In early 2023, when the Minnesota Legislature began weighing a sweeping ban on “forever chemicals” — a class of roughly 9,000 substances used in everything from lipstick and cellphones to cookware and clothing — many lawmakers were doubtful they could get anywhere. Several bills had failed to gain traction in the state, which was home to one of the world’s largest manufacturers of the chemicals, 3M Company.
But then a young woman named Amara Strande turned up at the Capitol. Ms. Strande, who grew up near St. Paul, had been diagnosed at age 15 with a rare liver cancer, a disease she and her family attributed to drinking water polluted with per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, or PFAS, as forever chemicals are formally known.
At hearing after hearing, she was at the statehouse lobbying lawmakers and giving testimony. Speaking faintly into the microphone, she described her excruciating pain and the gruesome surgery she endured to have a 15-pound tumor removed. She talked about the horrors of the cancer spreading throughout her chest, cracking her ribs and immobilizing her right hand. “There are no more treatments to try,” she said. “I can no longer braid my hair or play the piano.”
Ms. Strande died that April, just two days shy of her 21st birthday. But the following month, the State Legislature passed Amara’s Law, the most aggressive PFAS ban in the country.
In recent years, forever chemicals have been increasingly recognized as one of the most significant environmental threats of our time. They persist in the environment for millenniums. They spread rapidly through air and water, polluting ecosystems and human bodies everywhere, and there they stay, with the potential to damage cells and alter our DNA. The best studied of these chemicals have been linked to obesity, infertility, testicular cancer, thyroid disease, immune suppression and life-threatening pregnancy complications, among other maladies.
But unlike another daunting environmental threat, climate change, forever chemicals have spawned a forceful bipartisan response, driven by a network of unlikely activists. Across the country, thousands of ordinary Americans whose lives have been upended by PFAS — firefighters, farmers, factory workers, veterans and suburban moms — are fighting to turn off the tap on these chemicals. Their efforts, which often differ from those of conventional environmental groups, have helped ignite a chain reaction that has led to numerous congressional hearings and hundreds of bipartisan bills in Washington and statehouses, as well as federal regulations. The Environmental Protection Agency has set near-zero caps on several PFAS in drinking water.
Some of these measures may fall victim to the budget cuts and deregulatory fervor enveloping Washington under President Trump. But most should survive since they’re outside the direct reach of the federal government.
So far, 30 states have adopted their own restrictions on PFAS, including at least 14 full or partial bans on the chemicals in consumer goods. And this trend seems to have only accelerated since Mr. Trump’s election in November. More than 200 PFAS-related bills have been introduced in state legislatures, and dozens more are in the pipeline. Even deep-red states such as Mississippi, Montana and Texas are weighing crackdowns.
This movement has also helped engender a sprawling legal battle that is expected to surpass asbestos litigation, one of the largest, most costly legal battles in U.S. history. Already, manufacturers like DuPont and 3M have been hit with more than 15,000 claims, many of them personal-injury based, though dozens of states and multiple municipalities have also brought cases.
As a result of all this, large parts of the economy are voluntarily migrating away from PFAS, and it seems to be happening far faster than it would with regulation, a promising sign for others fighting to protect human health and the environment amid the attack on the federal bureaucracy.
The dangers of PFAS first came to light in the 1990s, after a family of West Virginia farmers whose land adjoined a DuPont landfill noticed that their cattle were sprouting tumors and vomiting blood. Soon the cows were dying faster than the farmers could bury them, and family members were landing in the hospital with mysterious chemical burns. Convinced that the landfill was to blame, the family sued the company.
That case helped expose a decades-long cover-up involving the forever chemical PFOA, which DuPont used to make Teflon. It also inspired a class-action lawsuit and a flurry of scientific research.
But PFAS didn’t attract much attention outside scientific circles until 2016, when contamination in the upstate New York village of Hoosick Falls made national headlines. There the instigator was a young man named Michael Hickey, who had started questioning the safety of the local drinking water after losing his father and several friends to cancer. When officials refused to investigate, he tested his own tap water and discovered dangerous levels of PFOA.
Mr. Hickey wasn’t your typical activist. A clean-cut insurance underwriter with a fear of public speaking, he had no interest in environmental issues generally. He liked to joke that he got his news from ESPN. And yet he wound up spearheading a fight against several giant multinational corporations and government agencies to get his community clean drinking water.
Other residents with little interest in politics found themselves enmeshed in the same battle: A doctor who had documented unusually high rates of rare, aggressive cancers among his patients before being diagnosed with cancer himself. A high school music teacher who decided to run for public office after learning his 2-year-old daughter had PFAS blood levels 50 times the national average. A young mother named Emily Marpe who had put everything she had into a dream home for her family, only to learn that her well was contaminated.
Ms. Marpe, who had only a high-school education, developed a command of the sciences and a talent for boiling complex concepts into simple language, making her a favorite among local reporters. She also helped organize forums for lawyers and scientists to speak with residents and recounted her story in testimony before government agencies and at private meetings with lawmakers. “The American dream was ripped out from under us,” she told one congressional staff member.
The stories of Ms. Marpe and others have resonated with Republicans and Democrats alike. By 2018, states were embracing a raft of bold policies. New York had designated two PFAS as hazardous substances, a move that gave the state the power to investigate the breadth of the pollution and force those responsible to pay for the cleanup. Other states were developing strict limits for PFAS in drinking water, and bills banning them in food packaging and consumer goods were cropping up in legislatures nationwide.
With the help of environmental organizations, citizen activists scored victories on the national level. In 2017, Mr. Trump nominated a scientist who had helped chemical makers fend off PFAS regulation to head the E.P.A.’s Office of Chemical Safety. Environmental groups responded by inviting Americans who had been harmed by these chemicals to Washington to tell their stories, among them Ms. Marpe and a former Marine sergeant who lost his 9-year-old to cancer and learned his family had been drinking tainted water. In the end, several Republican senators announced they would vote against the nominee, forcing him to withdraw.
As more activists from around the country arrived in Washington and bombarded lawmakers with emails and phone calls, something important began to happen. Republicans representing polluted communities — among them Lee Zeldin, now the E.P.A. chief but at the time a congressman from Long Island — began pushing strict PFAS legislation and demanding that federal agencies move swiftly to regulate these chemicals.
In response, the Trump administration, which was otherwise bent on cutting regulation, unveiled a detailed plan to “aggressively address” PFAS contamination. Congress began weighing bipartisan PFAS legislation. Mr. Hickey was called to testify before lawmakers, along with a Virginia man who had been born with serious facial deformities, a youth ministry director from North Carolina, an Army veteran from Colorado and a rural Michigan woman who reportedly has the highest PFAS ever detected in a human.
Many PFAS activists focused their efforts largely on institutions that, historically at least, tended to be less polarized and more responsive: the courts and state governments. Firefighters can be exposed to high levels of PFAS on the job and have unusually high rates of certain cancers that have been linked to PFAS. In some states, firefighting unions have dispatched their members to lobby for bans on PFAS-based firefighting foam, partly by sharing stories about their own battles with cancer or losing co-workers to the disease. As a result, at least 15 states have banned the use of these substances, which until recently were a staple at firehouses, airports and military bases.
In Maine, farmers led the charge. After an investigation revealed that sections of rural land were polluted with PFAS from sewage sludge, growers came together to lobby for a ban on using sludge as fertilizer. Adam Nordell, who was forced to shut down his vegetable farm because of contamination, later took a job at the nonprofit group Defend Our Health, where he has rallied Maine farmers behind legislation, including a near-total ban on PFAS in consumer goods.
Even before the PFAS bans take full effect, manufacturers are being forced to provide regulators with detailed information about how they’re using these chemicals. For a growing number of companies, this information is such a liability that they are giving up these substances. At least 40 major retail chains with $1.7 trillion in combined annual revenue have committed to eliminating or reducing forever chemicals in their packaging and products. Among them are Amazon, Starbucks, Apple, Target, McDonald’s, Dick’s Sporting Goods and Home Depot.
Some chemical manufacturers are abandoning PFAS, too; 3M, which owes more than $10 billion for PFAS settlements so far, has announced it will quit producing the chemicals by the end of 2025, citing mounting regulation and pressure from investors. Other chemical makers are getting similar pushback.
This doesn’t mean the battle is over. Right now, the chemical industry is fighting aggressively to protect the most lucrative types of PFAS — namely, specialized plastics such as Teflon and fluorinated gases, which together account for a market worth tens of billions of dollars. States have mostly resisted industry efforts to exempt these substances from legislation. But, as of a few years ago, the E.P.A. office charged with vetting chemicals for safety had adopted an industry-backed definition that would exclude the one type of PFAS most abundant in the environment.
In the end, however, no amount of industry lobbying can counter the economic pressures bearing down as the regulations take effect in the United States, as well as Europe, and PFAS litigation hits consumer brands like Band-Aid and Trojan condoms, whose parent companies have been sued by customers. Manufacturers are scrambling to find safer alternatives. All of which pushes us closer to the kind of economic tipping point that could lead to the virtual elimination of these chemicals.
We have ordinary citizens to thank for most of these shifts. People who set out to protect their families and communities and wound up building the most powerful grass-roots environmental movement since Rachel Carson’s groundbreaking 1962 book “Silent Spring.” Their story offers hopeful lessons for other movements struggling to gain traction. One is the potential for citizen movements to drastically alter market forces, leading to meaningful change.
Another is the power of working on the state level, where the federal government’s influence is limited. During the first Trump presidency, other movements made major headway using this approach. Teachers organizing strikes in states such as West Virginia managed to score crucial victories, emboldening the labor movement even as Mr. Trump was rolling back worker protections.
This time, the Trump camp is more organized and determined to crush opposition. Even so, advocates of PFAS legislation continue to make rapid progress. That should give everyone who cares about the environment at least a modicum of hope.
Mariah Blake is the author of the forthcoming book “They Poisoned the World: Life and Death in the Age of Forever Chemicals.”
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