Lawsuits over the effects of per and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) have become some of the most momentous legal battles since the Big Tobacco lawsuits. PFAS compounds, also known as “forever chemicals,” are used in so many different products that you are almost guaranteed to have one in your home. Since 2000, it has been discovered that these chemicals do not break down, have contaminated numerous water sources in America, that virtually everyone has been exposed to them, and that they carry serious health risks, including several types of cancer.
Already, PFAS manufacturers and other companies that use PFAS in the course of their daily business have paid over $11 billion in PFAS lawsuits, and that is just to mitigate the damage of PFAS exposure by cleaning up contaminated soils and waters. The lawsuits to compensate victims of PFAS exposure are just beginning, and may eclipse this massive total.
What are PFAS Chemicals?
PFAS chemicals are synthetic compounds that have multiple fluorine atoms attached to a chain of alkyl, which includes carbon atoms. There are thousands of different compounds that fall into the category of PFAS chemicals. Importantly, though, the fluorine-carbon bond that is present in all of them is one of the strongest in organic chemistry, with no natural processes for breaking it down. As a result, once a PFAS compound is created, it will continue to be a PFAS compound until something is done to it to break down its chemical structure, like superheating it when it is in water.
What are They Used For?
PFAS chemicals have been used by several major corporations for a variety of applications since they were first used to invent Teflon in 1938. Broadly speaking, PFAS chemicals are extremely useful at resisting, cleaning, or preventing:
- Heat
- Water
- Stains
- Grease
- Oil
These broad applications, however, have meant that they have been used in a huge number of specific ways. For example, PFAS chemicals are included in the following products to resist water:
- Paint
- Clothing
- Raincoats
- Tents
- Shoes
- Personal care products, like mascara and sunscreen
As a heat resistant chemical, PFAS compounds are frequently used in:
- Non-stick cookware
- Electrical wire insulation
- Firefighting foam
- Building materials, including adhesives and insulation
As a stain resistant material, PFAS chemicals have been used in:
- Carpeting
- Stain-resistant clothing
- Window curtains
- Furniture and varnishing
- Dental floss
- Food packaging
PFAS chemicals have also been used as oil- and grease-resistant products, like:
- Lubricants
- Hydraulic fluids
- Pizza boxes and microwave popcorn bags
The practical effect of all of this is that PFAS chemicals are everywhere. There are very few days that you do not interact with one. Worse, because the chemical structure of PFAS compounds do not break down, when they are used or discarded they can contaminate the area around them.
What Have PFAS Chemicals Contaminated?
Virtually everything.
In the early days after PFAS chemicals started to get used for a variety of consumer products, the public and the companies behind the compounds disposed of them with no regard or understanding for the dangers that they were causing.
That lack of understanding by the corporations behind PFAS chemicals, however, began to disintegrate in the 1970s. It was around then that 3M, one of the leading PFAS manufacturing companies, discovered its PFAS chemicals inside fish in local waterways.
Rather than sound the alarm, though, 3M and its competitors continued to dispose of used or unwanted PFAS materials in whatever means they wanted or were most convenient at the time. They burned them, buried them, or dumped them into the water. Some PFAS manufacturers even developed a new firefighting foam, aqueous film forming foams (AFFFs), that relied heavily on PFAS chemicals to put out fires involving airplane jet fuel. Firefighters used this PFAS containing firefighting foam on actual fires at airports and trained with it on controlled fires at airports across the country.
The PFAS chemicals in the foam leeched into the soil and waterways near these airports for decades.
The problem was not discovered, at least not by regulators from the federal government, until 1998. That was when the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) learned of an internal study by 3M. In that study, researchers exposed pregnant rats to PFAS materials. Inevitably, the newborn rats died within a few days. Alarmed by the news, the EPA began to investigate in an effort to regulate PFAS.
It was also at this time that a cattle farmer in West Virginia lost his animals to a mysterious health condition. Suspecting that the culprit was a major chemical plant upriver that was owned by PFAS manufacturer DuPont, the farmer sued. Over the next couple of years, the PFAS litigation expanded into a class action of over 3,500 plaintiffs and multiple water districts in the West Virginia region. A temporary settlement was reached in which DuPont would provide $30 million of funding for an independent health and environmental study to address PFAS contamination in the soil and water, the C8 Science Panel.
The findings of this Panel and subsequent studies were dire: There was PFAS contamination virtually everywhere. It was in the soil. It was in the water. It was in the animals that ate plants from the soil and that drank the water. Fish from contaminated waterways had especially high levels of PFAS chemicals in them. And PFAS chemicals were in human beings.
Who Has Been Exposed to Them?
According to one study, 95 percent of Americans had a detectable amount of PFAS chemicals in their blood.
Anyone who is exposed to PFAS chemicals has a risk of ingesting it or it getting into their body some other way – PFAS chemicals are readily absorbed through the skin, and can even get inside your body through your tear ducts. The most common way for your PFAS exposure to become PFAS contamination are:
- Eating contaminated food or drinking contaminated water
- Touching anything with PFAS chemicals in it, including clothing and soil
- Inhaling contaminated dust or air
- Swallowing anything that has PFAS chemicals in it, like makeup or lipstick
- Being in contaminated air, which can get into your body through your skin pores and sweat
This means different people are at higher risk of PFAS exposure and contamination than others.
For example, people who live in or near communities that have PFAS industries that emit the chemical into the air are likely to get exposed to the dangerous chemical every single day. Firefighters who use or train with PFAS-heavy AFFF are likely to get severe exposure to the chemical whenever they use the foam, but especially when they use it on a real fire, which burns the chemical and releases it into the air where it is more easily inhaled or absorbed through the skin.
Once they are in your body, PFAS chemicals work their way into your bloodstream. Once there, they pass through your body as your blood circulates. This takes them through all of the organs that handle your blood, including your kidneys and liver. While these organs are responsible for breaking down toxins in your blood, they cannot handle PFAS chemicals. Unless PFAS chemicals are excreted somehow, they will continue to pass through your organs, causing harm to them each time they go by.
Excreting PFAS chemicals seems to be difficult. Studies have found that many people do not excrete PFAS chemicals in their urine very well, though others can do it better. These variations in excretion mean that similar people with similar exposures to PFAS chemicals may have different levels of contamination.
Aside from urinating, the only ways to get PFAS chemicals out of your body are to bleed out contaminated blood and to breastfeed, though breastfeeding just gives the contamination to the newborn child who drinks the milk.
What Health Risks Come With PFAS Contamination?
It is important to know that there is still a lot that researchers have to learn about the health conditions caused by PFAS contamination. Collecting more data may connect new health conditions to high levels of exposure to the chemical, or may even undermine what we think we know at this point.
Right now, though, medical research has found that exposure to toxic PFAS chemicals and high levels of PFAS contamination are associated with higher risks of:
- Liver damage and cancer
- Kidney cancer
- Prostate cancer
- Testicular cancer
- Thyroid Disease
- Fertility problems
- Pregnancy issues, including:
- Fetal death
- Low birth weight
- Developmental delays in newborns
- Preeclampsia
- Hypertension
- Obesity
- Hormonal disruption and irregularities
- Dysfunction in the immune system
- High cholesterol
Some of these conditions are debilitating. Others may prove to be fatal.
Have There Been Any Settlements?
At this point, the only lawsuits that have been settled by PFAS manufacturers have been those brought by public municipalities and water districts. These class actions and multidistrict litigation (MDL) cases demanded compensation from these companies for the costs of decontaminating soil and upgrading water filtration system to eliminate PFAS from the drinking water.
Already, though, these lawsuits have recovered over $11 billion in settlements.
The first settlement is probably the most telling. This was the West Virginia case that led to the creation of the C8 Science Panel. In 2005, the Panel was created as a part of a temporary settlement that also required DuPont and its spin-off company, Chemours, to pay $71 million and cover the costs of fixing local water treatment facilities.
After the C8 Science Panel began publishing its findings, though, DuPont and Chemours reached a final settlement agreement of $671 million.
Both the settlement and the Panel’s findings led to numerous other studies, as well as to lawsuits by water districts against PFAS manufacturers.
The biggest of these has proven to be the MDL consisting of claims of over 300 water municipalities against the company 3M. This one nearly went to a bellwether trial, settling at the last moment in June, 2023, for between $10.3 billion and $12.5 billion, with the final amount depending on the amount of PFAS contamination that is found in the water. A similar lawsuit against DuPont and its subsidiaries and spin-offs settled soon thereafter for $1.185 billion. More recently, the MDL against Tyco Fire Products, one of the companies behind the firefighting foam AFFF, settled in April, 2024, for $750 million, and the one against BASF settled in May for $316.5 million.
What About Mass Tort Claims?
These massive settlements, totaling over $11 billion, are just to cover the costs of cleaning up the soil and water of the plaintiff municipalities. We have not even begun to recover compensation for the individual victims who have suffered the healthcare issues connected to PFAS exposure and contamination.
Several of these cases are ongoing, though.
Some are being pursued by small groups of plaintiffs against smaller PFAS businesses, like this Connecticut community that is suing a local paper company for contaminating local waterways with PFAS chemicals.
Many more, however, have been consolidated into an MDL in South Carolina. As of July, 2024, it had more than 9,000 claims in it. This MDL, though, is strictly concerned with PFAS exposure from AFFF firefighting foam. However, it does include individual plaintiffs who have suffered actual harm from PFAS exposure, rather than public municipalities. These individual plaintiffs are demanding compensation for their adverse health conditions, medical monitoring, and even for the costs of cleaning up contaminated private property or for the reduction in property values caused by the contamination.
According to PFAS mass tort lawyer Dr. Nick Oberheiden, founding partner of the national law firm Oberheiden P.C., “It seems safe to say that these individual claims for compensation related to PFAS exposure and contamination are going to continue to get filed for decades into the future. One likely outcome is that an MDL will form for non-AFFF specific claims related to medical conditions and property value loss due to PFAS contamination. Victims who have been exposed to PFAS chemicals could then join the MDL and benefit from the expedited process that it entails. If PFAS manufacturers and defendants go bankrupt, we will likely see a trust fund being created, similar to how asbestos manufacturers handled the thousands of cases against them.”
