Corporations Are Dodging Accountability for PFAS Contamination Around the Globe

I grew up walking the boardwalk in downtown Wilmington, North Carolina, peering into the froth of the Cape Fear River. The name came from 16th-century mariners who feared its mouth, which was known to churn ships into wrecks. But for the last few decades, there has been something new to fear in the river.

The Cape Fear River was tainted with per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS), the Wilmington Star-News reported in 2017, a group of synthetic compounds now commonly known as “forever chemicals.”

As their name suggests, forever chemicals are renowned for their persistence. One of the strongest bonds in chemistry, carbon and fluorine, gives PFAS their nonstick properties. A seemingly endless list of products — dental floss, tampons, cellphones, wall paint, yoga pants, carpets, contact lenses, hair-straightening treatments, toilet paper — rely on those bonds to smooth, harden, slicken, and withstand heat and wear. But that chemical strength also means that PFAS don’t break down in the environment. They accumulate over time, contaminating our soil, produce, fish, and drinking water — and eventually finding their way into us.

These forever chemicals were flowing into the river from a production facility in Bladen County, North Carolina, operated by Chemours, a chemical company that manufactures Teflon, the coating used in nonstick cookware. When the news broke, I was 15 years old and had been drinking the city’s tap water all my life. Nearly all of Wilmington had: The Cape Fear, the state’s largest river, supplies 80 percent of the city’s drinking water. The water was clear, and it tasted fine — but that didn’t mean it was clean. The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has linked PFAS chemicals to a host of severe health issues, including increased risk of prostate, kidney, and testicular cancers, as well as decreased fertility, reduced ability to fight infections, and developmental delays in children.

After years of public outcry, state officials announced a breakthrough earlier this month. The state had reached a $590 million deal with Chemours and associated companies to provide residents with clean water and repair the damage the pollution has caused. Politicians hailed the payout — the largest environmental-damages settlement in North Carolina history — as a major step forward in holding the company accountable for decades of damage.

But the agreement stops at the state line — while the contamination does not.

I had assumed, when I began researching Chemours’ pollution, that it was a local problem. But I quickly learned that it’s not just North Carolina struggling to navigate a new forever-chemical normal; it’s not even just the United States. The fluorochemical industry has a pattern of shuffling around PFAS production and waste, from North Carolina to Texas, from Italy to India. Every stop leaves a trail of contamination in its wake.

Chemours operates offices in North and South America, Europe, and Asia, as well as 21 production facilities across the world, not counting research and development sites. Alongside my home state, PFAS contamination has been reported around Chemours’ production plant in West Virginia, as well as around its facilities in Changshu, China, Villers-Saint-Paul, France, Dordrecht, Netherlands, and Mechelen, Belgium. One of the main PFAS chemicals made at Fayetteville Works has even been found in the snow at Antarctica’s Dome.

Tightening regulations in one state or country, I learned, pushes PFAS to another. And because PFAS are so durable, “destroying” them is more like moving them somewhere else for a while; common destruction methods, such as incineration, are often unable to fully destroy the compound. The Department of Defense has described thermal technologies like incineration as having “higher levels of uncertainties regarding their capacity to control the migration of PFAS into the environment.”

In other words, removing forever chemicals from one country, state, or river, such as the Cape Fear, just leads to a larger question: Where will they go next?

Danger in the Well

On an oppressively muggy day last July, I visited an organic farm in Castle Hayne, North Carolina, run by Ty Jacobus. He grows the essential ingredient in North Carolina’s favorite pie: pecans. Forty trees root in his grove, speckling the ground with shade. Closer to his house, he grows green and aubergine figs, including the “LSU Purple” variety, a deep violet-colored fruit bred at Louisiana State University.

“Everything has its little place,” he told me. Napoleon, Jacobus’ speckled rooster, squawked in the coop behind him.

In 2022, Jacobus decided to have the water in his farm’s well tested for PFAS. He had read in the local paper that, under a court order, Chemours was required to cover the costs of sampling private wells in New Hanover, Pender, Columbus, and Brunswick counties since its Fayetteville Works facility was roughly 80 miles upstream.

Jacobus didn’t think anything would come of the testing.

“I didn’t think we had [PFAS]. When we moved here in 2018, I put in a well that’s 95 feet deep,” he said. “My logic was that if there’s contamination, it’ll be closer to the surface.”

Jacobus recounted receiving the test results as a spreadsheet of chemical names and concentrations. To help him decode the results, he turned to Dana Sargent, then the executive director of Cape Fear River Watch, an environmental protection organization. The fight against PFAS was personal for Sargent: Her brother, a firefighter, passed away from brain cancer at age 46. Around the time that news of Wilmington’s water contamination broke, she learned that firefighting foam is also full of forever chemicals.

Chemours and its former parent company, DuPont, understood the risks of PFAS chemicals decades before I drank them in my sweet tea. A report written by DuPont’s Polychemicals Research and Development department in 1961 found that Teflon coatings (manufactured using PFAS) had “the ability to increase the size of the liver of rats at low doses.” In 1970, Haskell Laboratory, a lab founded and funded by DuPont to study its products, found a legacy PFAS chemical to be “highly toxic when inhaled and moderately toxic when ingested.” In 1992, an internal survey found elevated leukemia and kidney cancer rates among DuPont’s male workers at its Washington Works plant.

Rather than adapt to its findings, the company actively suppressed knowledge of the compounds’ potential effects on workers’ health, according to the nonprofit Environmental Working Group. In 1981, DuPont quietly removed many female employees from roles with high chemical contact. Managers told workers this was based on the results of a preliminary study of unborn rats. They didn’t share that two female workers that year had given birth to babies with eye and facial defects, with PFAS found in the umbilical cord blood of a third.

In 2015, DuPont spun off its Performance Chemicals unit into a new company, Chemours. A Chemours representative told me they “cannot comment on events predating the creation of Chemours in 2015.” But according to a complaint Chemours filed against its former parent company in 2019, DuPont had severely underestimated just how much cleaning up the Fayetteville Works’ contamination would cost — and it’d spun off the company in part to offload those liabilities.

As a result, Chemours was left holding the bag. In 2019, to settle lawsuits filed against it by state regulators and Cape Fear River Watch, the company agreed to a consent order requiring it to provide private well testing and supply replacement water for those affected by its pollution. The settlement also required the company to cut the plant’s PFAS air emissions by 99 percent, since forever chemicals can travel long distances through the air.

In 2021, state regulators required Chemours to extend its groundwater assessment and private well sampling to communities roughly 100 river miles downstream from the plant — and forced the company to test even more wells in the area the following year. Then, in June 2022, the EPA issued a health advisory warning that any water with more than 10 parts per trillion (ppt) of a PFAS produced by Chemours wasn’t safe to drink — a threshold 14 times stricter than the level Chemours agreed to in the 2019 consent order. This meant that Chemours was on the hook for up to 1,700 additional private wells that could be dangerously contaminated.

According to a Chemours spokesperson, “We notify homeowners who become eligible for private well sampling via mailed letters, as required.” But while Jacobus’ farm was included in the expanded advisory area, he said no one ever told him; he only found out by reading the paper.

With Sargent’s help, Jacobus learned that his well water tested at 50 to 60 ppt for various forever chemicals — and she attributed several of those PFAS to DuPont, Chemours’ former parent company.

The amount was well above what the EPA would later determine was safe for drinking, but the forever chemicals found in his water were not on the list of 12 PFAS chemicals that qualify for assistance from Chemours in remediating the water flowing through his sinks, much less to his farm’s pepper plants, peach trees, and chickens. According to testing done by NC State and Duke Universities, those chickens had eggs clocking in at 980 ppt. His mother participated in a forever chemicals health study in Wilmington; when the results came back, the PFAS level in her blood was 20,000 ppt.

Jacobus stopped watering the pepper plants and peach trees he had cultivated since 2018, when he bought his fifteen acres for a bargain after Hurricane Florence had flooded the land. He purchased a new flock of chickens and decided to close his business, Honeybird Organic Farm, until he could be sure his crops weren’t laden with forever chemicals.

“It’s Hurting Everybody”

Efforts to keep people safe from PFAS gained traction during President Joe Biden’s administration, as a proposal to set national discharge limits for forever chemicals slowly worked its way up to White House review. But Trump’s EPA withdrew the plan in the first days of his second term.

Under the deregulatory efforts of EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin, the agency went on to propose dramatic rollbacks of chemical manufacturing reporting requirements and cut PFAS research funding and staff. Then, this past May, the EPA announced it would rescind and restart national drinking water limits for four common forever chemicals. What this “restart” will look like isn’t clear.

Then, in late June, the federal agency brokered what some lawmakers called a “backroom deal” with Chemours, offering the company a $450 million settlement without consulting the 2,600-plus plaintiffs in North Carolina who have sued the chemical company for polluting their air, water, and soil, and who would not get their day in court if a federal judge approves the settlement.

The new $590 million state settlement with Chemours is more promising for North Carolinians. But according to the nonprofit Southern Environmental Law Center, the deal isn’t a cure-all, since it does nothing to stop Chemours from continuing or expanding its PFAS production at Fayetteville Works.

State regulators will likely struggle to limit that toxic output in the near future. The REINS Act, signed into law by the NC General Assembly in 2025, requires any regulation costing over $20 million across five years to pass the majority-Republican Assembly, meaning most new environmental regulations will likely stall.

It doesn’t help that the North Carolina Chamber, a powerful lobbying group for state businesses including Chemours, has pushed to slow the state’s response. The Chamber has worked to delay state regulators’ proposed water limits and has opposed broad restrictions on PFAS, including F-gases, as a threat to national security. The lobbying group’s legal arm, the NC Chamber Legal Institute, also supported DuPont and Chemours’ effort to have the state suit that led to the $590 million settlement thrown out, claiming in legal filings that “overlapping regulatory authority harms North Carolina businesses by creating compliance uncertainty and duplicative proceedings.”

A page on the Chamber’s website, titled “Beyond the Noise on PFAS,” reads: “When political leaders gain favorable headlines by suggesting a total ban on PFAS, they neglect to mention that life would change dramatically for every North Carolinian.”

“North Carolina is a very friendly state for big polluters,” Sargent told me, “and the Chamber of Commerce wants to keep it that way.” The Chamber did not respond to a request for comment.

Chemours formed a corporate political action committee in 2018, a year after the PFAS contamination in Wilmington became public. Since then, according to the Federal Election Commission, the PAC has contributed 10 times to campaigns of Republican state legislature members, as well as the National Republican Senatorial Committee.

Chemours’ PAC has also spent nearly $100,000 this election cycle donating to candidates across the country — including in North Carolina. Along with contributing $4,000 in total to the campaigns of Republican state Senate candidates Danny Britt, Warren Daniel, and Brent Jackson, it’s spent $5,000 to boost the campaign of Michael Whatley, the GOP nominee in the state’s closely watched U.S. Senate race. Whatley has gotten flak for the donation, especially since he’s never commented on Chemours’ PFAS liabilities.

Whatley did not respond to a request for comment. A campaign spokesperson for his Democratic opponent, former North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper, told me, “Michael Whatley is taking thousands of dollars from the very company Roy Cooper sued for polluting our water with forever chemicals, and when Whatley was asked about Chemours and PFAS and taking its donations, he refused to denounce them. We must hold companies like Chemours accountable, and Whatley cannot be trusted to do that.”

Jacobus, the farmer and owner of Honeybird Organic Farm, believes lawmakers’ and business groups’ defense of Chemours is misguided. “Whatever this chemical company Chemours is generating, it’s nowhere close to the revenue that agriculture as a whole brings in for the state of North Carolina, which is our number one industry,” Jacobus told me.

“If they’re willing to destroy agriculture just for this one manufacturing plant, it’s really suspicious, to be honest with you,” he said. “It’s hurting everybody.”

Jacobus didn’t know just how far that damage extended.

“Substances of Very High Concern”

Across the Atlantic, a Dutch organic farmer named Ted van der Vlies has lived out a story much like Jacobus’. He too grew fruits and vegetables — lettuce, carrots, potatoes, rhubarb, cherries — and raised free-range chickens. He’d been tending his garden, less than a mile from a Chemours plant in Dordrecht, an industrial city near Rotterdam, for over 40 years.

Then, in 2016, just a year before North Carolinians discovered PFAS in their water, a similar scandal broke in the Netherlands: Forever chemicals had long been leaching from the Dordrecht plant into the surrounding communities’ air and water. Van der Vlies tested his blood and found that his level of PFAS was more than a dozen times higher than the Dutch safety standard. He believes the exposure contributed to illnesses he’s developed: As of 2023, he had contracted both chronic leukemia and skin cancer.

The timeline in the Netherlands in many ways mirrors the timeline in my home state: The Dordrecht production facility — then operated by Chemours’ former parent company, DuPont — had been releasing PFAS into the environment for decades despite knowing about the chemical’s dangers since the 1960s. In 1998, DuPont informed the Province of South Holland that a legacy PFAS chemical released by the facility, PFOA, was “highly toxic,” but the provincial government continued to permit operations.

But Van der Vlies and Jacobus aren’t connected simply by their proximity to Chemours plants. Both farmers’ land, crops, and bodies may have been infiltrated by chemicals generated from the very same production process.

For years, the Chemours plant in Dordrecht shipped the PFAS waste generated by its manufacturing process across the ocean to the United States. The company’s plant in North Carolina had been importing PFAS-laden wastewater from the Netherlands since at least 2014. State officials only discovered this arrangement years later, when an employee mentioned it offhand during an unrelated plant inspection. The EPA halted the imports in December 2018, claiming they required “additional information” from Chemours.

But the shipments resumed by 2021 — and were set to ramp up significantly in September 2023, when the EPA approved a permit for Chemours to ship over 4 million pounds of wastewater from Dordrecht to North Carolina. That same month, the Rotterdam District Court in the Netherlands ruled that emissions at Chemours’ Dordrecht plant had been unlawful, and Dutch lawyers filed a mass criminal complaint against the company for “deliberately introducing dangerous substances into the environment.” Under Dutch law, several current and former Chemours executives could face prison sentences of 12 to 15 years if convicted.

In other words, just as the Dutch started to push back against the PFAS Chemours pumped into their environment, the company began exporting more of its PFAS waste to the North Carolina plant that was already polluting the Cape Fear’s water.

North Carolina’s state regulators weren’t informed of the EPA’s decision allowing the company to do so. In a subsequent letter questioning Chemours, the state claimed it was “provided scarce information” on the makeup of the waste from the Netherlands, how it was getting to North Carolina, what would happen to the waste when it arrived, and why it needed to be in our state in the first place. Previously, imported PFAS waste was processed at the North Carolina facility by removing PFAS “salts” from a “sludgy liquid.” It wasn’t clear how much waste would be processed, how the processing would work, or how any of the reclaimed materials would be used.

In response to questions about this process, a Chemours representative said that material imported from Dordrecht in the past was recycled for reuse and any waste material containing residual PFAS would have been incinerated.

With tons of contaminated waste marked for North Carolina shores — to the alarm of activists, residents, and state environmental authorities — the EPA said it had no legal authority to block the wastewater imports. That’s because while the chemicals were labeled as “substances of very high concern” in the Netherlands, they’re not regulated as such in the U.S. Chemours could cart its PFAS wastewater from one jurisdiction to another until regulations caught up with them.

After intense public outcry, including from North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper, the EPA reversed Chemours’ permit in November 2023.

That didn’t stop the wastewater from being shipped elsewhere.

“It Is As If Thieves Came Into My Home From the Tap”

The Fayetteville Works plant in North Carolina wasn’t the only recipient of the Dordrecht facility’s waste. For years, the Dutch plant also shipped PFAS waste to Veneto, Italy to be recycled at a factory operated by the chemical company Miteni S.p.A. There, unsafe concentrations of forever chemicals were carried by a single sewer pipeline into the Fratta-Gorzone River, seeping into groundwater and causing serious environmental contamination — among the worst in the country’s history. A 2024 study found that almost 4,000 excess deaths had been recorded in the local population, many attributable to increased mortality from diseases linked to PFAS exposure, such as kidney and testicular cancer.

Another study conducted in the region, from 2018, found that young men who had been exposed to PFAS had shorter penises, lower sperm counts, and lower sperm motility. One mother in the region told researchers, “I felt that my body, my privacy, my family had been stolen; it is as if thieves came into my home from the tap.”

“This connection [to the plant in Dordrecht] makes the contamination even more complex,” said Marialuisa Menegatto, a researcher and professor of social psychology at the University of Padova in Italy, “as it involves a transnational network of production, recycling, and responsibility.”

The Miteni plant was shuttered in 2018 after declaring bankruptcy, due in part to rising cleanup costs for its groundwater pollution. Prosecutors criminally charged 15 former executives over the contamination, and convicted 11 — the first criminal prosecution of corporate managers for PFAS pollution. The executives were sentenced to a combined 141 years, with appeals pending.

But the success advocates saw with the shuttering of the Miteni plant was, in a sense, temporary. In 2019, Viva Lifesciences, an Indian chemical company and subsidiary of Laxmi Organic Industries, bought the Miteni plant’s equipment and patents, reassembling its machinery and resuming PFAS production more than 4,000 miles away, in Lote, India.

India has not enacted any enforceable national limits on PFAS concentrations in drinking water or the environment. In 2024, the Laxmi production facility in India started sending quality samples to Miteni’s former clients — including Chemours — in an effort to recapture Miteni’s market share.

“Everybody Fend for Yourself”

When Chemours was severely restricted in its ability to discharge forever chemicals into the Cape Fear, it had to find another place to put them. Luckily for the company, lax federal regulations in the U.S. mean it can shuttle PFAS waste to other states where locals haven’t yet become aware of its environmental and health impacts.

Texas, in particular, has embraced a new, central role in PFAS waste management. From 2017 through 2025, for instance, VLS Texas Molecular, a hazardous waste treatment and storage facility in Deer Park, Texas, handled over 160 million gallons of PFAS-containing waste. The plant uses deep-well injection, a disposal method in which PFAS wastewater is shot down into a hole 5,000 to 10,000 feet deep, under layers of bedrock.

Although Texas Molecular doesn’t disclose where its waste comes from, a 2020 Click2Houston investigation found that, since 2017, waste had been transported to the facility daily by trucker convoys — and some of that has come from Chemours’ North Carolina plant to Deer Park.

Transporting PFAS waste via trucks isn’t always secure. In 2018, a truck leaving the Chemours plant leaked PFAS-polluted rainwater onto a residential road in Bladen County, North Carolina. Residents collected the water for testing and found that its PFAS concentration exceeded the state drinking water guidelines by more than 17,000 times.

Jean Zhuang, a Senior Attorney at the Southern Environmental Law Center, told me that the shipment of PFAS waste from North Carolina to Texas was “a sad consequence of how [Chemours] decided to follow the consent order,” referring to the 2019 settlement agreement that required the company to stop discharging PFAS wastewater into the Cape Fear River.

Even once the waste is injected into Texas’ deep wells, it doesn’t necessarily remain there. A 2021 letter to the EPA, cosigned by 30 environmental organizations, claims that deep-well injection doesn’t have the capabilities to contain the “extraordinary mobility of PFAS compounds,” which require “unprecedented measures.” A ProPublica review of more than 220,000 deep-well inspections found that structural failures inside injection wells were routine.

According to its social media accounts, VLS Environmental Solutions, which now owns Texas Molecular, sponsors events like “Tee Off Against Cancer.” Never mind that Deer Park’s own drinking water tests higher than federal guidelines for PFAS.

When asked whether its operations have contributed to elevated local PFAS levels, a VLS representative responded that “Texas Molecular has operated Class I hazardous waste injection wells at its Deer Park, Texas, facility since 1981, and that, to date, Texas Molecular has not identified any release from its operations.”

This cycle of reshuffling PFAS production and waste appears poised to continue as long as another country or state is willing to take on the risk of contamination. And the U.S. government remains willing. A group of environmental and human rights experts from the U.N. Human Rights Office wrote in letters to DuPont and Chemours that the two companies “appear to have impermissibly captured [the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency] and delayed its efforts to properly regulate PFAS chemicals.” In their responses, both companies relied upon DuPont’s many corporate restructurings, shifting blame either to their parent company, E.I. du Pont de Nemours and Company, or one of its various spinoffs. (Nearly two dozen states just filed a motion to stop yet another DuPont restructuring, arguing that the corporation was trying to avoid paying billions in PFAS damages.)

Theodore J. Leopold, co-lead counsel in a class-action lawsuit alleging that Chemours discharged PFAS into the Cape Fear River and misrepresented its actions to regulators, told me he doesn’t think there will be much regulation over the next few years.

The reality, he predicted, will be “everybody fend for yourself.”

When Water Becomes a Threat

In Wilmington, Jacobus experienced this every-man-for-himself approach firsthand when he set about ridding his farm of forever chemicals. Neither Chemours nor state regulators provided any guidance on how to find a filter that would effectively eliminate PFAS from his water. The options from big-box stores like Lowe’s didn’t work.

“We went through two different rounds of filters from Lowe’s, one even claiming to filter [legacy PFAS chemicals], and then we installed it and got the water tested, and it didn’t move the needle,” he said.

The filter Jacobus finally found to work for his well cost $6,000. It costs another $1,000 to replace it every five years. Although the state helped offset the filter’s original cost, Jacobus said upkeep comes at a heavy price for a small farm like his.

Roughly a year after I first visited their farm, Ty and his wife Mallory decided to sell their greenhouse, pivot away from produce, and focus on fruit and nut trees, partly because of the challenges of filtering and irrigating with their contaminated well water. Ty told me that tree roots go deep, so they don’t need to irrigate them. Vegetable produce requires irrigation, and irrigation requires filtration — clean water.

“We don’t know what to do with our farm long term,” he said. “Little stuff like [the filter] really chips into the cost of this place.”

Sargent, who left Cape Fear River Watch in 2025 to work at Audubon North Carolina, told me the easiest way to stop PFAS contamination is by phasing out their production and developing safer alternatives before communities find themselves stuck playing whack-a-mole with a chemical that can’t really disappear.

Instead, according to Cape Fear River Watch, Chemours has continued polluting North Carolina’s water. Weeks after the state’s celebrated settlement, the Southern Environmental Law Center sent a notice to Chemours alleging that the Fayetteville plant’s discharge has exceeded the PFAS discharge limits outlined in the 2019 consent order.

According to the notice, Chemours’ own sample of Willis Creek, a tributary of the Cape Fear River, found a PFAS concentration of 2,700 ppt, the notice claims — one of many illegally high water and air samples. It’s a reminder that nothing can “solve” contamination as long as it’s still occurring.

Nevertheless, Chemours wants to ramp up its PFAS manufacturing: The company announced in 2022 that it plans to expand its North Carolina plant. It is still waiting on permit approvals to do so.

Lieselot Bisschop, a professor of criminology at the Erasmus School of Law in Rotterdam, explained to me that PFAS contamination is a “state-corporate crime,” a combination of corporations hiding risks they know exist and states failing to provide any oversight.

“We’re dealing with the same company here, and they use the same playbook,” she said. “It’s been striking to see that playbook in every country.” Real justice, she said, would be based on something other than water and air quality measurements; it would have to measure quality of life.

Menegatto, the social psychology professor in Italy, echoed this sentiment.

“When water becomes a threat, the foundations of daily life change,” she said. “People begin to question things they previously took for granted: the safety of the tap, the intentions of public authorities, the credibility of health systems.”

Without regulations strong enough to replace the current patchwork of international, state, and local responses to forever chemical contamination, there is little reason to expect that Chemours’ pattern of shuffling PFAS from place to place will change. As long as the law allows it, there will always be another jurisdiction to run to, another place willing to bargain away the health of its citizens for small gains: a nonstick pan, a slicker pizza box, dental floss that slides between your teeth.

This story was published in collaboration with the Investigative Reporting Lab at Yale.