By Rose Hoban and Will Atwater
Key takeaways:
- The U.S. Department of Justice seeks hundreds of millions from Chemours in a federal complaint over years of PFAS contamination in three states, including North Carolina.
- Despite housing the only GenX-producing facility in the U.S., North Carolina may receive little to nothing from the proposed settlement.
- Since 2017, North Carolina has pursued enforcement actions against Chemours. It continues to seek accountability.
In a surprise move on Wednesday, the U.S. Department of Justice announced a proposed settlement with chemical manufacturer Chemours over the company’s contamination of major waterways in three states, including North Carolina’s Cape Fear River.
The proposed settlement agreement, totaling about $450 million, seeks to remediate what the DOJ called “years of historic and ongoing pollution of per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS), known as PFAS, from the Defendants’ chemical facilities.”
“Through this commitment, Chemours will better control PFAS at its plants, allowing the company to continue its manufacturing operations while protecting communities,” read a release from DOJ. “This agreement ensures that the company will manufacture these critical materials in a responsible manner.”
Almost immediately, though, in a response sent to the media, North Carolina Gov. Josh Stein and Attorney General Jeff Jackson denounced what they called a “backroom deal” that leaves “virtually nothing for North Carolina.”
Jackson said that he only learned of the pending agreement on Tuesday, June 23.
“This [U.S. Environmental Protection Agency], which has already weakened protections against chemicals like GenX, is now allowing polluters to pick and choose how and where they’ll fix their contamination — leaving North Carolina with no guarantees,” Stein said in the release.
The settlement was announced from the Southern District of West Virginia, where Chemours operates and “transferred PFAS materials between and among the West Virginia facility and the facilities in New Jersey and North Carolina.”
It’s the latest twist in a long-running saga of industrial pollution of waterways in North Carolina — and across the country — and the efforts to hold manufacturers responsible. These efforts have played out over the course of multiple presidential and gubernatorial administrations with varying degrees of force.
Drop in the bucket
Announcement of the agreement came on the same day that Stein, along with Department of Environmental Quality Secretary Reid Wilson, had been visiting homes in the Wilmington area where residents have been pushing for action around PFAS remediation for almost a decade.
“Forever chemicals like PFAS cause serious health problems, and one out of three North Carolinians currently drink water with PFAS levels that exceed upcoming federal health standards,” Wilson said in a statement.
The money flowing to North Carolina as a result of this settlement would amount to a drop in the bucket for water utilities like the Cape Fear Public Utility Authority, which provides drinking water for hundreds of thousands of residents in the Wilmington area. Since 2017, the water utility has spent more than $92 million to remove PFAS from drinking water for ratepayers, including the installation of a granular activated carbon system, according to information provided by the utility.
Stein said his administration has pushed for more than $1.6 billion in water infrastructure projects to improve drinking water and wastewater treatment, and to mitigate PFAS contamination. That’s after the Cooper administration and the state legislature funnelled more than $1.5 billion of American Rescue Plan Act dollars to water and sewer projects across the state.
In Stein and Jackson’s joint release, they criticized the amount of money that will come to North Carolina as a result of Wednesday’s settlement.
In their statement, they noted that, “Chemours will get to propose the projects it will fund, without any input from North Carolina or its residents. If any of the states require Chemours to do any additional PFAS cleanup or mitigation, the money that Chemours spends can get credited against this $90 million pool. Chemours doesn’t have to make any commitments to spending any of this money in North Carolina.”
The $90 million sum, if divided by three states over a 15-year period, would amount to roughly $2 million annually for each state.
The dollars are minuscule compared with the amount already spent on studying and mitigating PFAS contamination statewide.
N.C. State epidemiologist Jane Hoppin, principal investigator of the GenX Exposure Study, told NC Health News that since 2017, she has raised about $11.5 million in funding to support her research project, which includes collecting blood and other biological samples from 1,200 people and examining it. Hoppin said she will continue to rely on research money to fund the project for years to come.
Though Kemp Burdette, executive director of the Wilmington-based environmental advocacy group Cape Fear River Watch, couldn’t put a number on how much money the organization has spent collecting water samples, paying for lab tests and helping to enforce the 2019 consent order established between Chemours, Cape Fear River Watch and the North Carolina Department of Environmental Quality, he told NC Health News it’s a lot — and the work continues.
Kemp said he and his staff continue to inform the public on PFAS-related environmental issues and contribute to proposed policy and PFAS litigation.
The North Carolina Collaboratory, a General Assembly initiative that coordinates research across the UNC System to support state and local government decision-making, has received approximately $54million from the North Carolina General Assembly since 2018 to support PFAS research, Steve Wall, the senior research advisor, shared in an email to NC Health News.
“$450 million dollars sounds like a lot, but when you’re trying to divide up $450 million between three states over 15 years, it’s a drop in the bucket for the amount of money needed to remove PFAS,” said Beth Kline-Markesino, founder of Stop GenX in our Water, a former nonprofit advocacy group.
“This doesn’t include the thousands of well owners in our state with detectable PFAS limits from Chemours,” she continued. “The $450 million dollars is a start to help struggling utilities install filters, what our country needs is enforceable PFAS limits in drinking water.
Decades of pollution
Since the first detections of PFAS pollution in the Ohio River Valley in the early 2000s, research has been underway to track the health effects of the chemicals, known for their persistence in the environment.
Since then researchers have found possible links between PFAS and several health effects, such as low birth rates, certain forms of cancer, weakened immune systems, thyroid disease, and liver and kidney damage.
The Cape Fear River pollution was revealed in a 2017 Wilmington Star-News exposé revealing that the chemical GenX and other, older, forms of PFAS had been found in riverwater downstream from Chemours’ Fayetteville Works plant on the Bladen County border. At first, local utilities and the state, which had been alerted to the problem by NC State University water quality scientist Detlef Knappe, did not publicize the findings.
The facility, which produces industrial gas, plastics and resin chemicals, had been improperly storing chemicals on its property. The settlement documents also note that the company had allowed PFAS-tainted effluent to flow into the Cape Fear River.
“From 2004 to 2022, Old Dupont and Chemours surface water sampling downstream of Fayetteville Works detected PFOA (Perfluorooctanoic acid) and PFOS (Perfluorooctane Sulfonic Acid) discharges to the Cape Fear River, with PFOA concentrations of 42,000 – 49,000 [parts per trillion] and PFOS concentrations of 40,000 – 44,000 [parts per trillion] in 2021,” the settlement reads.
Subsequent studies of the surrounding area found contamination of soil and drinking water wells from PFAS, ostensibly emitted out of the chemical facility’s smokestacks and carried by the winds to surrounding areas.
Monitoring had also detected other stormwater discharges from 2019 to 2021 that totaled about 1.8 million parts per trillion for PFOA. In 2020, a report from the NCDEQ found “staggering” amounts of PFAS pollution in discharges into the Deep River, a tributary of the Cape Fear, that measured 1,000 parts per trillion of PFOS, far less than the concentrations released by Chemours.
In 2019, the state reached a consent agreement with Chemours that fined the company $12 million and required it to speed up actions to remove contaminants from the air, groundwater and the river water.
After the initial contamination event in Ohio and West Virginia, Chemours’ precursor company, DuPont, paid out hundreds of millions of dollars to study the effects of the chemicals, remediate the pollution and compensate victims.
The proposed consent decree, lodged in the Southern District of West Virginia is subject to a 30-day comment period and final court approval. Information on submitting comment and access to the settlement agreement is available on the Justice Department’s Proposed Consent Decree webpage,” according to information provided by the EPA.
Multiple claims against Chemours:
Wednesday’s agreement details years of issues with how Chemours handled its hazardous waste at plants in all three states. According to the findings, in North Carolina, Chemours:
- Discharged tainted water without the correct federal permits
- Failed to include relevant information about chemicals created by its processes as it started to release GenX in 2008, including failure to include all information “to the extent known or reasonably ascertainable, about worker exposure to GenX and environmental releases.”
- Failed to document compliance with restrictions around how much GenX was being released into the environment.
- Unlawful manufacture and processing of hexafluoropropylene oxide at Fayetteville Works as part of the PFAS production process.
- Unlawful manufacture and processing of carbooxohalide, a PFAS precursor chemical, at Fayetteville Works.
- Unauthorized acceptance of GenX waste shipped from Chemours facilities in the Netherlands for long term storage in North Carolina.
In addition, the complaint notes that Chemours storage of hazardous waste in unauthorized containers were improperly labeled.
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