How is that possible? PTFE (teflon) is itself a PFAS, no? Did they "only" get rid of other PFAS used during the manufacturing of teflon?
“Teflon is a high molecular weight polymer made using perfluoronated surfactants. Technically, PTFE is a fluorine-containing material but it is not the PFAS pollutants of recent concern. In the conventional synthesis, the real source of PFAS pollution is primarily those surfactants used in its manufacture. Our process made the use of those surfactants unnecessary.”
Why do you DuPont never acted on your patents?
“It was a cost of business decision because they had already invested so much capital in making Teflon with those surfactants.”
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36961328
Getting a product like this stood up is a $100 million endeavor at minimum. That’s before customer #1 presses “buy.”
My father and the colleague I mentioned are both successful serial entrepreneurs (large exits, Sequioa backed unicorn, etc.). There is close to zero appetite from VCs in this.
VCs seem to be allergic to these CapEx intensive businesses and I don’t blame them—the risks are enormous when compared to something like a SaaS.
That said, if you know someone who’s dying to throw hundreds of millions at this problem, he’d probably take the intro. You can email me at super solenoid theory at gmail dot com.
I think you'd get seed money, and a network large enough to raise some serious capital in future rounds.
There is a gulf of value between "literal cure for cancer" and, like, some basic consumer good. Most things do not exist at either extreme end. Not all things worth doing are wildly profitable.
They even had a process to remove the radioactivity, but, it made the nicotine a little less addictive so they didn't do it. Instead, they kept marketing to children with cartoon characters for another 20+ years until forced to stop.
These same companies are still marketing cigarettes to kids where they can get away with it.
At some point we need to start talking about self defense from this shitty system. And I feel like that point was the 60's.
But the reason they haven’t been acted upon (that I know of) is that economic difficulty of making a competing Teflon has to do chiefly with issues of manufacturing scale and large up front capital expenditure. This is true across the entire chemicals industry for any new product. Rule of thumb costs were, the last I heard, roughly 100 Million in development to get a single product into baseline commercial viability.
Why compete against an established and “tainted” product like Teflon? Can you guarantee the PFAS free process is cheaper at any of the initial commercial scales you’re likely to achieve? Is there a market for an off-brand substitute?
These kinds of risks delimit innovation in physical manufacturing far more than the possession of IP.
One of the interesting side effects of free markets is that when there are no consequences for mass poisoning / polluting, you will ignore opportunities to manufacture without doing so because there is often zero or negative economic consequences to change your process.
In DuPont’s case, it was more valuable in the near term for the shareholders to ignore this manufacturing innovation and not disrupt supply than to reconfigure with a new process. No doubt there were massive risks involved in trying a new process that made it a “safer” and wiser decision economically to continue to use PFAS.
I think about this every time someone tells us on HN how a freer market will solve our problems.