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The US military is poisoning communities across the US with AFFF

The AFFF issue is a weird one, because they want to restrict use for firefighting foams, but meanwhile the biggest source of PFAS contamination is from wastewater from industrial usage, as 90% of it is used for textiles, pulp and paper, and food processing. Goretex, teflon, scotchguard are all common examples, but it's also found in things like food packaging and makeup.

None of the AFFF replacements perform as well, and some of the flourine free foams (F3s) actually have higher acute and long term health risks (while not working as well). We've gotten rid of the PFOS/PFOA legacy AFFFs, and use the C6 short chain formulas now (and only for the real thing or very controlled training evolutions with decontamination protocols).

Lot of work within DND to look at an alternative, but won't be a 'one size fits all' solution, and there is no 'drop in replacement'. The F3s need more volume and are thicker, so even if we accept the lower performance (and associated life safety impact) would need to redesign the systems on the ships to increase the size of piping and the pumps, so a 5-10 year project (which we don't have people for).

If we can find reasonable alternatives for land based firefighting I think that would be a great harm reduction, but with ships and deployed airfields really need the performance, and people tend to forget AFFF was specifically developed after a massive USN fire because the F3 doesn't work as well.
 
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