Eight takeaways from The Inquirer’s yearlong investigation into ‘forever chemicals’

On May 14, 2022, David West, a lanky former relief pitcher for the Philadelphia Phillies, died from brain cancer. He was 57.

West had spent four of his 10 seasons in major-league baseball with the Phillies, and was a member of the beloved 1993 team, a group of mulleted, gutsy characters who stunned the city by advancing to the World Series that autumn, before falling in six games to the Toronto Blue Jays.

He was also the sixth former Phillie to die from glioblastoma, a particularly aggressive and deadly form of brain cancer. Each of them — West, Darren Daulton, John Vukovich, Tug McGraw, Ken Brett, Johnny Oates — had played for the team at Veterans Stadium, on its notoriously threadbare AstroTurf field.

The rate of brain cancer among Phillies who played at the Vet between 1971 and 2003 was about three times higher than the average rate among adult men in the United States.

In 2023, The Inquirer investigated the six players’ deaths, to see if there might be a common link. What followed was a year’s worth of stories, beginning with Field of Dread, that chronicled the potential connection between dangerous chemicals that lurked in the Vet’s turf — and in a range of consumer products, including the protective equipment worn by firefighters — and a plethora of cancer cases.

» READ MORE: Field of Dread: Six former Phillies died of brain cancer. We tested the Vet's turf

Here’s what our reporting found.

Inquirer reporters obtained, through eBay, chunks of AstroTurf that had been on the field at the Vet between 1977 and 1981. The turf had been cut into 4-inch squares and sealed in plastic, and was given to fans in 1982, affixed with a label: “Official Turf of Champions.”

Two samples were tested by Eurofins Scientific, an international group of 900 labs in 50 countries, while the others were tested by the University of Notre Dame. The results showed that the turf contained 16 different PFAS, or per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, which the EPA have linked to cancer, liver damage, decreased fertility, and an increased risk of asthma.

Two of the chemicals in the turf — PFOA and PFOS — are the most widely studied of the estimated 12,000 forever chemicals, and considered the most perilous. Artificial turf traps heat; temperatures on the field at the Vet during summer day games sometimes rose to 165 degrees. When exposed to intense heat, the chemicals in turf fields release volatile organic compounds, which players can inhale.

“We’re never going to have a good measure of what the Phillies players were exposed to,” said Timothy Rebbeck, an epidemiologist who researches cancer causes at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.

(AstroTurf was pioneered in the 1960s by the Monsanto Company, and marketed to professional teams, high schools, and colleges as a cheaper and more durable alternative to natural grass. The Vet’s turf had to be replaced five times in its 33-year history.)

The Phillies consulted brain cancer experts who told the team there is no connection between turf, PFAS, and brain cancer. But reporters found multiple studies, conducted by scientists in Italy and China, that showed PFAS have been discovered in brain tumors.

“It was just sad all the way around to lose all those guys. To lose them that way,” said former Phillies pitcher Larry Christenson. “Then you start thinking, with Vuke, Darren Daulton — it opened a can of worms: ‘Whoa. Why are all of our teammates dying?’ ”

Last spring, The Inquirer asked the Synthetic Turf Council, a national organization that represents manufacturers, builders, and infill material suppliers if newer generations of artificial turf contained PFAS.

The council didn’t respond.

Months later, though, the newspaper obtained a letter that the council’s president and CEO, Melanie Taylor, had sent to legislators in California, who were seeking to ban in 2024 the sale of any turf products that contain forever chemicals.

“These dates do not provide enough time for manufacturers and suppliers to develop viable alternatives for the marketplace,” Taylor wrote.

Taylor later told The Inquirer that “most synthetic turf already does not contain intentionally added PFAS.”

The turf council has said materials in the product have been “thoroughly reviewed” by government agencies and are considered nonhazardous.

Firefighters have long been exposed to a slew of carcinogens at the scenes of infernos.

A National Institute of Occupational Safety and Health study of 30,000 firefighters who worked in Philadelphia, Chicago, and San Francisco between 1950 and 2009 found that firefighters had a 14% higher chance of dying of the disease than the rest of the U.S. population. Rates of prostate cancer and leukemia appear to be more than three times higher than the norm.

But many in the profession now believe that their cancer cases are linked to water-repellent PFAS that are found in the protective turnout gear that they wear.

Their growing concerns were explored in another Inquirer report, The Burning Question, which was built on interviews with firefighters in Philadelphia and across the country who were battling cancer, and relatives of firefighters who had recently died from the disease.

» READ MORE: The Burning Question: Are chemicals in firefighters' protective gear making them sick?

In 2018, Graham Peaslee, a physicist at the University of Notre Dame who has spent years studying PFAS compounds, tested 43 pieces of new and used turnout gear. What he found, he said, were the highest levels of PFAS he’d ever seen in any textile.

Last year, scientists at the National Institute of Standards and Technology also found that the PFAS-treated textiles in firefighters’ jackets and pants tend to release more of the chemicals when subjected to wear and tear, or exposed to high temperatures.

Stedfast, a Canadian-based manufacturer of turnout gear, announced last spring that it had developed a PFAS-free moisture barrier, which is a middle layer in turnout gear. It is unclear when it will be available to firefighters.

“I never would have thought that something that I love doing so much would be the reason that I die,” Anthony Patterson, a Philadelphia firefighter, told his fiancée, Shayla Robinson. “At least not this way.”

Patterson died from lung cancer Nov. 10, 2022, on what was supposed to have been his and Robinson’s wedding day. He was 41.

Two days after The Inquirer published The Burning Question, U.S. Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick (R., Pa.) and seven other congressional lawmakers introduced the Protecting Firefighters and Advancing State of the Art Alternatives Act, which seeks to spend more than $100 million in federal funds on researching and developing firefighting turnout gear that doesn’t contain PFAS.

“We’ve seen reports of firefighters being harmed by the gear that is supposed to protect them in these high-risk situations,” Fitzpatrick said, “and I am committed to cracking down on this trend.”

In Pennsylvania, a state representative, Greg Scott, introduced legislation that called for manufacturers to include warning labels if firefighters’ jackets, pants, helmets, or respiratory gear contain PFOS or PFOA, two types of forever chemicals. Companies that ignore the requirement would face up to $10,000 in fines.

In October, the NFL Players Association told The Inquirer that it had “considerable concern” about players being exposed to forever chemicals in the artificial turf fields that are used in 14 NFL stadiums.

“Our question to those who would put players’ health at risk is, ‘If that were your brother, son or father exposed to those chemicals, would you take that risk?’ ” Thom Mayer, the union’s medical director, wrote in an email.

This marked the first time that the NFLPA identified PFAS exposure as an area of concern. The union renewed calls for the NFL to replace its turf fields with natural grass, citing a decade’s worth of data that showed players suffered more noncontact injuries on turf than on grass.

The NFL said that it was working with the union “to gain a better understanding of what contributes to injury on both synthetic and natural grass surfaces.”

Scrap tires, often used to cushion artificial turf fields, cannot be discarded in landfills. Yet no such regulation is on the books for rolls of fake grass, which, given its weight, can cost more than $20,000 per field to be dumped in a landfill.

But there’s a cheaper alternative: abandoning rolls of used turf in Pennsylvania.

In Forever Fields, The Inquirer found that thousands of turf rolls have been discarded by companies and municipalities on farmlands or in empty lots and warehouses across the state. Some bundles of used turf are sold online, and used to carpet batting cages, dog runs, back yards, miniature golf courses, and paintball fields.

» READ MORE: ‘Forever Fields’: How Pennsylvania became a dumping ground for discarded artificial turf

In 2021, Pennsylvania officials announced that Re-Match, a Danish company, would locate its first U.S. turf recycling facility in Luzerne County. These plans never came to be. Instead, the company is seeking to open a factory in Rush Township, Schuylkill County, by the end of this year.

But in a prospectus that was distributed to potential investors, Re-Match wrote that it might not be able to recycle 100% of the turf it collects, and that its operations could potentially cause environmental contamination.

Many municipalities across the country still regard artificial turf as a cheap and effective way to create safe outdoor spaces for children. But parents, youth coaches, and medical experts worry that an assortment of dangerous chemicals, lurking unseen in an estimated 13,000 turf fields, has made youth athletes sick.

Last year, scientists in Egypt found that “there is a potential for cancer risk” for children, aged 3 to 15, who played on artificial turf, due to volatile compounds that are emitted from the plastic grass and are capable of being inhaled. Earlier studies showed that crumb rubber, used to cushion turf fields, contains arsenic, benzene, cadmium, and other heavy metals linked to cancer.

Experts believe young people are particularly vulnerable to carcinogenic substances because their endocrine, reproductive, and nervous systems are still developing.

“The fact that those chemicals are known to be present in turf is enough evidence to say children should not be playing on those surfaces,” Sarah Evans, an assistant professor in the Department of Environmental Medicine and Public Health at Mount Sinai’s Icahn School of Medicine, told The Inquirer, for another report, Risky Play.

“The risk of exposure is too great.”

» READ MORE: Risky Play: Why parents and coaches of cancer-stricken youth athletes are worried about artificial turf

In 2009, Amy Griffin, then coach of the women’s soccer team at the University of Washington, began to hear about young players who were battling cancer. She kept a tally of the athletes on what became known as “Amy’s List.” Now, Griffin’s list contains the names of 275 athletes, 80% of them soccer players from across the U.S.

The Inquirer interviewed parents of young athletes who developed cancer, including Schyler Herman, the goalkeeper at Pleasant Valley High School in the Pocono Mountains. She played year-round, mostly on artificial turf.

In 2017, Schyler was diagnosed with leukemia at the age of 14. As soon as her father, Mike Herman, heard the word “cancer,” he immediately “thought it was because of the turf fields,” he said.

Schyler died the next year.

After The Inquirer published Risky Play, the city’s department of parks and recreation said that a newly installed turf field at South Philadelphia’s Lawrence E. Murphy Recreation Center did not contain forever chemicals.

Sprinturf, the turf’s manufacturer, had assured the city that the field was PFAS-free, and shared a lab report to support its claim.

The newspaper asked three PFAS experts to independently review the report. Each said the results were misleading and inadequate, and that the field likely still contained forever chemicals.

“The city was bamboozled,” said Kyla Bennett, a former EPA official who is now the director of science policy for Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility.

A Sprinturf official did not respond to requests for comment.

Reporters followed up with RTI Laboratories, which had tested the turf that the city purchased.

Lloyd Kaufman, an RTI vice president and analytical chemist, acknowledged that the test results didn’t guarantee that the field didn’t contain forever chemicals.

Kaufman said he “cringes” whenever someone claims that a current turf product is “PFAS-free.”