The Global Shell Game Hiding Forever Chemicals

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

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.

The author as a child. (Credit: Maia Siegel)

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?

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