一个受害人与杜邦的单独案子。

这几乎是接受不到任何正反馈的持久抗战，影片在为我们展现了这种无休止的调查诉讼的同时，也为我们展现了比洛特的生活是如何被摧毁的。

因为十几年都一心扑在这个案件上，他缺席了孩子的成长，和妻子缺乏交流，也没有人敢找他参与其他案子，他在律所的薪水也被降到了原来的三分之一，人也因为巨大的精神压力而出现了暂时性休克状态，之前那种典型白人中产阶级精英的状态几乎荡然无存。

由此，《黑水》也得以完成了起两个层面上的功能。

一方面，它呈现为一部真实而详尽的时事改编电影，对于特氟龙事件的前因后果和利益相关方都有展现。

而这种展现被有机地植入到了比洛特和受害人、杜邦公司相关方、科学研究人员、律所同事、家人等的交流中，这些纷繁的素材被托德·海因斯自然地编织进了所有的「对话」中，亦成为了影片本身所想要挖掘的那种日常生活背后真相的佐证。

另一方面，作为真实事件和影片的绝对主角，《黑水》也同样为我们展现了比洛特的生活是如何被这一事件占据的。

托德·海因斯时常把他扔进具有强大压迫性的单人场景中，以影像传达那种无法言说的压力和恐惧。

当比洛特一个人坐在地上整理材料，被如山的档案包围时，他也是在被杜邦那种超越了时代和历史的强权包围。

一个非常有意思的场景是，在一次和杜邦高层的关键性对谈后，比洛特步行去地下车库准备驱车离开，那种巨大压力带来的焦虑又让他手发生了神经性抽搐，比洛特几乎是逃进了自己的车里。

在准备转动车钥匙点火时，他迟疑了很久，最终什么也没有发生。

但作为观众的我们已经明白了他的担忧。

对于他这样的体制撼动者而言，在各种不明原因的爆炸意外中丧生是常见的结局。

且不论比洛特本人是否遭遇过这样的危机，但托德·海因斯由此所建立出的惊悚感和悬疑性，不得不让人想到上世纪那些著名的政治惊悚电影诸如《凶线》《视差》。

而比洛特那种被摧毁的状态，贯穿了整部影片的无力感，以及那种站在失败者边缘的崩溃状态，显然也是诸如《唐人街》这样的黑色电影中绝望侦探的变体。

由此，《黑水》也在拥有了时事改编电影的那种现实性的同时，也成功地在其中融入了政治惊悚片所会带给我们的恐慌和荒谬感。

而它所触及的「政治」，已经远远超过了我们通常理解的那种国家层面上的政治，呈现为一种不同掌权者之间的相护和勾结。

就像比洛特的同事在反对他的行为时暗示的那样，起诉杜邦除了意味着律所要完全打破以前的制度，还无异于在摧毁一家标志性的美国公司的形象，这同样也是维护杜邦的当地政府在巨大的经济利益之外要考虑的事。

某种程度上，这是在摧毁「美国精神」。

从这个角度上来说，《黑水》显得尤为大胆，并在这样一个看起来完全不像托德·海因斯会拍的题材中，展现出了一种高度凝练的共性。

无论是同性题材的《卡罗尔》和《远离天堂》，还是讲述艾滋病群体的《安然无恙》，都是在讲述某种「局外人」和「边缘人」的故事。

为了一个陌生人的请求而拿出了自己十几年甚至更长人生的比洛特就是这样的「局外人」。

即便到故事的最后，我们也不能说比洛特胜利了，杜邦为此付出的代价还不及自己一年的利润，陈述与局外人相对的巨型体制的胜利，是《黑水》的毫不粉饰。

它犹如一封战书，向每个人宣读了战斗的理由。

我们战斗的意义，并不因这战斗的胜利与否而削减半分。

“Has anyone even read the evidence this man has collected?The willful negligence, the corruption?Read it!And then tell me we should be sitting on our asses!That's the reason why Americans hate lawyers.This is the crap that fuels the Ralph Naders of the world.We should want to nail DuPont.All of us should!American business is better than this, gentlemen.And when it's not, we should hold them to it.That's how you build faith in the system.We're always arguing that companies are people.Well, these people have crossed the line!"

"They want us to think it'll protect us,but that's a lie.We protect us. We do.Nobody else.Not the companies. Not the scientists.Not the government. Us.A farmer with a 12th grade education told me that.On day one, he knew and I thought he was crazy.Isn't that crazy?"

Part 1 基本定義全氟化合物 (perfluorinated compounds, PFCs) 是一類碳鏈上氫原子全部被氟原子取代的有機化合物。

由於其良好的疏水、疏油特性，常被用作表面活性劑應用於紡織、造紙、金屬電鍍、油漆塗料、食品包裝等工業和民用領域，與人類生產生活密切相關。

由於PFCs穩定性極強，目前已在包括水、土壤、大氣等環境介質及生物體中大量檢出。

一如電影《黑水》中提及的PFOA與腎癌、睪丸癌、潰瘍性結腸炎、甲狀腺疾病、高膽固醇血癥和妊娠高血壓六種重疾相關，毒理學研究表明，PFCs具有致癌性、肝毒性、神經毒性、生殖毒性等。

全氟化合物可分為離子型類 (Ionic PFCs) 和非離子型化合物 (Non-ionic PFCs). 離子型全氟化合物又可分為全氟磺酸類化合物 (perfluoroalkyl sulfonic acids, PFSAs) 和全氟羧酸類化合物 (perfluoroalkyl carboxylic acids, PFCAs) 兩類。

非離子型化合物以全氟酰胺類化合物(perfluorooctane sulfonamides, FOSAMs) 和氟調聚醇類化合物 (Fluorotelomer acids, FTAs) 兩種應用最廣。

大部分全氟化合物產品含 4-14個碳原子，其中全氟辛烷 (C8) 產品占80%以上。

全氟辛烷磺酸及其鹽類 (perfluorooctane sulphonate, PFOS) 和全氟辛酸羧酸及其鹽類 (perfluorooctanoic acid, PFOA) 是PFCs的典型代表化合物。

此外，PFOS是在PFOSF酶催水解後形成的，也是全氟辛烷類表面活性劑產品的最終降解產物。

PFOA是生產氟化乙醇 (perfluorinated alcohol) 的副產品，在防水防污及水成膜泡沫 (AFFF)的產生過程中也會形成PFOA. 食品包裝袋中的氟化調聚物 (Fluorotelomer)降解時也會出現PFOA. 電影中杜邦公司生產特氟龍所使用的工業表面活性劑也含PFOA.近年來，PFOA和PFOS，作為全氟和多氟烷基物质 (PFAS) 或全氟化合物 (PFC) 的一組化學品的一部分，已被列入持久性有機汙染物(persistent organic pollutants,POPs) 的斯德哥爾摩公約附錄B和歐洲化學品管理局的第9批高度關註物質(substances of very high concern,SVHC)中。

持久性有機汙染物具備四種特性：高毒性、持久性、生物積累性、遠距離遷移性，顯然這意味著全氟化合物 (PFCs) 以其獨特的表面活性及化學穩定性，而被廣泛應用於生活、工業及科研等領域的產品中，其性質穩定可長距離遷移，具有生物富集性和生物毒性，是一種持久性有機污染物。

另外，電影《黑水》屢次提及的另一種人造化學物質－聚四氟乙烯 (Polytetrafluoroethylene, PTFE)，可在-180～260ºC长期使用。

Teflon是該聚合物的商標名稱。

目前，除PTFE外，杜邦公司也將商標用於FEP、PFA、ETFE、AF、NXT、FFR等樹脂上，但整個氟塑料產量的70%以上都是PTFE。

目前，聚四氟乙烯被世界衛生組織國際癌症研究機構作為3類致癌物列入致癌物清單，對人的致癌性尚無法分類，即對人致癌可疑。

Part 2 我們喝的水2016年，美國國家環境保護局 (the U. S. Environmental Protection Agency) 已將PFOS和PFOA總量的建議限值設定為70 ng/L (ppt)，部分州則採用更嚴格的標準，比如，佛蒙特州在2019年將標準提到20 ng/L，加州則提出了5.1 ng/L的標準。

中國目前尚未設定官方標準，但學界對此一直有推動研究。

1）中國居民飲用水清華大學針對18種PFASs調研了來自66個中國城市的526份水樣，並將其研究成果發佈在《歐洲環境科學》上。

其中，受PFASs污染最嚴重的是四川自貢 (502.9 ng/L)，江蘇連雲港 (332.6 ng/L)，江蘇常熟 (122.4 ng/L)，四川成都(119.4 ng/L)，江蘇無錫(93.6 ng/L)，浙江杭州(74.1 ng/L)，其次是廣西南寧(64.1 ng/L)，江蘇蘇州(61.3 ng/L)，雲南昆明(60.4 ng/L)和安徽巢湖 (59.9 ng/L) 。

研究者們也提供了與全氟化合物相關的工廠附近水樣的數據：

中昊晨光化工研究院有限公司位於四川自貢的一生產PTFE(特氟龍)的工廠的水樣測出高達3165 ng/L的PFOA數值。

該公司是中國化工集團公司下屬全資企業，主營產品之一就是電影裡提到的特氟龍。

這是不是中國版的杜邦事件我們不得而知，但我們更擔心的是中國或許沒有一個能夠戰勝杜邦的羅伯特·比洛特。

而且以中國的人口基數和長江流域人口密集程度，電影裡美國的數萬人將會是我們的數千萬中國人。

另一間被點名的江西 Liwen Industrial PFOA也被測出268的驚人數值，另外還有浙江巨化這家證券代碼 600160的上市公司，PFOA測出115.4ng/L. 相比之下，《黑水》提及的杜邦公司在廣東的工廠則被測出53.4的PFOA數值。

在居民飲用水問題上，如果用佛蒙特州2019年的標準來判斷，那麼66個中國城市中有39個城市RQ（判斷飲水健康風險）小於0.1，屬於風險小到可忽略類別，24個城市屬於中風險範圍，另外四川自貢、江蘇連雲港、江西九江是高風險地區。

中國西南部居民飲用水受到PFASs的污染最為嚴重，中國東部地區為第二嚴重區，其次是中國南部城市。

除局部環渤海帶城市外，中國北方城市受污染程度普遍較低。

在中國居民飲水所含的PFASs化合物的組成上，以PFBA，PFOA和PFOS為主。

2020年，歐洲針對FOA, PFOS, PFHxS和PFNA之集合給出的TWI標準（週允許攝入量）是4.4ng/kg body weight. 這一數值從2008年歐標的每日允許攝入量1500 ng/kg 降至如今的每週允許攝入量4.4 ng/kg，該標準並不是在說你攝入4.4就沒事，而是在說能不攝入就千萬不要攝入了。

66個城市中，有20％的城市屬於居民飲用水攝入PFASs超標的城市範圍。

在自貢、九江、連雲港、佛山、蘇州、無錫、海寧、常熟、石家莊、淄博、上海的全年齡組人口每日攝入PFOA量都超過 3 ng/kg/day （2018年美國標準）。

在連雲港、東莞、深圳、石家莊、無錫、香港、台北、佛山、廣州、濟南、巢湖、常熟的全年齡組每日攝入PFOS量在1.27 到 61.44 ng/kg/day之間，但對於9個月到1歲的嬰兒，每日攝入PFOS量是在 3.54 to 171.28 ng/kg/day 遠遠超過 2 ng/kg/day （2018年美國標準）。

特別要指出的是自貢市的每日攝入量是822.9 至 2975.1ng/kg/day. 超出美國美國毒物和疾病登記署 (ATSDR) 標準近千倍，如果這不是黑水，你告訴我，這是什麼？

清華研究團隊通過水樣城市計算得出在中國有9850萬屬於飲用水攝入PFASs超標人群。

然而，除清華大學該研究所涉及的66個城市外，還有其他研究團隊也針對其他城市做過研究，比如國家地質實驗測試中心曾在長江流域-江西段的水樣中共檢出了11種PFASs，其中PFOA檢出率是100%. 地表水中PFASs的濃度範圍為7.8-586.2 ng/L。

總體上，汙染水平呈中遊高於下遊、幹流高於支流、南昌市高於鄱陽湖的趨勢；長江幹流和支流以PFOA為主，而南昌市和鄱陽湖以短鏈的PFBS為主，表明不同地區的汙染物主要來源存在差異。

南昌市地表水中PFASs的濃度最高，為146.2- 586.2 ng/L，高於以往報道的其他高汙染地區。

如此看來，中國有超過一億人口屬於飲用水攝入PFASs超標人群。

2）地下水、土壤和沉積物。

根據兰州交通大学刘庆先生的論文，珠三角地區依然存在高濃度水平的PFCs。

在廣州和深圳兩處垃圾填埋場滲濾液中PFCs有高濃度檢出。

廣深垃圾填埋場滲濾液總濃度分別為735.4ng/L和338.2ng/L，以PFOA、PFOS及全氟壬酸（PFNA）為主要目標污染物。

於珠三角地區採集的6個污水處理廠, 污水中13種PFCs的總濃度介於2.7594.58ng/L，主要的PFCs污染物為全氟辛烷羧酸（PFOA）和全氟辛烷磺酸（PFOS），活性污泥中PFCs總濃度介於6.5626.68ng/g之間， PFOS是主要目標物質。

廣州、中山、深圳、東莞及清遠5個珠三角城市地下水採樣點中100%檢出PFCs污染，地下水檢出總PFCs濃度介於0.05654.07ng/L，其中東莞受污染最大。

地下水中檢出目標物質以短中碳鏈的全氟羧酸及磺酸類物質為主，長碳鏈檢出率較低。

珠三角地區所有地下水採樣點中檢出PFCs濃度之間存在顯著相關（P0.05），說明這些污染物可能存在相似污染源。

因此，珠三角地區PFCs污染源是垃圾填埋場滲濾液、污水處理廠及城市排污河等典型污染源。

2019年11月，發改委根據《關於持久性有機污染物的斯德哥爾摩公約》將全氟辛烷磺酸（PFOS）和全氟辛烷磺酰氟（可接受用途為限制類）列為落後產品。

3）怎么做 What to Do If There Is a PFOA/PFOS Water Advisory1944年，NSF(National Sanitation Foundation，即美國國家衛生基金會)成立於密歇根大學公共衛生學院，並開始將公共衛生和食品安全要求標準化。

透明的、以共識為基礎的標準開發過程促成了NSF International開發出其第一個關於蘇打水冷飲機和便餐設備的標準，這也形成了NSF International開發其他公共衛生和安全標準的流程。

至今，NSF已經開發了超過80個公共衛生和安全方面的美國國家標準。

1990年NSF正式更名為NSF International，並持續為食品、水、環境和消費品領域提供服務。

NSF International的官網專門指出，如果你發現你的居民用水含過量全氟化合物，千萬不要煮沸水來飲用。

這和中國人的習慣息息相關，因此格外需要注意。

含有全氟辛烷磺酸/全氟辛烷磺酸的沸水实际上会浓缩污染物。

如有可能，也需要在咨詢當地水务局关于饮用水、烹饪水、洗澡水、洗碗水、宠物饮用水或过滤水的建议。

NSF International的官網提供 NSFP473认证（滤除PFOA全氟辛酸及PFOS全氟辛烷磺酸）的相關企業認證。

如有購買淨水器需求的朋友，可以上該官網驗證對方的資質。

Part 3 愛美的世界數十年間，已有超過 4800 種已知 PFAS 被用於商業用途，一場健康危機正在醞釀之中。

全球各地的法規指南和限製要求各不相同。

隨著在環境中發現新的 PFAS，並獲得更多的毒理學信息，勢必會出臺更嚴格的法規。

中國生態環境部公告2019年第10號《關於禁止生產、流通、使用和進出口丹林等持久性有機汙染物的公告》中規定 在物質和產品中不得使用PFOS及其鹽類。

在食品安全國家標準（GB 31604.35-2016）中， 對食品接觸材料及製品PFOS和PFOA的測定做出了具體規定， 檢出限為1.0 ng/g，定量限為2.0 ng/g。

全氟和多氟烷基物質（PFAS）持久性强且潜在有毒，添加到化妝品之後可以提高耐用性和耐水性。

但是，我國《已使用化妝品原料目錄》和《化妝品禁用原料目錄》目前針對全氟化合物的指導是空白的。

美國食品藥物監督管理局 (Food and Drug Administration, FDA) 提供一個名為自願化妝品注册計畫（VCRP）的報告系統，供在美國進行商業分銷的化妝品製造商、包裝商和分銷商使用。

根據該VCRP系統信息顯示，在2019-2020年的9個月期間，約有21種PFAS被反覆用作化妝品成分。

以零售管道出售給消費者的化妝品的標籤按照占主導地位的降序排列。

用作化妝品成分的一些常見PFAS包括PTFE（聚四氟乙烯）、全氟辛基三乙氧基矽烷、全氟壬基二甲基醚、全氟十二烷和全氟己烷。

PFAS 被廣泛用於化妝品中，包括乳液、清潔劑、指甲油、剃須膏、粉底、口紅、眼線、眼影和睫毛膏。

這些PFAS用於化妝品中，以調節和平滑皮膚，使其看起來有光澤，或影響產品的一致性和質地。

同時，因為注册和產品上市是自願的，這些數據不能用於就注册化妝品中PFAS的類型和數量得出明確結論，也不能用於確定哪些化妝品可能含有PFAS卻沒有在VCRP中注册。

然而，2021年6月15日《環境科學與技術快報》上由美國和加拿大學者提供的重磅調研結果，將大眾和監管者的目光再次投向PFAS. 該研究使用粒子感應伽馬射線發射光譜法對美國和加拿大購買的231種化妝品進行了全氟篩選。

結果顯示美國和加拿大超過半數的在售化妝品含氟。

在測試的八個類別中，粉底霜、睫毛膏和唇部產品（口紅、唇膏等）的總氟含量最高≥0.384μgf/cm2。

大多數被測試產品的成分清單並沒有披露PFAS的存在，這暴露了美國和加拿大標籤法的漏洞。

無獨有偶，實際上早在2018年EWG數據庫就已經檢出了15個化妝品品牌中66個產品含PFAS的問題，其中包括倩碧等耳熟能詳的大牌。

事實上，化妝品中的PFAS檢測和定量極具挑戰性。

並非所有可能在化妝品中發現的PFA都可以輕易量測，因為可能無法獲得化合物的特定“指紋”或分析標準，畢竟某些化妝品中PFAS作為雜質或成分的濃度範圍從十億分之一到百萬分之一百。

顯然，針對PFAS需要進行更多的研究來確定：1）化妝品中全氟辛烷磺酸的毒理學特徵；2）化妝品中各種PFA可通過皮膚吸收的程度；3）對人類健康的潛在風險。

除化妝品外，在珠寶首飾和鐘錶行業，PFAS用於珠寶首飾水洗後的乾燥環節。

PFPE用作鐘錶行業的潤滑劑，比如Rolex劳力士。

雖然，在上述內容上，PFAS研究還需要進一步明確。

但無可辯駁的是，含有PFAS的化妝品的製造、使用和處置都是健康和生態系統損害的潜在機會。

我們潔面後的化妝品液體會進入我們的飲水體系，我們廢棄的化妝品會成為毒害土壤的填埋品。

PFAS由於它的穩定性，因此極難降解。

在全球，PFAS氾濫的今天，8月歐盟最近再次更新它對PFAS的政策，這一次範圍更廣也更加嚴格。

相信很多人看了《黑水》都會重新檢視自己的生活和消費是否也和PFAS掛勾，下面列出一些已公開PFAS-free 政策的公司：化妝品（全線去除PFAS）：H&M (自制產品PFASfree)、歐萊雅 L’Oréal、 Lumene、the Body Shop、Isadora、Kicks 衣服（全線去除PFAS）：華倫天奴、Burberry、Benetton、Comptoir des Cotonniers、 Esprit、H&M、Zara、Levi’s、UNIQLO、Fast Retailing、Inditex、Lidl、NIKE、李寧、Puma、M&S、mango、Theory、G-Star、Limitedbrands、Tschibo、Tesco、Coop、C&A、Aldi、rewe、Helmut Lang、J Brand、Elvine、Kaufland、Miroglio、Primark快餐：Taco Bell 2025年之前全面去除。

麥當勞包裝紙不含，但包裝袋和包裝盒含。

家具（全線去除PFAS）：IKEA鞋品：AllBirds (Mizzle products)、Adidas (99% of products PFASfree)、Keen (95% PFASfree; remaining 5% mostly workboots)、Reebok (99% of products PFASfree)查看PFAS Free可使用的NGO網站：https://www.pfasfree.org.uk/current-initiatives/pfas-free-products#cosmetics查看你的化妝品安全性一定要使用的網站：https://www.ewg.org/skindeep/資料來源 Retrieve from:https://www.rsc.org/suppdata/d0/em/d0em00291g/d0em00291g1.pdfhttps://pubs.acs.org/doi/pdf/10.1021/acs.estlett.1c00240https://www.researchgate.net/publication/348417317_Per-_and_polyfluoroalkyl_substances_PFASs_in_Chinese_drinking_water_risk_assessment_and_geographical_distribution

整个体制都被操控了，他们想让我们认为体制会保护我们，但那是个谎言，是我们自己保护自己。

——《黑水》01《黑水》是由Participant Media公司出品，改编自罗伯特·比洛特律师揭露美国杜邦公司长达几十年的化学污染骗局的真实事件。

值得一提的是《美国工厂》、《聚焦》等社会事件改编的电影均是出自这一公司之手。

影片极高程度地还原了事件，使得其现实意义远大于电影艺术本身。

1938年，世界500强的杜邦公司意外发明了聚四氟乙烯（PTFE），中文名称特氟龙。

因其超级稳定的化学性质，被冠以“塑料之王”的称号，广泛应用于原子能、国防、航天、电子建筑等领域。

1954年，杜邦集团开始用特氟龙制造不粘锅，一时间成为其最赚钱的项目。

真正有毒的物质并不是特氟龙而是PFOA（全氟辛酸铵），它一种制作特氟龙聚合反应过程中添加的助剂，而并非合成特氟龙的原料。

02全片大部分的画面使用冷峻的蓝色调，采用大量的主观镜头停留于报纸、书页、照片、去体现罗伯特调查取证收集线索的复杂和艰难。

影片跨度十余年，气氛沉重，压迫感极强，大量的调查数字令人触目惊心。

抛开电影类型的固有分类，那这就是一部社会恐怖片。

罗伯特为了这次漫长的起诉浪费了自己20年的光阴，损害了健康，远离了家人，甚至遭到民众的攻击。

科学调查组对污染物标准模糊不定，政府通过各方面压力试图让罗伯特放弃起诉，杜邦公司更是公然撕毁条约竟无人问责。

最终杜邦公司交出的罚款和赔偿甚至远不及其一年的利润。

如今它仍是世界五百强企业，似乎这件事对它没有任何影响。

影片最后观众甚至不会感到正义获得胜利喜悦，更多的是和罗伯特一样五味杂陈的无奈与酸楚。

政府需要大公司的经济效益，民众需要政府保护权益。

该怎么选？

亦或有了答案。

03电影是人类社会最伟大的记录者和见证者，看到《黑水》《聚焦》后，不禁为这些依旧重视电影记录意义的人喝彩。

个人对抗体制的现实电影，在韩国和美国很常见，然而这样的影片在国内却少之又少。

本以为《我不是药神》会是一个开端，但现在看来大概也是结尾。

当然过分苛责中国电影人并不会对中国电影有推动作用。

审查机制如何改革，电影分级何时推行，这也许才能真正改变现状。

即使带着镣铐跳舞，也希望中国电影人能舞得漂亮。

04近年来，我国兴建了多个大型氟化工基地，世界各大氟化工巨头也纷纷在华兴建含氟聚合物生产设施。

氟化工产业快速发展导致了中国前几年PFOA/PFO的大量应用和排放。

研究表明，中国每年PFOA/PFO的环境排放量从2004年的近20吨/年增至2012年的逾50吨/年，超过欧美等氟化工发达国家排放量的总和。

按照当前世界各国氟化工生产状况和污染治理措施推算，预计全世界2005年～2050年间PFOA/PFO的总排放可能在475吨～950吨水平，其中大部分将来自中国。

中国暂无专门针对PFOA/PFO环境风险的管控政策。

过去十年，欧洲和美洲逐步淘汰PFOA，国际公约《斯德哥尔摩公约》也逐步将C8类污染物（包括PFOA和PFOS）拉入黑名单。

中国虽然也是公约缔约国之一，不过作为一个化工大国，早就已经接棒成为生产的第一大国了。

在中国，多个地方的河流土壤、食品及人体内，都检测出明显超标的C8含量。

不过公众知之甚少，国家层面也没有环境质量标准、排放标准及检测技术规范，甚至还没有进行环境监测。

既然生活在国家的体制内，我们没有理由攻击或歧视它，但亡羊补牢为时不晚。

第一步也许是应该揭开问题的盖子。

这些事实，望周知。

首先要告诉大家事实，然后再给大家做选择.这是一个zf、企业、科学家要做的事情。

科学带来便利、快捷这是毋庸置疑的，但同时带来的副作用也是数不胜数，至今还有6万多种的化学成分是还没有对人体是否有危害的检测报告。

一个物种最终走向自我灭亡，都是从内部的溃烂，而消失。

所以请人类慢一点，科技慢一点，发布慢一点，赚钱慢一点，再慢一点。

也许生命延续也会慢一点。

电影的剧情就不必说了，在这里谈谈我看完这部电影的感受。

一、男主对于正义的坚持。

男主是一名专门帮助化工公司处理纠纷的律师，已经做到了律所合伙人的高度，可见其业务能力之高，也可见其对于化工公司的实力是有着深入的了解的。

但是当他发现这种PFOA的物质正在威胁人们的健康时，他依旧果断地提起了诉讼，当然，据我不太清晰的了解，在美国的司法制度之下，做这种大额标的的诉讼代理，将会收获巨额的律师费，但是这完全不影响我对男主的品质的评价。

相反，我会感谢这样的制度，使在巨大困境中坚持正义的人可以获得一些金钱上的补偿。

因为单从本案来看，跨度将近二十年，整整一代人的时光。

二、面对庞然大物时的勇气。

在电影中，我们可以清晰地感受到，男主作为受害者的代理律师，不仅要面对杜邦公司这个化工领域的庞然大物，还要面对来自委托人、当地居民、杜邦的工人、自己领导和家人等各方面的职责。

想想这困难程度就令人瑟瑟发抖。

三、看完影片，我不禁反问，做一个对人类有益但是短时间无法证明的事情，需要什么。

首先，我想肯定是来自志同道合者的支持，本片中，男主在关键时刻得到了律所领导的支持，并且片中也表现出了一些其他律师对其工作的支持。

其次，还有来自制度的支持，虽然片中美国政府和杜邦公司沆瀣一气，但是依稀可以感到男主对于法律的信任以及司法的中立。

试想，如果法官也和杜邦公司同流合污，那么正义是不是彻底不能伸张了。

四、对于坚持做对的事的奖励。

本剧中只提及一句，“如果胜诉，会有高额的律师费”，我不知道他最终获得的律师费是否足够高额。

五、利益被侵犯后，“只有我们自己保护自己”，并且，补偿永远不能覆盖损失。

仅本片中，杜邦对吼赔偿的数额都不如其一年以此种物质获得的利润。

但他造成的损失呢？

全世界99%的人身体中都含有这种物质。

我们永远无法弥补利益被侵犯所造成的损失，补偿和赔偿也仅仅事一些挽回，这是多么悲哀的事啊。

而这其中，又有多少普通人在未被发现的地方被庞然大物所吞噬呢？

最后，粗鄙见解，仅作个人观影留念。

Rob Bilott was a corporate defense attorney for eight years. Then he took on an environmental suit that would upend his entire career — and expose a brazen, decades-long history of chemical pollution.

Rob Bilott on land owned by the Tennants near Parkersburg, W.Va. Credit: Bryan Schutmaat for The New York TimesBy Nathaniel Rich Jan. 6, 2016Just months before Rob Bilott made partner at Taft Stettinius & Hollister, he received a call on his direct line from a cattle farmer. The farmer, Wilbur Tennant of Parkersburg, W.Va., said that his cows were dying left and right. He believed that the DuPont chemical company, which until recently operated a site in Parkersburg that is more than 35 times the size of the Pentagon, was responsible. Tennant had tried to seek help locally, he said, but DuPont just about owned the entire town. He had been spurned not only by Parkersburg’s lawyers but also by its politicians, journalists, doctors and veterinarians. The farmer was angry and spoke in a heavy Appalachian accent. Bilott struggled to make sense of everything he was saying. He might have hung up had Tennant not blurted out the name of Bilott’s grandmother, Alma Holland White.White had lived in Vienna, a northern suburb of Parkersburg, and as a child, Bilott often visited her in the summers. In 1973 she brought him to the cattle farm belonging to the Tennants’ neighbors, the Grahams, with whom White was friendly. Bilott spent the weekend riding horses, milking cows and watching Secretariat win the Triple Crown on TV. He was 7 years old. The visit to the Grahams’ farm was one of his happiest childhood memories.When the Grahams heard in 1998 that Wilbur Tennant was looking for legal help, they remembered Bilott, White’s grandson, who had grown up to become an environmental lawyer. They did not understand, however, that Bilott was not the right kind of environmental lawyer. He did not represent plaintiffs or private citizens. Like the other 200 lawyers at Taft, a firm founded in 1885 and tied historically to the family of President William Howard Taft, Bilott worked almost exclusively for large corporate clients. His specialty was defending chemical companies. Several times, Bilott had even worked on cases with DuPont lawyers. Nevertheless, as a favor to his grandmother, he agreed to meet the farmer. ‘‘It just felt like the right thing to do,’’ he says today. ‘‘I felt a connection to those folks.’’The connection was not obvious at their first meeting. About a week after his phone call, Tennant drove from Parkersburg with his wife to Taft’s headquarters in downtown Cincinnati. They hauled cardboard boxes containing videotapes, photographs and documents into the firm’s glassed-in reception area on the 18th floor, where they sat in gray midcentury-modern couches beneath an oil portrait of one of Taft’s founders. Tennant — burly and nearly six feet tall, wearing jeans, a plaid flannel shirt and a baseball cap — did not resemble a typical Taft client. ‘‘He didn’t show up at our offices looking like a bank vice president,’’ says Thomas Terp, a partner who was Bilott’s supervisor. ‘‘Let’s put it that way.’’Terp joined Bilott for the meeting. Wilbur Tennant explained that he and his four siblings had run the cattle farm since their father abandoned them as children. They had seven cows then. Over the decades they steadily acquired land and cattle, until 200 cows roamed more than 600 hilly acres. The property would have been even larger had his brother Jim and Jim’s wife, Della, not sold 66 acres in the early ’80s to DuPont. The company wanted to use the plot for a landfill for waste from its factory near Parkersburg, called Washington Works, where Jim was employed as a laborer. Jim and Della did not want to sell, but Jim had been in poor health for years, mysterious ailments that doctors couldn’t diagnose, and they needed the money.DuPont rechristened the plot Dry Run Landfill, named after the creek that ran through it. The same creek flowed down to a pasture where the Tennants grazed their cows. Not long after the sale, Wilbur told Bilott, the cattle began to act deranged. They had always been like pets to the Tennants. At the sight of a Tennant they would amble over, nuzzle and let themselves be milked. No longer. Now when they saw the farmers, they charged.Wilbur fed a videotape into the VCR. The footage, shot on a camcorder, was grainy and intercut with static. Images jumped and repeated. The sound accelerated and slowed down. It had the quality of a horror movie. In the opening shot the camera pans across the creek. It takes in the surrounding forest, the white ash trees shedding their leaves and the rippling, shallow water, before pausing on what appears to be a snowbank at an elbow in the creek. The camera zooms in, revealing a mound of soapy froth.‘‘I’ve taken two dead deer and two dead cattle off this ripple,’’ Tennant says in voice-over. ‘‘The blood run out of their noses and out their mouths. ... They’re trying to cover this stuff up. But it’s not going to be covered up, because I’m going to bring it out in the open for people to see.’’The video shows a large pipe running into the creek, discharging green water with bubbles on the surface. ‘‘This is what they expect a man’s cows to drink on his own property,’’ Wilbur says. ‘‘It’s about high time that someone in the state department of something-or-another got off their cans.’’At one point, the video cuts to a skinny red cow standing in hay. Patches of its hair are missing, and its back is humped — a result, Wilbur speculates, of a kidney malfunction. Another blast of static is followed by a close-up of a dead black calf lying in the snow, its eye a brilliant, chemical blue. ‘‘One hundred fifty-three of these animals I’ve lost on this farm,’’ Wilbur says later in the video. ‘‘Every veterinarian that I’ve called in Parkersburg, they will not return my phone calls or they don’t want to get involved. Since they don’t want to get involved, I’ll have to dissect this thing myself. ... I’m going to start at this head.’’The video cuts to a calf’s bisected head. Close-ups follow of the calf’s blackened teeth (‘‘They say that’s due to high concentrations of fluoride in the water that they drink’’), its liver, heart, stomachs, kidneys and gall bladder. Each organ is sliced open, and Wilbur points out unusual discolorations — some dark, some green — and textures. ‘‘I don’t even like the looks of them,’’ he says. ‘‘It don’t look like anything I’ve been into before.’’Bilott watched the video and looked at photographs for several hours. He saw cows with stringy tails, malformed hooves, giant lesions protruding from their hides and red, receded eyes; cows suffering constant diarrhea, slobbering white slime the consistency of toothpaste, staggering bowlegged like drunks. Tennant always zoomed in on his cows’ eyes. ‘‘This cow’s done a lot of suffering,’’ he would say, as a blinking eye filled the screen.‘‘This is bad,’’ Bilott said to himself. ‘‘There’s something really bad going on here.’’Bilott decided right away to take the Tennant case. It was, he says again, ‘‘the right thing to do.’’ Bilott might have had the practiced look of a corporate lawyer — soft-spoken, milk-complected, conservatively attired — but the job had not come naturally to him. He did not have a typical Taft résumé. He had not attended college or law school in the Ivy League. His father was a lieutenant colonel in the Air Force, and Bilott spent most of his childhood moving among air bases near Albany; Flint, Mich.; Newport Beach, Calif.; and Wiesbaden, West Germany. Bilott attended eight schools before graduating from Fairborn High, near Ohio’s Wright-Patterson Air Force Base. As a junior, he received a recruitment letter from a tiny liberal-arts school in Sarasota called the New College of Florida, which graded pass/fail and allowed students to design their own curriculums. Many of his friends there were idealistic, progressive — ideological misfits in Reagan’s America. He met with professors individually and came to value critical thinking. ‘‘I learned to question everything you read,’’ he said. ‘‘Don’t take anything at face value. Don’t care what other people say. I liked that philosophy.’’ Bilott studied political science and wrote his thesis about the rise and fall of Dayton. He hoped to become a city manager.But his father, who late in life enrolled in law school, encouraged Bilott to do the same. Surprising his professors, he chose to attend law school at Ohio State, where his favorite course was environmental law. ‘‘It seemed like it would have real-world impact,’’ he said. ‘‘It was something you could do to make a difference.’’ When, after graduation, Taft made him an offer, his mentors and friends from New College were aghast. They didn’t understand how he could join a corporate firm. Bilott didn’t see it that way. He hadn’t really thought about the ethics of it, to be honest. ‘‘My family said that a big firm was where you’d get the most opportunities,’’ he said. ‘‘I knew nobody who had ever worked at a firm, nobody who knew anything about it. I just tried to get the best job I could. I don’t think I had any clue of what that involved.’’At Taft, he asked to join Thomas Terp’s environmental team. Ten years earlier, Congress passed the legislation known as Superfund, which financed the emergency cleanup of hazardous-waste dumps. Superfund was a lucrative development for firms like Taft, creating an entire subfield within environmental law, one that required a deep understanding of the new regulations in order to guide negotiations among municipal agencies and numerous private parties. Terp’s team at Taft was a leader in the field.As an associate, Bilott was asked to determine which companies contributed which toxins and hazardous wastes in what quantities to which sites. He took depositions from plant employees, perused public records and organized huge amounts of historical data. He became an expert on the Environmental Protection Agency’s regulatory framework, the Safe Drinking Water Act, the Clean Air Act, the Toxic Substances Control Act. He mastered the chemistry of the pollutants, despite the fact that chemistry had been his worst subject in high school. ‘‘I learned how these companies work, how the laws work, how you defend these claims,’’ he said. He became the consummate insider.Bilott was proud of the work he did. The main part of his job, as he understood it, was to help clients comply with the new regulations. Many of his clients, including Thiokol and Bee Chemical, disposed of hazardous waste long before the practice became so tightly regulated. He worked long hours and knew few people in Cincinnati. A colleague on Taft’s environmental team, observing that he had little time for a social life, introduced him to a childhood friend named Sarah Barlage. She was a lawyer, too, at another downtown Cincinnati firm, where she defended corporations against worker’s-compensation claims. Bilott joined the two friends for lunch. Sarah doesn’t remember him speaking. ‘‘My first impression was that he was not like other guys,’’ she says. ‘‘I’m pretty chatty. He’s much quieter. We complemented each other.’’

The road to one of the Tennant farms. Credit: Bryan Schutmaat for The New York TimesThey married in 1996. The first of their three sons was born two years later. He felt secure enough at Taft for Barlage to quit her job and raise their children full-time. Terp, his supervisor, recalls him as ‘‘a real standout lawyer: incredibly bright, energetic, tenacious and very, very thorough.’’ He was a model Taft lawyer. Then Wilbur Tennant came along.The Tennant case put Taft in a highly unusual position. The law firm was in the business of representing chemical corporations, not suing them. The prospect of taking on DuPont ‘‘did cause us pause,’’ Terp concedes. ‘‘But it was not a terribly difficult decision for us. I’m a firm believer that our work on the plaintiff’s side makes us better defense lawyers.’’Bilott sought help with the Tennant case from a West Virginia lawyer named Larry Winter. For many years, Winter was a partner at Spilman, Thomas & Battle — one of the firms that represented DuPont in West Virginia — though he had left Spilman to start a practice specializing in personal-injury cases. He was amazed that Bilott would sue DuPont while remaining at Taft.‘‘His taking on the Tennant case,’’ Winter says, ‘‘given the type of practice Taft had, I found to be inconceivable.’’Bilott, for his part, is reluctant to discuss his motivations for taking the case. The closest he came to elaborating was after being asked whether, having set out ‘‘to make a difference’’ in the world, he had any misgivings about the path his career had taken.‘‘There was a reason why I was interested in helping out the Tennants,’’ he said after a pause. ‘‘It was a great opportunity to use my background for people who really needed it.’’Bilott filed a federal suit against DuPont in the summer of 1999 in the Southern District of West Virginia. In response, DuPont’s in-house lawyer, Bernard Reilly, informed him that DuPont and the E.P.A. would commission a study of the property, conducted by three veterinarians chosen by DuPont and three chosen by the E.P.A. Their report did not find DuPont responsible for the cattle’s health problems. The culprit, instead, was poor husbandry: ‘‘poor nutrition, inadequate veterinary care and lack of fly control.’’ In other words, the Tennants didn’t know how to raise cattle; if the cows were dying, it was their own fault.This did not sit well with the Tennants, who began to suffer the consequences of antagonizing Parkersburg’s main employer. Lifelong friends ignored the Tennants on the streets of Parkersburg and walked out of restaurants when they entered. ‘‘I’m not allowed to talk to you,’’ they said, when confronted. Four different times, the Tennants changed churches.Wilbur called the office nearly every day, but Bilott had little to tell him. He was doing for the Tennants what he would have done for any of his corporate clients — pulling permits, studying land deeds and requesting from DuPont all documentation related to Dry Run Landfill — but he could find no evidence that explained what was happening to the cattle. ‘‘We were getting frustrated,’’ Bilott said. ‘‘I couldn’t blame the Tennants for getting angry.’’FURTHER READINGFor more about DuPont's FPOA pollution, see ‘‘The Teflon Toxin’’ by Sharon Lerner (The Intercept, Aug. 17, 2015) and ‘‘Welcome to Beautiful Parkersburg, West Virginia’’ by Mariah Blake (The Huffington Post, Aug. 27, 2015).With the trial looming, Bilott stumbled upon a letter DuPont had sent to the E.P.A. that mentioned a substance at the landfill with a cryptic name: ‘‘PFOA.’’ In all his years working with chemical companies, Bilott had never heard of PFOA. It did not appear on any list of regulated materials, nor could he find it in Taft’s in-house library. The chemistry expert that he had retained for the case did, however, vaguely recall an article in a trade journal about a similar-sounding compound: PFOS, a soaplike agent used by the technology conglomerate 3M in the fabrication of Scotchgard.Bilott hunted through his files for other references to PFOA, which he learned was short for perfluorooctanoic acid. But there was nothing. He asked DuPont to share all documentation related to the substance; DuPont refused. In the fall of 2000, Bilott requested a court order to force them. Against DuPont’s protests, the order was granted. Dozens of boxes containing thousands of unorganized documents began to arrive at Taft’s headquarters: private internal correspondence, medical and health reports and confidential studies conducted by DuPont scientists. There were more than 110,000 pages in all, some half a century old. Bilott spent the next few months on the floor of his office, poring over the documents and arranging them in chronological order. He stopped answering his office phone. When people called his secretary, she explained that he was in the office but had not been able to reach the phone in time, because he was trapped on all sides by boxes.‘‘I started seeing a story,’’ Bilott said. ‘‘I may have been the first one to actually go through them all. It became apparent what was going on: They had known for a long time that this stuff was bad.’’Bilott is given to understatement. (‘‘To say that Rob Bilott is understated,’’ his colleague Edison Hill says, ‘‘is an understatement.’’) The story that Bilott began to see, cross-legged on his office floor, was astounding in its breadth, specificity and sheer brazenness. ‘‘I was shocked,’’ he said. That was another understatement. Bilott could not believe the scale of incriminating material that DuPont had sent him. The company appeared not to realize what it had handed over. ‘‘It was one of those things where you can’t believe you’re reading what you’re reading,’’ he said. ‘‘That it’s actually been put in writing. It was the kind of stuff you always heard about happening but you never thought you’d see written down.’’The story began in 1951, when DuPont started purchasing PFOA (which the company refers to as C8) from 3M for use in the manufacturing of Teflon. 3M invented PFOA just four years earlier; it was used to keep coatings like Teflon from clumping during production. Though PFOA was not classified by the government as a hazardous substance, 3M sent DuPont recommendations on how to dispose of it. It was to be incinerated or sent to chemical-waste facilities. DuPont’s own instructions specified that it was not to be flushed into surface water or sewers. But over the decades that followed, DuPont pumped hundreds of thousands of pounds of PFOA powder through the outfall pipes of the Parkersburg facility into the Ohio River. The company dumped 7,100 tons of PFOA-laced sludge into ‘‘digestion ponds’’: open, unlined pits on the Washington Works property, from which the chemical could seep straight into the ground. PFOA entered the local water table, which supplied drinking water to the communities of Parkersburg, Vienna, Little Hocking and Lubeck — more than 100,000 people in all.Bilott learned from the documents that 3M and DuPont had been conducting secret medical studies on PFOA for more than four decades. In 1961, DuPont researchers found that the chemical could increase the size of the liver in rats and rabbits. A year later, they replicated these results in studies with dogs. PFOA’s peculiar chemical structure made it uncannily resistant to degradation. It also bound to plasma proteins in the blood, circulating through each organ in the body. In the 1970s, DuPont discovered that there were high concentrations of PFOA in the blood of factory workers at Washington Works. They did not tell the E.P.A. at the time. In 1981, 3M — which continued to serve as the supplier of PFOA to DuPont and other corporations — found that ingestion of the substance caused birth defects in rats. After 3M shared this information, DuPont tested the children of pregnant employees in their Teflon division. Of seven births, two had eye defects. DuPont did not make this information public.In 1984, DuPont became aware that dust vented from factory chimneys settled well beyond the property line and, more disturbing, that PFOA was present in the local water supply. DuPont declined to disclose this finding. In 1991, DuPont scientists determined an internal safety limit for PFOA concentration in drinking water: one part per billion. The same year, DuPont found that water in one local district contained PFOA levels at three times that figure. Despite internal debate, it declined to make the information public.(In a statement, DuPont claimed that it did volunteer health information about PFOA to the E.P.A. during those decades. When asked for evidence, it forwarded two letters written to West Virginian government agencies from 1982 and 1992, both of which cited internal studies that called into question links between PFOA exposure and human health problems.)By the ’90s, Bilott discovered, DuPont understood that PFOA caused cancerous testicular, pancreatic and liver tumors in lab animals. One laboratory study suggested possible DNA damage from PFOA exposure, and a study of workers linked exposure with prostate cancer. DuPont at last hastened to develop an alternative to PFOA. An interoffice memo sent in 1993 announced that ‘‘for the first time, we have a viable candidate’’ that appeared to be less toxic and stayed in the body for a much shorter duration of time. Discussions were held at DuPont’s corporate headquarters to discuss switching to the new compound. DuPont decided against it. The risk was too great: Products manufactured with PFOA were an important part of DuPont’s business, worth $1 billion in annual profit.‘His taking on the Tennant case, given the type of practice Taft had, I found to be inconceivable.’But the crucial discovery for the Tennant case was this: By the late 1980s, as DuPont became increasingly concerned about the health effects of PFOA waste, it decided it needed to find a landfill for the toxic sludge dumped on company property. Fortunately they had recently bought 66 acres from a low-level employee at the Washington Works facility that would do perfectly.By 1990, DuPont had dumped 7,100 tons of PFOA sludge into Dry Run Landfill. DuPont’s scientists understood that the landfill drained into the Tennants’ remaining property, and they tested the water in Dry Run Creek. It contained an extraordinarily high concentration of PFOA. DuPont did not tell this to the Tennants at the time, nor did it disclose the fact in the cattle report that it commissioned for the Tennant case a decade later — the report that blamed poor husbandry for the deaths of their cows. Bilott had what he needed.In August 2000, Bilott called DuPont’s lawyer, Bernard Reilly, and explained that he knew what was going on. It was a brief conversation.The Tennants settled. The firm would receive its contingency fee. The whole business might have ended right there. But Bilott was not satisfied.‘‘I was irritated,’’ he says.DuPont was nothing like the corporations he had represented at Taft in the Superfund cases. ‘‘This was a completely different scenario. DuPont had for decades been actively trying to conceal their actions. They knew this stuff was harmful, and they put it in the water anyway. These were bad facts.’’ He had seen what the PFOA-tainted drinking water had done to cattle. What was it doing to the tens of thousands of people in the areas around Parkersburg who drank it daily from their taps? What did the insides of their heads look like? Were their internal organs green?Bilott spent the following months drafting a public brief against DuPont. It was 972 pages long, including 136 attached exhibits. His colleagues call it ‘‘Rob’s Famous Letter.’’ ‘‘We have confirmed that the chemicals and pollutants released into the environment by DuPont at its Dry Run Landfill and other nearby DuPont-owned facilities may pose an imminent and substantial threat to health or the environment,’’ Bilott wrote. He demanded immediate action to regulate PFOA and provide clean water to those living near the factory. On March 6, 2001, he sent the letter to the director of every relevant regulatory authority, including Christie Whitman, administrator of the E.P.A., and the United States attorney general, John Ashcroft.DuPont reacted quickly, requesting a gag order to block Bilott from providing the information he had discovered in the Tennant case to the government. A federal court denied it. Bilott sent his entire case file to the E.P.A.‘‘DuPont freaked out when they realized that this guy was onto them,’’ says Ned McWilliams, a young trial lawyer who later joined Bilott’s legal team. ‘‘For a corporation to seek a gag order to prevent somebody from speaking to the E.P.A. is an extraordinary remedy. You could realize how bad that looks. They must have known that there was a small chance of winning. But they were so afraid that they were willing to roll the dice.’’With the Famous Letter, Bilott crossed a line. Though nominally representing the Tennants — their settlement had yet to be concluded — Bilott spoke for the public, claiming extensive fraud and wrongdoing. He had become a threat not merely to DuPont but also to, in the words of one internal memo, ‘‘the entire fluoropolymers industry’’ — an industry responsible for the high-performance plastics used in many modern devices, including kitchen products, computer cables, implantable medical devices and bearings and seals used in cars and airplanes. PFOA was only one of more than 60,000 synthetic chemicals that companies produced and released into the world without regulatory oversight.

Jim Tennant and his wife, Della, sold DuPont a 66-acre tract of land that became part of the Dry Run Landfill.‘‘Rob’s letter lifted the curtain on a whole new theater,’’ says Harry Deitzler, a plaintiff’s lawyer in West Virginia who works with Bilott. ‘‘Before that letter, corporations could rely upon the public misperception that if a chemical was dangerous, it was regulated.’’ Under the 1976 Toxic Substances Control Act, the E.P.A. can test chemicals only when it has been provided evidence of harm. This arrangement, which largely allows chemical companies to regulate themselves, is the reason that the E.P.A. has restricted only five chemicals, out of tens of thousands on the market, in the last 40 years.It was especially damning to see these allegations against DuPont under the letterhead of one of the nation’s most prestigious corporate defense firms. ‘‘You can imagine what some of the other companies that Taft was representing — a Dow Chemical — might have thought of a Taft lawyer taking on DuPont,’’ Larry Winter says. ‘‘There was a threat that the firm would suffer financially.’’ When I asked Thomas Terp about Taft’s reaction to the Famous Letter, he replied, not quite convincingly, that he didn’t recall one. ‘‘Our partners,’’ he said, ‘‘are proud of the work that he has done.’’Bilott, however, worried that corporations doing business with Taft might see things differently. ‘‘I’m not stupid, and the people around me aren’t stupid,’’ he said. ‘‘You can’t ignore the economic realities of the ways that business is run and the way clients think. I perceived that there were some ‘What the hell are you doing?’ responses.’’The letter led, four years later, in 2005, to DuPont’s reaching a $16.5 million settlement with the E.P.A., which had accused the company of concealing its knowledge of PFOA’s toxicity and presence in the environment in violation of the Toxic Substances Control Act. (DuPont was not required to admit liability.) At the time, it was the largest civil administrative penalty the E.P.A. had obtained in its history, a statement that sounds more impressive than it is. The fine represented less than 2 percent of the profits earned by DuPont on PFOA that year.Bilott never represented a corporate client again.The obvious next step was to file a class-action lawsuit against DuPont on behalf of everyone whose water was tainted by PFOA. In all ways but one, Bilott himself was in the ideal position to file such a suit. He understood PFOA’s history as well as anyone inside DuPont did. He had the technical and regulatory expertise, as he had proved in the Tennant case. The only part that didn’t make sense was his firm: No Taft lawyer, to anyone’s recollection, had ever filed a class-action lawsuit.It was one thing to pursue a sentimental case on behalf of a few West Virginia cattle farmers and even write a public letter to the E.P.A. But an industry-threatening class-action suit against one of the world’s largest chemical corporations was different. It might establish a precedent for suing corporations over unregulated substances and imperil Taft’s bottom line. This point was made to Terp by Bernard Reilly, DuPont’s in-house lawyer, according to accounts from Bilott’s plaintiff’s-lawyer colleagues; they say Reilly called to demand that Bilott back off the case. (Terp confirms that Reilly called him but will not disclose the content of the call; Bilott and Reilly decline to speak about it, citing continuing litigation.) Given what Bilott had documented in his Famous Letter, Taft stood by its partner.A lead plaintiff soon presented himself. Joseph Kiger, a night-school teacher in Parkersburg, called Bilott to ask for help. About nine months earlier, he received a peculiar note from the Lubeck water district. It arrived on Halloween day, enclosed in the monthly water bill. The note explained that an unregulated chemical named PFOA had been detected in the drinking water in ‘‘low concentrations,’’ but that it was not a health risk. Kiger had underlined statements that he found particularly baffling, like: ‘‘DuPont reports that it has toxicological and epidemiological data to support confidence that exposure guidelines established by DuPont are protective of human health.’’ The term ‘‘support confidence’’ seemed bizarre, as did ‘‘protective of human health,’’ not to mention the claim that DuPont’s own data supported its confidence in its own guidelines.Still, Kiger might have forgotten about it had his wife, Darlene, not already spent much of her adulthood thinking about PFOA. Darlene’s first husband had been a chemist in DuPont’s PFOA lab. (Darlene asked that he not be named so that he wouldn’t be involved in the local politics around the case.) ‘‘When you worked at DuPont in this town,’’ Darlene says today, ‘‘you could have everything you wanted.’’ DuPont paid for his education, it secured him a mortgage and it paid him a generous salary. DuPont even gave him a free supply of PFOA, which, Darlene says, she used as soap in the family’s dishwasher and to clean the car. Sometimes her husband came home from work sick — fever, nausea, diarrhea, vomiting — after working in one of the PFOA storage tanks. It was a common occurrence at Washington Works. Darlene says the men at the plant called it ‘‘Teflon flu.’’In 1976, after Darlene gave birth to their second child, her husband told her that he was not allowed to bring his work clothes home anymore. DuPont, he said, had found out that PFOA was causing health problems for women and birth defects in children. Darlene would remember this six years later when, at 36, she had to have an emergency hysterectomy and again eight years later, when she had a second surgery. When the strange letter from the water district arrived, Darlene says, ‘‘I kept thinking back to his clothing, to my hysterectomy. I asked myself, what does DuPont have to do with our drinking water?’’

Joe called the West Virginia Department of Natural Resources (‘‘They treated me like I had the plague’’), the Parkersburg office of the state’s Department of Environmental Protection (‘‘nothing to worry about’’), the water division (‘‘I got shut down’’), the local health department (‘‘just plain rude’’), even DuPont (‘‘I was fed the biggest line of [expletive] anybody could have been fed’’), before a scientist in the regional E.P.A. office finally took his call.‘‘Good God, Joe,’’ the scientist said. ‘‘What the hell is that stuff doing in your water?’’ He sent Kiger information about the Tennant lawsuit. On the court papers Kiger kept seeing the same name: Robert Bilott, of Taft Stettinius & Hollister, in Cincinnati.Bilott had anticipated suing on behalf of the one or two water districts closest to Washington Works. But tests revealed that six districts, as well as dozens of private wells, were tainted with levels of PFOA higher than DuPont’s own internal safety standard. In Little Hocking, the water tested positive for PFOA at seven times the limit. All told, 70,000 people were drinking poisoned water. Some had been doing so for decades.But Bilott faced a vexing legal problem. PFOA was not a regulated substance. It appeared on no federal or state list of contaminants. How could Bilott claim that 70,000 people had been poisoned if the government didn’t recognize PFOA as a toxin — if PFOA, legally speaking, was no different than water itself? In 2001, it could not even be proved that exposure to PFOA in public drinking water caused health problems. There was scant information available about its impact on large populations. How could the class prove it had been harmed by PFOA when the health effects were largely unknown?The best metric Bilott had to judge a safe exposure level was DuPont’s own internal limit of one part per billion. But when DuPont learned that Bilott was preparing a new lawsuit, it announced that it would re-evaluate that figure. As in the Tennant case, DuPont formed a team composed of its own scientists and scientists from the West Virginia Department of Environmental Protection. It announced a new threshold: 150 parts per billion.Bilott found the figure ‘‘mind-blowing.’’ The toxicologists he hired had settled upon a safety limit of 0.2 parts per billion. But West Virginia endorsed the new standard. Within two years, three lawyers regularly used by DuPont were hired by the state D.E.P. in leadership positions. One of them was placed in charge of the entire agency. ‘‘The way that transpired was just amazing to me,’’ Bilott says. ‘‘I suppose it wasn’t so amazing to my fellow counsel in West Virginia who know the system there. But it was to me.’’ The same DuPont lawyers tasked with writing the safety limit, Bilott said, had become the government regulators responsible for enforcing that limit.Bilott devised a new legal strategy. A year earlier, West Virginia had become one of the first states to recognize what is called, in tort law, a medical-monitoring claim. A plaintiff needs to prove only that he or she has been exposed to a toxin. If the plaintiff wins, the defendant is required to fund regular medical tests. In these cases, should a plaintiff later become ill, he or she can sue retroactively for damages. For this reason, Bilott filed the class-action suit in August 2001 in state court, even though four of the six affected water districts lay across the Ohio border.Meanwhile the E.P.A., drawing from Bilott’s research, began its own investigation into the toxicity of PFOA. In 2002, the agency released its initial findings: PFOA might pose human health risks not only to those drinking tainted water, but also to the general public — anyone, for instance, who cooked with Teflon pans. The E.P.A. was particularly alarmed to learn that PFOA had been detected in American blood banks, something 3M and DuPont had known as early as 1976. By 2003 the average concentration of PFOA in the blood of an adult American was four to five parts per billion. In 2000, 3M ceased production of PFOA. DuPont, rather than use an alternative compound, built a new factory in Fayetteville, N.C., to manufacture the substance for its own use.Bilott’s strategy appeared to have worked. In September 2004, DuPont decided to settle the class-action suit. It agreed to install filtration plants in the six affected water districts if they wanted them and pay a cash award of $70 million. It would fund a scientific study to determine whether there was a ‘‘probable link’’ — a term that delicately avoided any declaration of causation — between PFOA and any diseases. If such links existed, DuPont would pay for medical monitoring of the affected group in perpetuity. Until the scientific study came back with its results, class members were forbidden from filing personal-injury suits against DuPont.

The chemical site near Parkersburg, W.Va., source of the waste at the center of the DuPont class-action lawsuit.A reasonable expectation, at this point, was that the lawyers would move on. ‘‘In any other class action you’ve ever read about,’’ Deitzler says, ‘‘you get your 10 bucks in the mail, the lawyers get paid and the lawsuit goes away. That’s what we were supposed to do.’’ For three years, Bilott had worked for nothing, costing his firm a fortune. But now Taft received a windfall: Bilott and his team of West Virginian plaintiff lawyers received $21.7 million in fees from the settlement. ‘‘I think they were thinking, This guy did O.K.,’’ Deitzler says. ‘‘I wouldn’t be surprised if he got a raise.’’Not only had Taft recouped its losses, but DuPont was providing clean water to the communities named in the suit. Bilott had every reason to walk away.He didn’t.‘‘There was a gap in the data,’’ Bilott says. The company’s internal health studies, as damning as they were, were limited to factory employees. DuPont could argue — and had argued — that even if PFOA caused medical problems, it was only because factory workers had been exposed at exponentially higher levels than neighbors who drank tainted water. The gap allowed DuPont to claim that it had done nothing wrong.Bilott represented 70,000 people who had been drinking PFOA-laced drinking water for decades. What if the settlement money could be used to test them? ‘‘Class members were concerned about three things,’’ Winter says. ‘‘One: Do I have C8 in my blood? Two: If I do, is it harmful? Three: If it’s harmful, what are the effects?’’ Bilott and his colleagues realized they could answer all three questions, if only they could test their clients. Now, they realized, there was a way to do so. After the settlement, the legal team pushed to make receipt of the cash award contingent on a full medical examination. The class voted in favor of this approach, and within months, nearly 70,000 West Virginians were trading their blood for a $400 check.The team of epidemiologists was flooded with medical data, and there was nothing DuPont could do to stop it. In fact, it was another term of the settlement that DuPont would fund the research without limitation. The scientists, freed from the restraints of academic budgets and grants, had hit the epidemiological jackpot: an entire population’s personal data and infinite resources available to study them. The scientists designed 12 studies, including one that, using sophisticated environmental modeling technology, determined exactly how much PFOA each individual class member had ingested.It was assured that the panel would return convincing results. But Bilott could not predict what those results would be. If no correlation was found between PFOA and illness, Bilott’s clients would be barred under the terms of the agreement from filing any personal-injury cases. Because of the sheer quantity of data provided by the community health study and the unlimited budget — it ultimately cost DuPont $33 million — the panel took longer than expected to perform its analysis. Two years passed without any findings. Bilott waited. A third year passed. Then a fourth, a fifth, a sixth. Still the panel was quiet. Bilott waited.It was not a peaceful wait. The pressure on Bilott at Taft had built since he initiated the class-action suit in 2001. The legal fees had granted him a reprieve, but as the years passed without resolution, and Bilott continued to spend the firm’s money and was unable to attract new clients, he found himself in an awkward position.‘‘This case,’’ Winter says, ‘‘regardless of how hugely successful it ends up, will never in the Taft firm’s mind replace what they’ve lost in the way of legal business over the years.’’The longer it took for the science panel to conduct its research, the more expensive the case became. Taft continued to pay consultants to interpret the new findings and relay them to the epidemiologists. Bilott counseled class members in West Virginia and Ohio and traveled frequently to Washington to attend meetings at the E.P.A., which was deciding whether to issue advisories about PFOA. ‘‘We were incurring a lot of expenses,’’ Bilott says. ‘‘If the scientific panel found no link with diseases, we’d have to eat it all.’’

Land where Tennant cattle once grazed. Credit: Bryan Schutmaat for The New York TimesClients called Bilott to say that they had received diagnoses of cancer or that a family member had died. They wanted to know why it was taking so long. When would they get relief? Among those who called was Jim Tennant. Wilbur, who had cancer, had died of a heart attack. Two years later, Wilbur’s wife died of cancer. Bilott was tormented by ‘‘the thought that we still hadn’t been able to hold this company responsible for what they did in time for those people to see it.’’Taft did not waver in its support of the case, but the strain began to show. ‘‘It was stressful,’’ Sarah Barlage, Bilott’s wife, says. ‘‘He was exasperated that it was lasting a long time. But his heels were so dug in. He’s extremely stubborn. Every day that went by with no movement gave him more drive to see it through. But in the back of our minds, we knew that there are cases that go on forever.’’His colleagues on the case detected a change in Bilott. ‘‘I had the impression that it was extremely tough on him,’’ Winter says. ‘‘Rob had a young family, kids growing up, and he was under pressure from his firm. Rob is a private person. He didn’t complain. But he showed signs of being under enormous stress.’’In 2010, Bilott began suffering strange attacks: His vision would blur, he couldn’t put on his socks, his arms felt numb. His doctors didn’t know what was happening. The attacks recurred periodically, bringing blurry vision, slurred speech and difficulty moving one side of his body. They struck suddenly, without warning, and their effects lasted days. The doctors asked whether he was under heightened stress at work. ‘‘Nothing different than normal,’’ Bilott told them. ‘‘Nothing it hadn’t been for years.’’The doctors ultimately hit upon an effective medication. The episodes ceased and their symptoms, apart from an occasional tic, are under control, but he still doesn’t have a diagnosis.‘‘It was stressful,’’ Bilott says, ‘‘not to know what the heck was going on.’’In December 2011, after seven years, the scientists began to release their findings: there was a ‘‘probable link’’ between PFOA and kidney cancer, testicular cancer, thyroid disease, high cholesterol, pre-eclampsia and ulcerative colitis.‘‘There was relief,’’ Bilott says, understated nearly to the point of self-effacement. ‘‘We were able to deliver what we had promised to these folks seven years earlier. Especially since, for all those years, DuPont had been saying that we were lying, trying to scare and mislead people. Now we had a scientific answer.’’As of October, 3,535 plaintiffs have filed personal-injury lawsuits against DuPont. The first member of this group to go to trial was a kidney-cancer survivor named Carla Bartlett. In October, Bartlett was awarded $1.6 million. DuPont plans to appeal. This may have ramifications well beyond Bartlett’s case: Hers is one of five ‘‘bellwether’’ cases that will be tried over the course of this year. After that, DuPont may choose to settle with every afflicted class member, using the outcome of the bellwether cases to determine settlement awards. Or DuPont can fight each suit individually, a tactic that tobacco companies have used to fight personal-injury lawsuits. At the rate of four trials a year, DuPont would continue to fight PFOA cases until the year 2890.DuPont’s continuing refusal to accept responsibility is maddening to Bilott. ‘‘To think that you’ve negotiated in good faith a deal that everybody has abided by and worked on for seven years, you reach a point where certain things were to be resolved but then remain contested,’’ he says. ‘‘I think about the clients who have been waiting for this, many of whom are sick or have died while waiting. It’s infuriating.’’In total, 70,000 people were drinking poisoned water. Some had been doing so for decades.As part of its agreement with the E.P.A., DuPont ceased production and use of PFOA in 2013. The five other companies in the world that produce PFOA are also phasing out production. DuPont, which is currently negotiating a merger with Dow Chemical, last year severed its chemical businesses: They have been spun off into a new corporation called Chemours. The new company has replaced PFOA with similar fluorine-based compounds designed to biodegrade more quickly — the alternative considered and then discarded by DuPont more than 20 years ago. Like PFOA, these new substances have not come under any regulation from the E.P.A. When asked about the safety of the new chemicals, Chemours replied in a statement: ‘‘A significant body of data demonstrates that these alternative chemistries can be used safely.’’Last May, 200 scientists from a variety of disciplines signed the Madrid Statement, which expresses concern about the production of all fluorochemicals, or PFASs, including those that have replaced PFOA. PFOA and its replacements are suspected to belong to a large class of artificial compounds called endocrine-disrupting chemicals; these compounds, which include chemicals used in the production of pesticides, plastics and gasoline, interfere with human reproduction and metabolism and cause cancer, thyroid problems and nervous-system disorders. In the last five years, however, a new wave of endocrinology research has found that even extremely low doses of such chemicals can create significant health problems. Among the Madrid scientists’ recommendations: ‘‘Enact legislation to require only essential uses of PFASs’’ and ‘‘Whenever possible, avoid products containing, or manufactured using, PFASs. These include many products that are stain-resistant, waterproof or nonstick.’’When asked about the Madrid Statement, Dan Turner, DuPont’s head of global media relations, wrote in an email: ‘‘DuPont does not believe the Madrid Statement reflects a true consideration of the available data on alternatives to long-chain perfluorochemicals, such as PFOA. DuPont worked for more than a decade, with oversight from regulators, to introduce its alternatives. Extensive data has been developed, demonstrating that these alternatives are much more rapidly eliminated from the body than PFOA, and have improved health safety profiles. We are confident that these alternative chemistries can be used safely — they are well characterized, and the data has been used to register them with environmental agencies around the world.’’Every year Rob Bilott writes a letter to the E.P.A. and the West Virginia D.E.P., urging the regulation of PFOA in drinking water. In 2009, the E.P.A. set a ‘‘provisional’’ limit of 0.4 parts per billion for short-term exposure, but has never finalized that figure. This means that local water districts are under no obligation to tell customers whether PFOA is in their water. In response to Bilott’s most recent letter, the E.P.A. claimed that it would announce a ‘‘lifetime health advisory level for PFOA’’ by ‘‘early 2016.’’This advisory level, if indeed announced, might be a source of comfort to future generations. But if you are a sentient being reading this article in 2016, you already have PFOA in your blood. It is in your parents’ blood, your children’s blood, your lover’s blood. How did it get there? Through the air, through your diet, through your use of nonstick cookware, through your umbilical cord. Or you might have drunk tainted water. The Environmental Working Group has found manufactured fluorochemicals present in 94 water districts across 27 states (see sidebar beginning on Page 38). Residents of Issaquah, Wash.; Wilmington, Del.; Colorado Springs; and Nassau County on Long Island are among those whose water has a higher concentration of fluorochemicals than that in some of the districts included in Rob Bilott’s class-action suit. The drinking water in Parkersburg itself, whose water district was not included in the original class-action suit and has failed to compel DuPont to pay for a filtration system, is currently tainted with high levels of PFOA. Most residents appear not to know this.Where scientists have tested for the presence of PFOA in the world, they have found it. PFOA is in the blood or vital organs of Atlantic salmon, swordfish, striped mullet, gray seals, common cormorants, Alaskan polar bears, brown pelicans, sea turtles, sea eagles, Midwestern bald eagles, California sea lions and Laysan albatrosses on Sand Island, a wildlife refuge on Midway Atoll, in the middle of the North Pacific Ocean, about halfway between North America and Asia.‘‘We see a situation,’’ Joe Kiger says, ‘‘that has gone from Washington Works, to statewide, to the United States, and now it’s everywhere, it’s global. We’ve taken the cap off something here. But it’s just not DuPont. Good God. There are 60,000 unregulated chemicals out there right now. We have no idea what we’re taking.’’Bilott doesn’t regret fighting DuPont for the last 16 years, nor for letting PFOA consume his career. But he is still angry. ‘‘The thought that DuPont could get away with this for this long,’’ Bilott says, his tone landing halfway between wonder and rage, ‘‘that they could keep making a profit off it, then get the agreement of the governmental agencies to slowly phase it out, only to replace it with an alternative with unknown human effects — we told the agencies about this in 2001, and they’ve essentially done nothing. That’s 14 years of this stuff continuing to be used, continuing to be in the drinking water all over the country. DuPont just quietly switches over to the next substance. And in the meantime, they fight everyone who has been injured by it.’’Bilott is currently prosecuting Wolf v. DuPont, the second of the personal-injury cases filed by the members of his class. The plaintiff, John M. Wolf of Parkersburg, claims that PFOA in his drinking water caused him to develop ulcerative colitis. That trial begins in March. When it concludes, there will be 3,533 cases left to try.A correction was made on Jan. 24, 2016:An article on Jan 10. about legal action against DuPont for chemical pollution referred incorrectly to DuPont’s response in the 1970s when the company discovered high concentrations of PFOA in the blood of workers at Washington Works, a DuPont factory. DuPont withheld the information from the E.P.A., not from its workers. The article also misstated the year DuPont agreed to a $16.5 million settlement with the E.P.A. It was 2005, not 2006. In addition, the article misidentified the water district where a resident received a letter from the district noting that PFOA had been detected in the drinking water. It was Lubeck, W.Va. — not Little Hocking, Ohio. The article also misidentified the district where water tested positive for PFOA at seven times the limit. It was Little Hocking, not Lubeck. And the article misidentified the city in Washington State that has fluorochemicals in its drink-ing water. It is Issaquah, not Seattle._________Nathaniel Rich is a contributing writer for the magazine and the author of ‘‘Odds Against Tomorrow.’’ He lives in New Orleans and is a frequent contributor to The New York Review of Books and The Atlantic.

文/蠡湖野人（野评人）这部影片叫《黑水》。

标题为什么说你家锅有毒？

因为里面有一种材料叫特氟龙。

一、什么是特氟龙首先我们来了解一下本片的大佬——特氟龙，是个啥东西。

特氟龙是一个商标，英文叫Teflon®，是美国杜邦公司注册的。

它的化学名叫聚四氟乙烯（Polytetrafluoroethylene），英文缩写为PTFE，俗称“塑料王，哈拉”。

用它做成的材料，300℃才能分解，400℃才能水解，抗酸抗碱抗各种溶剂，连王水都溶解不了，再加上耐高温、摩擦系数低，广泛应用于原子能、国防、航天、电子、电气、化工、机械、仪器、仪表、建筑等领域。

民用领域也和我们的生活朝夕相伴，最常见的如不粘锅、雨衣雨具和衣服等。

二、特氟龙和杜邦公司杜邦是一家1802年诞生于美国的化学制品和销售公司，经营内容涉及食品、保健、家具、交通、服装等领域。

2018年总收入279.4亿美元，员工52000人，在世界五百强中排名171。

我在网上查证了资料，有和影片对得上的也有对不上的，对不上的部分我以影片为准。

接下来我以杜邦公司为主角，撸一下它与特氟龙的前世今生。

三、我对影片的看法首先，影片的话题意义超过艺术价值，这是毋庸置疑的。

电影对社会和法制的推动，韩国的《熔炉》是杰出代表，它直接推动政府出台了未成年人保护法，美国电影人也喜欢把一起起事件搬上银幕，让观众了解事件的始末，这无疑会加强民众对政府和公司的警惕性和监控，而且美国是个案例法的国家，作用就更大了。

《黑水》同个班底拍摄制作的另一部同类题材影片《聚焦》，获得了2016年奥斯卡最佳电影，推荐一看。

反过来看我们这里，现实题材的影片就少了点，我十分期待有人把华为251事件搬上银幕。

《我不是药神》开了个好头，但到目前为止还没有后续的作品接上。

值得一提的是，《我不是药神》》是现实题材改编，而且改得非常多。

真正好的现实题材电影是需要制作者从骨子里坚持现实主义的，我们这里可能有现实题材，但目前来看还缺乏现实主义。

其次，如上所述，影片的表现手法比较普通，一般观众容易觉得无聊，即使对于喜欢这类题材的观众，最后半小时也很差强人意，因为没有做到情绪上的连贯性。

如果说前面一个半小时通过一系列细节让人的情绪保持在一条水平线上（和《聚焦》相比确实很平），那最后半小时就往下滑了，直到最后也没有拉一个高潮起来。

导演和编剧也知道这一点，所以安排了比洛特夫妻吵架、晕倒送医的戏份，但故事进展到这样的环节，观众已经无法被主线之外的情节吸引。

第三，部分情节缺乏说服力，如一开始比洛特律师接下养殖场的案子，影片交代的动机是乡情，并且使用《乡村小路带我回家》来渲染情绪，固然感人，但理智上缺乏说服力。

又比如最后半部分，角色们全部处于等待状态，而等待的结果是杜邦公司反悔，作为一名资深律师，难道一开始没想到这一点？

影片中比洛特把责任都推给了政府和杜邦公司，这都是情绪上的宣泄。

如果影片在前面作出一些技术性的交代如杜邦公司的律师找出了法律漏洞留作后路，那杜邦公司的突然反悔就有说服力很多。

当然，影片还是非常值得一看的，尤其是对于关注社会新闻的朋友更是不可错过。

对于我来说，看完这部片子之后，多认识了一种叫特氟龙的人工合成材料，而且它就在我们身边（欧美国家已经禁止使用，我国国家质检总局2019年才开始开始论证特氟龙是否危害人体健康，目前仅靠厂商自觉）。

以后买锅碗瓢盆塑料制品这些东西查看组成材料的时候，就会特别注意聚四氟乙烯、PFOA、PFOS、C-8这些字眼了。

添加微信号paokaishubenxbb加入全国影迷群经作者授权发布，转载请注明作者和出处

01杜邦的跨时代创新带来了3000多个癌症患者！

电影《黑水》的原型故事要从1954年一项跨时代的发明——不粘锅说起。

而制造不粘锅需要叫做PFOA或C8的有毒物质。

杜邦集团在明知PFOA会导致胎儿畸形以及受体致癌的情况下，仍然继续生产不粘锅，并且把7100吨含有PFOA的淤泥丢进工厂旁边的露天深坑里，接着渗进了帕克斯堡和邻近三个城市共十万人的饮水系统。

1984年一个先天面部畸形的小男孩巴基降生，但这只是开始，当地7万多名住户中先后出现了3000多例癌症患者。

更为触目惊心的是，由于生物无法分解此种物种，致使现在地球上99%的人体内都有PFOA存在！

2004年9月，杜邦就集体诉讼提出和解，同意在受到影响的六个水区安装过滤装置，并支付7000万美元的赔偿。

但杜邦并不承认C8和疾病有关。

代表律师罗伯特比洛特提出了一个方案，只有接受体检才能拿到赔偿金。

之后70000名西弗吉尼亚居民接受了体检，每人领到了400美元的补偿金。

之后又经过漫长的7年等待，科学家终于证明PFOA与多种癌症之间的因果关系，2015年，美国环保署全面禁止生产C8。

其实该案件其实已经被拍成了纪录片——《魔鬼你知我知》。

需要说明的是杜邦之所以会交出所有资料包括证明PFOA有毒的材料，是因为根据美国法律在这种环保案件中被告必须无条件提供原告所需材料。

02青蓝色下绿巨人的无奈《黑水》就是根据上文提到的律师罗伯特（片中由绿巨人马克叔饰演）真实经历改编的。

影片在青蓝的色调下由一群年轻人在倾倒废水的河里游泳开场，然后很快场景转移到了1998年马克叔供职的律所，一个操着浓重口音的农场主来寻求帮助。

电影也从马克叔追查杜邦排放有害物质PFOA开始，讲述了这个前后历时17年的漫长而又曲折的真实故事，他提起的诉讼揭露了几十年来杜邦公司化学污染的历史。

影片给人印象最深刻的无疑是无力感，农场主面对世界500强公司的无助，马克叔在面对杜邦送来的打乱了顺序的上万页资料时的无奈，以及面对自己对家人疏于关心的挫败感。

这致使本片氛围极其压抑，马克叔略显佝偻的身体，仿佛被压垮一样。

当我们看到那些触目惊心的由污染导致的身体缺陷和残疾时，我们的无助转为了愤怒。

故事发生地西弗吉尼亚本是美国十三块发源地之一，但是因为污染已经有多个地方破败不堪，片中为这些镜头配了描绘当地美丽风光的经典名曲《Take Me Home, Country Roads》，可谓讽刺意味十足。

片中除了马克叔这个绝对主角的精彩演出，还有安妮海瑟薇扮演在他身边一直支持他的妻子，她退去了花瓶扮相，以一个真实的有时候甚至有点徐娘半老的姿态出现在我们面前。

同时影片对17年中真实的时间流逝十分关注，每次都要提醒观众，而且片中男主的孩子们也一天天的长大，无不提示我们扳倒杜邦之艰难！

03大卫击败巨人的套路为什么屡试不爽有人曾经说过古往今来只有一个故事模板，那就是小人物逆袭战胜巨人的故事，本片无疑又是一个例证。

一开始马克叔对这件事并不上心，眼里只有成为公司合伙人后的满足和对金钱的追求，但是他看过农民的处境后决定帮个小忙，没想到在过程中自己找到了愿意为之付出一生的使命。

仔细想想大火的国产电影《我不是药神》，徐峥好像也经历了这样的心路历程。

虽然大家面对的具体的“巨人”不太一样，但无论是《达拉斯买家俱乐部》中挣扎求生的艾滋病患者，还是《辩护人》中内心觉醒的律师，他们想改变的其实都是不合理的体制。

虽然监管必然会落后于创新，但是更好的更负责任的化学品监管总是需要的。

在一个雾霾时有发生的时代，对环保的要求应该会越来越高，看过本片马克叔不停奔走的17年应该体会到社会改变的不易，片中很多人没有等到结果就已经先一步离开了人世，庆幸的是总有一些像罗伯特比洛特这样的人敢于对“巨人”说不。