I feel for the people living there and being affected by the pollution. The long term effects of chemical pollution are ugly.
But the CEO in the intro just seems like an odd choice. PFAS were known to cause issues for a long time, if you continued to use them for years then it is in your back too.
Being "surprised" this might eventually affect your own product line just seems naive. You might have trusted 3M but just blindly trusting a supplier is not an excuse at some point.
"I feel for the people living there and being affected by the pollution."
Isn't it all of us with carpets in our homes that are affected? (Albeit to a lesser degree—but also we are at the least partners in this if our buying carpets are destroying these other people's communities.)
I think “to a lesser degree” is doing a lot of heavy lifting here. The degrees of exposure are many orders of magnitude wide. Occupational exposure in a factory is far greater than living downstream from a polluter which is far greater still than being a far away consumer of the polluter’s products.
Your carpet doesn’t contain enough PFAS to create dangerous runoff and contaminate groundwater or entire rivers, but a town that manufactures most of the world’s mass produced carpeting is going to generate industrial amounts of pollution in a concentrated area.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10237242/
Our review of industry documents shows that companies knew PFAS was “highly toxic when inhaled and moderately toxic when ingested” by 1970, forty years before the public health community.
It's so convenient that all these people waited until retirement to speak out, but they also said they weren't doing anything wrong? Zero morals by anyone in this story.
We built our modern society on the principle that profit must be prioritized over morality, they're just conforming to systematic incentives. Those who sell their souls to the devil don't get to act shocked when they wind up in hell.
With the on-going elimination of the EPA at the US federal level, this could be the future for many States. And States with a strong State level "EPA" will be at the mercy of up-river states that pollute their own waterways.
I drive through Dalton anytime I visit Chattanooga (a cool hipster city on the border of Georgia and Tennessee). The scale of manufacturing there is wild. There are so many factories.
Dalton makes something like 70-80% of the carpet in the world. They've had carpet factories there since I was a kid, but they're starting to expand into lots of other industries.
They've begun massively ramping up on solar panel production, for instance.
It used to be the only city between Chattanooga and Cobb County (in the Atlanta metro), but now factories have sprung up throughout the I-75 corridor from Acworth to Calhoun. And they're putting them up at breakneck pace.
You can easily see all the factories on a satellite view.
Just look at the I-75 corridor [1].
The folks working in these factories are making good money. They're able to afford 2,000 square foot homes in the rural towns they live in.
This little city is doing $10B in GDP. It's impressive if you've ever driven through there.
In this society, appearance, convenience, and justifying one's existence with unnecessary, destructive labor are more important than the ecosystems which support them. Humans are the invasive, destructive species.
Also(I'm absolutely not taking corporate side here), she says, "I feel like, I don’t know, almost like there’s a blanket over me, smothering me that I can’t get out from under." because of PFAS levels but then look at the corporate products/chemicals she covers her body in daily, and accepts money from others to do the same. If you are going to be outraged, at least be consistent about it.
Ultimately it's because we've (as people) let corporations have too much of influence in politics and daily life. As such they will continue to sociopathically enshittify everything around them without compunction because the only guiding axis is "line must go up". Everyone can be absolve themselves from any wrong doing with the banal "I was just following orders" when the orders were to make the line increase at any cost.
We need a corporate death penalty. Probably combined with something that will put the fear of God in anyone who thinks only along the axis of profit.
If by we you mean the US this would require a dramatic change in the culture.
Just look how USAmericans view the regulations and rules that are imposed on businesses in the EU - what you propose would require a much harsher regulation than in the EU currently and even the current regulations seem extreme to Americans and proposing regulations like that would probably be political suicide
You mean that because people take issue with the fact that the EU implements everything in almost the worst and most intrusive way possible? Sorry, you forgot to accept my view conversation cookie and I don’t want to be personally liable because you didn’t, so this response will be cut off in order to
Clearly. It is definitely just about a pop-up and not anything else that was alluded to! How astute! You’re from the EU though I suspect that you’ve never even read that law in detail.
When complaining about poor regulations you chose a cookie popup as an example. You couldn’t think of anything less trivial? If that’s what your mind reaches for when you think of “poor regulations” you’ll have to forgive me for assuming you have nothing of substance to add to the discussion.
Your substance has been “I don’t know what I’m talking about, so you must not know what you are”. Impressive. I’d suggest reading more and assuming less.
I think this proves my point.
The kind of regulations that GP proposed are just not realistic in US culture unless something changes dramatically.
I agree that cookie banners shouldn’t exist - but too many companies love to collect and sell my personal data so that is their current workaround. I would love for the EU regulation to clamp down on this as well but it’s a never ending process.
I think it's a chicken and egg problem around politics not necessarily a "cultural issue", which rings like victim blaming, it's politically suicidal only because the way that lobbying works and how we structure campaign financing. We only really have pro-business-does-no-wrong+blue bits or business-does-no-wrong+red bits, we don't have any effective other voices.
Again, harsher regulation is only "harsher" if it's purely reductive or increases the burden right. Indoor synthetic fiber carpets might not be the best example here, but something like health insurance is more easy to grok.
For the sake of the article though I'll try with carpets. If we issued regulations that said "no more companies making indoor carpeting that pollutes our environments and poisoned people" then used those resources elsewhere like encouraging sheep farming and carpet making, you would be to mitigate the pollution while not depriving people of their floor coverings.
It's pretty much a solved problem. All highly developed countries still have some manufacturing - some more, some less - and they comply with today's strict environmental regulations.
Stuff has to be made somewhere. This argument is essentially predicated on the idea that it's okay for some places to be polluted and for some people to have to deal with it but not for other places and people. What you're really saying is "When people talk about how they want manufacturing back, they conveniently forget the pollution impacts people who live here instead of China and India, where it's totally okay."
Domestic manufacturing has a lot of advantages from the standpoint of total pollution. I guarantee you that even with lax American environmental rules, the pollution caused by a factory in Georgia is still lower and less hazardous to workers and the surrounding community than if the same factory were in India. Furthermore, our government is at least theoretically capable of adding better protections for workers and communities, while our government is going to have a hard time enforcing pollution rules overseas.
I don't think you are racist or xenophobic. I just think that when people make this argument they don't think about the fact that this stuff is still getting manufactured somewhere if it's not made here, and basically the complaint is that Americans are having to deal with the consequences rather than people in other countries.
Stuff is made in response to demand. That can feel like an inevitability especially if you look at the failure of interdiction of drug trafficking. But that's no excuse to give up on harm reduction and demand shaping. Cigarette smoking hasn't disappeared, but the costs it imposes on healthcare has been reduced successfully. The same can be done to reduce the freeriding on ecological damage.
When people extol the virtues of manufacturing, I’m always reminded of the poll where 80% of Americans say that the country would benefit from a bigger manufacturing base but only 25% are interested in actually working in manufacturing. This isn’t an American thing btw - I’ve had arguments with brits and others who argue passionately that the country has been destroyed by the relative decline in manufacturing but when I ask “so you’d prefer to work in a factory?” it provokes fairly confused responses like “no but other people would”….
Whether I intend to work a factory job or not I can still decide that unemployment in the U.S., especially unemployment of blue-collar workers, would be better served by local industry than allowing for homelessness or a dependency on welfare. Never mind that there might also be national security issues addressed by local manufacture.
The opposite, expecting everyone in the country to aspire to white-collar professions, is to me much more clearly an elitist (or at least irrational) position to have.
Dalton has been the worldwide leader in carpet manufacturing since before I was born. Multiple generations of people have worked in those factories. They earn good money and can afford big houses and savings.
You should talk to the people of Dalton. They're really proud of it. The first thing they tell you is they're from the "carpet capital of the world". Without fail they will mention that to you. It's so ingrained that it's part of their identity.
I don't think they'd be happy to lose their jobs for knowledge work or anything else.
It is supposed to get better over time though. I mean at least that's the sales pitch. Globalization was supposed to lift all boats. If you remember the air quality in Beijing used to be the absolute worst but it has allegedly improved a lot recently.
I don't know where the flaw in the logic was but I think the idea was first you have to become wealthier and with more money comes a better quality of life.
But the CEO in the intro just seems like an odd choice. PFAS were known to cause issues for a long time, if you continued to use them for years then it is in your back too.
Being "surprised" this might eventually affect your own product line just seems naive. You might have trusted 3M but just blindly trusting a supplier is not an excuse at some point.
Isn't it all of us with carpets in our homes that are affected? (Albeit to a lesser degree—but also we are at the least partners in this if our buying carpets are destroying these other people's communities.)
Your carpet doesn’t contain enough PFAS to create dangerous runoff and contaminate groundwater or entire rivers, but a town that manufactures most of the world’s mass produced carpeting is going to generate industrial amounts of pollution in a concentrated area.
Has this actually been confirmed, or is this just the precautionary principle in action?
Frankly the carpet factories will do more business as people will want to replace their carpets more frequently.
Dalton makes something like 70-80% of the carpet in the world. They've had carpet factories there since I was a kid, but they're starting to expand into lots of other industries.
They've begun massively ramping up on solar panel production, for instance.
It used to be the only city between Chattanooga and Cobb County (in the Atlanta metro), but now factories have sprung up throughout the I-75 corridor from Acworth to Calhoun. And they're putting them up at breakneck pace.
You can easily see all the factories on a satellite view. Just look at the I-75 corridor [1].
The folks working in these factories are making good money. They're able to afford 2,000 square foot homes in the rural towns they live in.
This little city is doing $10B in GDP. It's impressive if you've ever driven through there.
[1] https://www.google.com/maps/@34.6185909,-84.9776839,50698m/d...
And all they had to do to accomplish this, apparently, was make their environment toxic. What a bargain.
Also(I'm absolutely not taking corporate side here), she says, "I feel like, I don’t know, almost like there’s a blanket over me, smothering me that I can’t get out from under." because of PFAS levels but then look at the corporate products/chemicals she covers her body in daily, and accepts money from others to do the same. If you are going to be outraged, at least be consistent about it.
I (and others) need to be educated about it first. I know, for example, the risks of cigarettes because it is on every pack in the U.S.
We need a corporate death penalty. Probably combined with something that will put the fear of God in anyone who thinks only along the axis of profit.
EDIT: grammer
I agree that cookie banners shouldn’t exist - but too many companies love to collect and sell my personal data so that is their current workaround. I would love for the EU regulation to clamp down on this as well but it’s a never ending process.
Again, harsher regulation is only "harsher" if it's purely reductive or increases the burden right. Indoor synthetic fiber carpets might not be the best example here, but something like health insurance is more easy to grok.
For the sake of the article though I'll try with carpets. If we issued regulations that said "no more companies making indoor carpeting that pollutes our environments and poisoned people" then used those resources elsewhere like encouraging sheep farming and carpet making, you would be to mitigate the pollution while not depriving people of their floor coverings.
Domestic manufacturing has a lot of advantages from the standpoint of total pollution. I guarantee you that even with lax American environmental rules, the pollution caused by a factory in Georgia is still lower and less hazardous to workers and the surrounding community than if the same factory were in India. Furthermore, our government is at least theoretically capable of adding better protections for workers and communities, while our government is going to have a hard time enforcing pollution rules overseas.
I don't think you are racist or xenophobic. I just think that when people make this argument they don't think about the fact that this stuff is still getting manufactured somewhere if it's not made here, and basically the complaint is that Americans are having to deal with the consequences rather than people in other countries.
https://fortune.com/2025/04/15/americans-want-factory-jobs-r...
Whether I intend to work a factory job or not I can still decide that unemployment in the U.S., especially unemployment of blue-collar workers, would be better served by local industry than allowing for homelessness or a dependency on welfare. Never mind that there might also be national security issues addressed by local manufacture.
The opposite, expecting everyone in the country to aspire to white-collar professions, is to me much more clearly an elitist (or at least irrational) position to have.
You should talk to the people of Dalton. They're really proud of it. The first thing they tell you is they're from the "carpet capital of the world". Without fail they will mention that to you. It's so ingrained that it's part of their identity.
I don't think they'd be happy to lose their jobs for knowledge work or anything else.
I don't know where the flaw in the logic was but I think the idea was first you have to become wealthier and with more money comes a better quality of life.