3M Corp. is in the news this week for settling a huge lawsuit, and this time it's not about PFAS.
The Maplewood, Minn.-based company on Aug. 28 agreed to pay $6.01 billion to settle hundreds of thousands of claims brought by military veterans who said its earplugs did not protect them from hearing loss.
The U.S. military used the CAEv2 earplugs — short for Combat Arms version 2 — in training and combat from 2003-2015, including in Afghanistan and Iraq.
I went down a rabbit hole on this story the past few days, looking for details for Plastics News readers. The short version is that this isn't a failure of plastic materials. The problem was that the design just didn't work, and it wasn't properly tested.
The earplugs were first designed and sold by Aearo Technologies Inc., an Indianapolis-based company that 3M bought for $1.2 billion in 2007. The innovative CAEv2 earplugs, and the lucrative contract to sell them to the Pentagon, were key parts of that deal.
The CAEv2 isn't a simple foam cylinder like you see on factory floors. It's a reversible plug, with one side designed to let in low-level noises, such as officer commands, while blocking louder noises. The plug design featured a small internal filter and flexible flanges that adapt to the shape of the ear to seal out noise.
But the story started to unravel when a rival, Moldex-Metric Inc., decided to enter the market in 2011 with a competing product called BattlePlugs. What followed was the usual patent infringement lawsuits, as the two companies jockeyed for advantage.
But what was unexpected was that in 2014, in the discovery process for those suits, Moldex found an internal Aearo report from 2000 that revealed that one end of the two-sided CAE earplugs was too short and that the geometry of some users' ear canal openings sometimes prevented deep enough insertion of the plugs.
Moldex brought a whistleblower suit against 3M, which was settled for $9.1 million in 2018. Moldex's share was $1.9 million.
Aearo then filed for bankruptcy in 2022, but that did not stop the lawsuits. The settlement announced this week covers about 260,000 lawsuits brought by current and former U.S. military service members. Observers are calling it one of the largest tort cases in U.S. history.
This is the second big set of lawsuits that 3M has settled this year. In June, the company agreed to pay up to $12.5 billion to settle suits about cleaning up PFAS in drinking water.