Nonstick Cookware Industry Furious at Suggestion They Should Stop Causing Cancer

The makers of America's nonstick cookware are none too pleased about a new law that will bar them from using carcinogenic "forever chemicals."

As Minnesota Public Radio reports, the Cookware Sustainability Alliance advocacy group is suing Katrina Kessler, the head of the state's pollution control agency, over a newly-enacted law that will ban the use of cancer-causing per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS), which are used to make non-stick pans.

Dubbed "Amara's Law" after 20-year-old cancer victim Amara Strande, who in 2023 succumbed to a rare type of liver cancer linked to PFAS after growing up near a Minnesota-based 3M plant that dumped them into the local water supply, the new regulation bans the chemicals and any items made with them from being sold within the state.

Though the cause seems worthy enough, the Cookware Sustainability Alliance — which was launched last spring by cooking utensil manufacturers to purportedly enhance "public understanding of the safety of cookware based on scientific research and verifiable data" — is calling the law unconstitutional and unenforceable.

"Everything else that is produced for the consumer cookware industry — and 100 percent of the Subject Cookware — is manufactured, distributed, and sold from outside Minnesota," the lawsuit declares, per Minneapolis' KARE 11. "This out-of-state commerce is, consequently, the sole subject impacted by the cookware ban in the Statute."

Though Amara's Law covers everything from rugs to menstrual products alongside the cookware in question, the advocacy group insists that it unfairly discriminates against culinary tools that use these forever chemicals, and violates state commerce clauses to boot. The Minnesota Pollution Control Agency, which championed the law and spurred on its passage, heartily disagrees.

"It is estimated Minnesota taxpayers will have to spend $28 billion in the next 20 years to remove PFAS from wastewater and landfill leachate in the state," reads a statement from the MPCA to Minnesota Public Radio. "We simply cannot clean our way out of this problem."

Mehmet Konar-Steenberg, a professor at Saint Paul's Mitchell Hamline School of Law, suggested to MPR that the nonstick advocates are questioning the law's worth.

"They’re saying that this law doesn’t deliver enough public health benefits when compared to the kind of difficulties it creates for out-of-state businesses to conduct business in Minnesota," Konar-Steenberg said. "They’re saying, on balance, this law just isn’t worth it."

A glance at the docket for this injunction, which seeks to have the law declared unconstitutional by state courts, shows that the Cookware Sustainability Alliance means business — and that they're not going to stop making and selling products using cancer-causing nonstick technology without a fight.

More on toxicity: Whoever Figures Out How to Remove Microplastics From the Human Body Is Going to Make a Fortune

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