Lawsuits accusing major chemical companies of polluting U.S. drinking water with toxic PFAS chemicals led to over $11 billion in settlements in 2023, with experts predicting that new federal regulations and a growing awareness of the breadth of PFAS contamination in the U.S. will spur more litigation and settlements in the year ahead.
Forever chemicals have shown up in drinking water across the country. Now they are appearing in homeowners’ soaring utility bills.
Nov 13 (Reuters) – U.S. cities, towns and water districts have challenged proposed class action settlements worth more than $11 billion with 3M (MMM.N), DuPont de Nemours (DD.N) and others, arguing the deals are too generous to the chemical companies accused of contaminating U.S. water with toxic “forever chemicals.”
Gov. Gavin Newsom last week passed on a chance to limit the use of the so-called “forever chemicals” in legions of plastic products when he vetoed a bill that would have banned them in synthetic lawns.
His veto of an environmental bill that overwhelmingly passed the Legislature underscores California’s convoluted guidance on the plastic turf that some homeowners, schools and businesses use in place of grass in a state accustomed to drought.
Twenty-two attorneys general urged a federal court Wednesday to reject a proposed $10.3 billion settlement over contamination of U.S. public drinking water systems with potentially dangerous chemicals, saying it lets manufacturer 3M Co. off too easily.
The deal announced in June doesn’t give individual water suppliers enough time to determine how much money they would get and whether it would cover their costs of removing the compounds known collectively as PFAS, said the officials with 19 states, Washington, D.C., and two territories. In some cases the agreement could shift liability from the company to providers, they said.
“While I appreciate the effort that went into it, the proposed settlement in its current form does not adequately account for the pernicious damage that 3M has done in so many of our communities,” said California Attorney General Rob Bonta, leader of the multistate coalition.
EPA’s historic move to regulate “forever chemicals” in drinking water has set the stage for a multi-pronged courtroom slugfest among the agency, water utilities that must comply with the rule and multinational conglomerates that have flooded the environment with the toxicants linked to a long list of health problems, including cancer.
The Environmental Protection Agency on Tuesday proposed the first federal limits on harmful “forever chemicals” in drinking water, a long-awaited protection the agency said will save thousands of lives and prevent serious illnesses, including cancer.
The plan would limit toxic PFAS chemicals to the lowest level that tests can detect. PFAS, or per- and polyfluorinated substances, are a group of compounds that are widespread, dangerous and expensive to remove from water. They don’t degrade in the environment and are linked to a broad range of health issues, including low birthweight and kidney cancer.
What happens after you flush your toilet? For 2.6 million county residents, the answer to that question can be found at a 110-acre plant in Fountain Valley operated by the Orange County Sanitation District.
The industrial site, along with a similar setup in Huntington Beach, is where approximately 185 million gallons of sewage is treated in a complex process that essentially digests biologic material into its basic components.
An insidious category of carcinogenic pollutants known as “forever chemicals” may not be so permanent after all. University of California, Riverside, chemical engineering and environmental scientists recently published new methods to chemically break up these harmful substances found in drinking water into smaller compounds that are essentially harmless.
The state of California on Thursday sued the manufacturers of a class of chemicals known as “forever chemicals” that are found in a variety of consumer items including food packaging and cookware and are linked to cancer and other illnesses. The chemicals at the heart of the lawsuit are perfluoroalkyl and polyfluoroalkyl substances, commonly referred to as PFAS. They are resistant to environmental degradation, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Environmental Protection Agency, and hundreds of scientific studies.
