Setting aside the issues from waste during the manufacturing process and the messes that have been made (see 3M plants for example), is the actual Gore-tex product itself hazardous? Like, how much of the material do you have to eat, and how edible is the Gore-tex product? I get Teflon coatings scratching and getting mixed with the prepared food, but I typically don't go around gnawing on my clothing. Does Gore-tex leach anything that can absorbed by the skin while wearing it?
in the 80s on every ski trip, my parents would spray me down with scotch guard while i stood there in my cold gear. think of the scene from A Christmas Story with Randy in his overstuffed coat, but then imagine the mom spraying him down with a can of scotch guard. that was me.
does that count as being overused, or just as intended?
The title says this is expanded PTFE, which seems like it wouldn't need an additional PFOTS coating. I doubt it would shed similar small molecules to a PFOTS coating as it's a different material (polymerized tetrafluoroethylene).
I also doubt you would get similar endocrine disruption with PTFE polymerization biproducts since you won't have the "polar head/fluorinated tail" structure that PFOTS has.
Not exactly. Its properties come from PTFE, which is not water soluble. PFOS is a surfactant, like soap. You can’t make a jacket out of it — it’s water soluble.
PFOS was used in the manufacturing process. It’s quite problematic, but it’s actually the end product.
Is it more precisely: don't use PFOA or PFOS anymore, switching to less-proven-guilty chemicals with different lengths?
Either way, my concerns are mostly: how much fluorinated waste they release from factories and what happens at the end of product lifetime. Solid fluorinated compounds don't seem atrocious, as they can be reduced to safe minerals if burned properly unlike the spray-on compounds and factory leakage.
You may have to turn on your VPN to appear to be coming from an EU country (or maybe even from inside Germany, since this Youtube channel, Strg-F [literally "Ctrl F", so 'find'] is part of `Funk`, which is a German public broadcast station) but I found this half-hour-long documentary on PFAS and PFOAs, more generally, to be quite informative:
The video covers Chemours, DuPont, etc. and how there's a town in the US where the rain and soil is poisonous due to PFOA production in the past (and still on-going: not PFAS but other deemed-safe-by-corporate-lawyers PFOAs). The man who they interviewed had pet dogs that he would let outside and the husky loved being outside in the rain. However, the dog developed sores / lesions on its back and then died. Turns out the groundwater and basically the whole environment around the PFOA factory is highly toxic.
The video also interviewed a worker at a PFOA plant in Germany who has (had?) thyroid cancer, I believe it was, and suffers from many disrupted endocrine system effects. (He worked inside a PFOA factory where sometimes the chemical vapor would condense on the ceiling and drip down on to the workers. Again, the ground water and soil there is not safe for human or animal consumption.)
They also cover / touch upon the lawsuits that farmers with grazing cattle (that died off) tried to bring against PFOA manufacturers like DuPont, Chemours, etc. Unfortunately, most of those farmers are now dead due to cancers of various sorts (from consuming PFOA-laden groundwater, the same water which they were giving to their animals which died by the hundreds a few decades ago).
They also touch upon how difficult it is to recycle PFOA-containing fabrics: they must be incinerated at much higher temperatures to render the compounds inert and safe for disposal in the way that regular trash is disposed of after incineration.
Unfortunately, like Teflon cooking pans, its amazing properties come from a coating with perfluorinated octyl sulfonate, a known endocrine disruptor:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7722801/