TITLE: Chemours and DuPont Knew About Risks But Kept Making Toxic PFAS Chemicals, UN Human Rights Advisors Conclude
https://insideclimatenews.org/news/26022024/un-chemours-pfas-north-carolina/
EXCERPTS: In advance of a United Nations meeting this week where pollution is on the agenda, a U.N. human rights team has called out a PFAS manufacturing plant in North Carolina as a poster child for irresponsible behavior.
Nine independent U.N. human rights advisors put blame for widespread contamination in the area from a Chemours plant near Fayetteville, a Dupont spinoff, and said “even as DuPont and Chemours had information about the toxic impacts of PFAS on human health and drinking water, the companies continued to produce and discharge PFAS.”
The experts also rebuked state and federal regulators, alleging lax enforcement and arguing that regulatory bodies, including the Environmental Protection Agency, had been “captured” by the plant’s current and past owners, a term implying the regulators were inappropriately doing the companies’ bidding.
At issue are the PFAS chemicals made at the Fayetteville plant, or per-and polyfluoroalkyl substances. They are known as “forever chemicals” because they last a very long time in the environment. Various PFAS are used to make certain kinds of plastics, and are found in a wide array of consumer products, such as shampoo, dental floss, nail polish, eye makeup, fast food containers and stain-resistant coatings on fabrics.
Created in the 1940s, PFAS are now found in the blood of humans and animals all over the world.
“DuPont and Chemours have produced, marketed and profited from PFAS for decades, contributing to a global toxic contamination problem,” the U.N. panel said in a public statement released Wednesday. “DuPont and Chemours appear to have impermissibly captured the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and delayed (their) efforts to properly regulate PFAS chemicals.”
For their part, the companies pushed back hard.
Chemours said in a written statement that products it makes in North Carolina are contributing to “vital technologies for green hydrogen, electric vehicles and semiconductor manufacturing. We are committed to responsibly manufacturing and producing products in a manner consistent with international principles, including the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights,” a set of standards adopted in 2011 that seek to prevent and address human rights abuses committed in business operations.
In its response, DuPont de Nemours, Inc., shared a letter with Inside Climate News that it wrote late last year to the U.N. Human Rights Commission in response to the inquiry. That letter detailed a complicated history of Dupont corporate reorganizations, and denied responsibility for the Fayetteville plant.
“To implicate DuPont de Nemours in these issues disregards these varied corporate histories, the movement of product lines and personnel that now exist with entirely different companies,” the company wrote.
Emily Donovan, the co-founder of Clean Cape Fear, the North Carolina citizens group that last year petitioned for the human rights investigation, welcomed the U.N. team’s findings and said she hoped the matter would be discussed at the Nairobi meeting.
“It feels like validation,” Donovan said in an interview. “For a while, we felt like we were going to be ignored. Having the United Nations elevate PFAS, using North Carolina’s story as an example, amplifies a global concern that we really need to talk about.”
In its request for help, Clean Cape Fear described what it called “an environmental human rights crisis in North Carolina involving pervasive human exposure to toxic chemicals. There, in the lower reaches of the Cape Fear River watershed, more than 500,000 residents have been chronically exposed to dangerous quantities of PFAS” from the Fayetteville plant.
The community action group demanded, among other remedies, company accountability for water treatment and clean-up costs for all impacted residents, and said it was worried about Chemours’ plans to expand PFAS production at its Fayetteville Works plant, and to ship PFAS waste from the Netherlands to the Chemours plant.
This week, the U.N. advisors expressed “grave concern” about Chemours’ pending air permit before North Carolina regulators for the PFAS production expansion, and described the movement of PFAS waste from the Netherlands to North Carolina an “apparent breach of international law.”
The Stockholm Convention on Persistent Organic Pollutants, a 2001 treaty to protect human health and the environment from chemicals that remain intact in the environment for long periods, has taken action to control certain types of PFAS. But there is no comprehensive action yet at the global level addressing the threat of this class of hazardous chemicals, said Marcos Orellana, one of the U.N. advisors whose title is special rapporteur on toxics and human, in a written statement.
The U.S. signed the Stockholm Convention in 2001 but never ratified it.
TITLE: US military says it is immune to dozens of PFAS lawsuits
https://www.reuters.com/legal/government/us-military-says-it-is-immune-dozens-pfas-lawsuits-2024-02-27/
EXCERPTS: The United States government has asked a federal judge to dismiss more than two dozen lawsuits filed against it for allegedly contaminating water and soil at hundreds of sites near military bases and facilities across the country with toxic “forever chemicals.”
The U.S. told a federal judge in Charleston, South Carolina, late Monday that it is immune to the lawsuits filed by state and local governments, businesses and property owners who say the U.S. military is liable for property and environmental damage caused by its use of firefighting foams containing per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, or PFAS.
PFAS are used in hundreds of consumer and commercial products including the firefighting foams, non-stick pans, stain-resistant clothing and cosmetics, and have been linked to cancer and hormonal dysfunction. The military has used PFAS-containing firefighting foams since the 1970s for things like firefighting training.
The chemicals are often referred to as forever chemicals because they do not easily break down in nature or in the human body.
The 27 lawsuits were filed in the past six years against the U.S. government by states including New Mexico, New York and Washington, cities, private property owners and local businesses near military facilities where firefighting foams were used.
The plaintiffs say they are seeking potentially hundreds of billions of dollars in damages to pay for groundwater and soil remediation near military sites across the country. Some businesses among the plaintiffs, including a dairy that claims PFAS-contaminated water caused its cattle to die and a property owner whose blueberry cropland was allegedly damaged by the chemicals, are also seeking punitive damages.
The government said it was immune to the lawsuits under a provision of the Federal Tort Claims Act that protects it from tort liability for the discretionary acts of government employees. That law allows plaintiffs to sue the U.S. government for damages only if the government violates specific, mandatory policies.
In its motions to dismiss, the government said the plaintiffs have not identified specific PFAS handling regulations or restrictions that were violated, and that military policy actually encouraged the use of the firefighting foams that contained PFAS for decades since it is very effective at extinguishing jet fuel fires.
TITLE: EPA Seeks to Regulate Nine PFAS as Hazardous Constituents
https://www.natlawreview.com/article/epa-seeks-regulate-nine-pfas-hazardous-constituents
EXCERPT: The first proposal seeks to add nine PFAS, their salts, and their structural isomers to the U.S. EPA’s list of hazardous constituents in 40 C.F.R. Part 261 Appendix VIII.[1] Placement on this list serves as one of the criteria for determining whether a solid waste is a hazardous waste. Thus, while the proposed rule does not list the nine specific PFAS as “hazardous wastes” under RCRA, their listing paves the way for the U.S. EPA to potentially identify these nine PFAS as listed hazardous wastes under RCRA in the future. While “hazardous constituents” are not “hazardous wastes” under RCRA, there are specific provisions in the existing regulations that require owners or operators of solid waste management units to address releases of hazardous constituents to the uppermost aquifer at a RCRA corrective action site.
If adopted, this rule will expand the U.S. EPA’s ability to require PFAS cleanups at sites that are subject to RCRA jurisdiction. The proposal would require the U.S. EPA and state agencies to consider these PFAS in implementing corrective action requirements at treatment, storage, and disposal facilities under RCRA. The U.S. EPA’s corrective action program under RCRA authorizes the U.S. EPA or an authorized state agency to require such facilities to clean up releases of hazardous wastes or hazardous constituents. 42 U.S.C. § 6924(u)-(v).
The U.S. EPA’s second proposed rule would alter the definition of “hazardous waste” as it applies to corrective actions for solid waste management units at treatment, storage, and disposal facilities. According to the U.S. EPA, this proposed rule would harmonize the regulations with the statutory definition of “hazardous waste” at 42 U.S.C. § 6903(5). The definition of “hazardous waste” would include all listed hazardous wastes, hazardous constituents, and any other hazardous wastes which, under the regulations, “cause, or significantly contribute to an increase in mortality or an increase in serious irreversible, or incapacitating reversible, illness; or [] pose a substantial present or potential hazard to human health or the environment when improperly treated, stored, transported, or disposed of, or otherwise managed.” If adopted, this rule would allow the U.S. EPA or states that implement the proposed rule to impose additional, and potentially costly, requirements to investigate and clean up the nine proposed PFAS as well as emerging contaminants in a corrective action context. These additional requirements could also expand upon the existing provisions related to addressing hazardous constituents in the uppermost aquifer of a RCRA corrective site.
Collectively, these proposed rules would expand the cleanup obligations at existing sites managed under RCRA corrective action orders and provide the U.S. EPA authority to issue new corrective action orders to address these nine PFAS or any emerging contaminants.