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Retired fire chief now SoyFoam advocate  

A retired firefighter and cancer survivor is urging widespread adoption of SoyFoam.

Pat Butler joined the fire service in 1975 and used high-expansion foams containing PFAS chemicals for decades.

“We used it, we trained with it, I mean, I’d wallowed in it up to my knees in the foam,” he shares. “You’re always working with equipment and your hands, and what we didn’t know what it was doing to us. The other thing we didn’t know was what it was doing to the environment.”

This spring, Butler became a distributor of SoyFoam in the Eastern Corn Belt after learning about it through the National Fire Academy.

“This is a big deal, to help our environment and to help our firefighters, and soybean farmers like it too, it sells more soybeans,” he says.

SoyFoam was developed using soy flour by Cross Plains Solutions through United Soybean Board checkoff funds.

Butler tells Brownfield areas can become a hazardous material site and are costly to clean up if fire departments use the products still containing PFAS.

“I have fire departments that say as soon as I get rid of this old stuff, we’re going to go to the soy foam, but my concern is is in the meantime, if you use it, you’re continuing to invade the environment, you’re putting your firefighters at risk,” he cautions.

More than 15 states have banned the use of firefighting foam containing PFAS chemicals in training drills, and the retired fire chief says it needs to be eliminated completely.

The Michigan Soybean Committee has partnered with Butler to host SoyFoam demonstrations and help local fire departments learn about the alternative.

The foam is a certified USDA BioPreferred product and is made of more than 70 percent biobased materials.