Poisoned Forever

Per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, called PFAS (pronounced "pfazz"), are a class of more than 12,000 synthetic chemicals first developed in the 1940s. The carbon-fluorine bond that holds them together is one of the strongest in organic chemistry — effectively indestructible under normal conditions. Water cannot dissolve them. Heat cannot break them down. They accumulate in soil, groundwater, rainwater, marine life, and in human bodies. Scientists began calling them "forever chemicals" because they do not go away.

PFAS were used in non-stick cookware (Teflon), food packaging, waterproof clothing, firefighting foam known as Aqueous Film-Forming Foam (AFFF), stain-resistant carpeting, dental floss coatings, and hundreds of other consumer and industrial applications. The companies that manufactured them — primarily 3M and DuPont — made them ubiquitous across American consumer life over the second half of the twentieth century. They also knew, for decades, that they were toxic.

3M began manufacturing PFAS in the late 1940s and helped the United States Navy develop AFFF firefighting foam in the 1960s. By the 1970s, the company had conducted more than a thousand internal studies on PFAS and their effects on animals and humans. What those studies found was alarming. They found it in blood. Type Investigations.

In 1975, an internal 3M memo documented that independent scientists had detected PFAS chemicals in human blood samples in Texas and New York, and that Scotchgard — 3M's flagship stain-repellent product — was the likely source of the contamination. The company's response, according to documents later produced in litigation: 3M attorneys urged company scientists "not to release the true identity of the source." The EPA was not informed. The public was not informed. The product remained on the market. Minnesota Reformer.

The internal studies continued. They showed that the chemicals caused liver damage, suppressed immune function, interfered with thyroid hormone levels, and were linked to cancer. 3M did not share this research with the Environmental Protection Agency. In 2006, after the company was forced to turn over hundreds of documents it had previously withheld, the EPA fined 3M more than $1.5 million for 244 violations of the Toxic Substances Control Act. That is the penalty for hiding research on chemicals that contaminated the blood of hundreds of millions of Americans: one and a half million dollars. ProPublica.

3M stopped manufacturing PFOS — one of the primary PFAS compounds — in 2000, after the EPA began asking serious questions. By then, the chemicals had been in production and in consumer products for more than 50 years. No executive at 3M was charged with a crime.

DuPont began using a PFAS compound called perfluorooctanoic acid, known as PFOA or C8, in the production of Teflon in 1951. Within three years, the company was documenting health effects. By 1954, DuPont had medical records showing C8 caused liver damage in workers. The studies continued for decades in the company's own research divisions. The findings were never shared with regulators. The Intercept.

Internal emails from Bernard Reilly, DuPont's in-house counsel, describe the company's operations in terms that did not survive sunlight. In one email, Reilly wrote that C8 was "the material 3M sells us that we poop to the river and into drinking water." He acknowledged that "we have people drinking our famous surfactant" and noted that DuPont's analytical testing recovered only 25 percent of actual C8 concentrations — meaning the company's own measurements systematically understated the contamination.

In 1991, DuPont set an internal safety guideline for C8 in drinking water at 1 part per billion. That same year, the company's own monitoring showed C8 levels in a creek from which nearby cattle drank at 100 parts per billion — 100 times the company's own safety limit. DuPont had been monitoring the creek since 1984. The company did not tell the people who lived there, or the farmers who drank from that watershed, or the approximately 70,000 residents of the Mid-Ohio Valley whose drinking water was contaminated. The Intercept.

In 2004, DuPont's chief executive Charles Holliday testified before Congress that C8 was "safe." By then, DuPont possessed two decades of internal studies contradicting that claim. A lawyer named Robert Bilott had filed a class action lawsuit on behalf of 80,000 contaminated residents in 2001. Bilott had obtained the documents. In 2004, DuPont settled that class action for $343 million — the same year its CEO told Congress the chemical was safe. Right Livelihood.

The C8 Science Panel, an independent body established as part of the Bilott settlement, studied 69,000 exposed residents for seven years. It linked PFOA exposure to six diseases: testicular cancer (five times the expected rate near the plant), kidney cancer (twice the expected rate), high cholesterol, ulcerative colitis, thyroid disease, and pregnancy-induced hypertension. Charles Holliday was not charged with perjury. Bernard Reilly was not charged with anything.

PFAS contamination is not a localized incident. It is a planetary-scale event. Scientists have found PFAS in the water of the Great Lakes, in the drinking water of 200 million Americans, in the tissue of fish in remote Arctic ecosystems, in rainwater collected above the Tibetan Plateau, and in the blood of nearly every person tested in the United States. The Environmental Protection Agency found PFAS in every water sample it tested in a 2023 national survey.

The Pentagon identified PFAS contamination at more than 2,800 military installations across the United States, the result of decades of AFFF use in training exercises and fire suppression. Many of these contamination sites border the communities where military families and base workers live. The Department of Defense — the government's largest single consumer of AFFF — studied the contamination and declined to share the findings with affected communities for years. ProPublica.

As of May 2026, there are more than 15,000 active lawsuits in the Aqueous Film-Forming Foam Multi-District Litigation — the consolidated federal case brought by municipalities, water utilities, states, and individuals whose water systems were contaminated by firefighting foam. The lawsuits document contamination in every state in the country. Consumer Notice.

The civil reckoning for PFAS contamination has been enormous by the standards of environmental litigation. 3M settled with the state of Minnesota in 2018 for $850 million — at the time, the largest environmental settlement in Minnesota's history. In June 2023, 3M agreed to pay up to $12.5 billion to settle claims from public water systems nationwide — a final court approval arrived in April 2024. New Jersey extracted an additional $450 million in 2025. Consumer Notice.

DuPont, Chemours (a spinoff carrying DuPont's PFAS liabilities), and Corteva collectively settled for $1.18 billion with drinking water providers in June 2023 — the same month as 3M's major settlement. DuPont had previously settled the Bilott class action for $343 million in 2004 and the personal injury cases for $670 million in 2017. Other PFAS manufacturers — Tyco Fire Products, BASF — have settled for hundreds of millions more.

The total civil liability across 3M, DuPont, and other manufacturers now exceeds $15 billion. Not one executive has been indicted. Not one scientist who suppressed the research has been charged. Not one attorney who advised the company to conceal the contamination source from the EPA has faced criminal accountability. The companies settled. Their shareholders absorbed the cost. The executives who made the decisions retired with their compensation intact.

Here is what the documents establish: DuPont documented health effects of PFOA in 1954 and continued manufacturing Teflon with it until 2013. 3M found its chemicals in human blood in 1975, told its lawyers, and did not tell the EPA. DuPont's in-house counsel used the phrase "poop to the river and into drinking water" in an internal email — and his company continued the practice. DuPont's CEO testified before Congress that the chemical was safe while the company held decades of contrary research.

The EPA fined 3M $1.5 million in 2006 — roughly 0.002 percent of the eventual $12.5 billion settlement — for hiding documents. Robert Bilott, the attorney who spent twenty years of his career forcing DuPont to produce those documents and compensate the people it poisoned, won the Right Livelihood Award in 2017. The executives he sued are not in prison. The science panels and bipartisan investigations and multi-district litigations have documented the contamination in exhaustive detail. Right Livelihood.

PFAS are in American drinking water, in Arctic ice, in the blood of newborns, in the fish that people catch and eat. They will remain there for generations — that is what "forever chemicals" means. The companies that manufactured them, the lawyers who advised them to suppress the evidence, and the executives who made the decisions to keep selling them through the decades of known contamination: none have been charged with a crime.