EPA denies Chemours permission to ship PFAS-laden wastewater to NC, reversing course

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency announced Wednesday that it won’t allow Chemours to send wastewater containing the forever chemical known as GenX to a North Carolina plant for recycling, rescinding a September approval.

The denial is happening because Chemours provided inaccurate information to regulators in the Netherlands, where the shipments were set to originate, an EPA spokesman said.

That resulted in the EPA initially granting Chemours permission to ship about 4.4 million pounds of wastewater annually, about 10 times as much as it is capable of recycling at Fayetteville Works, EPA Administrator Michael Regan wrote in a letter Wednesday to N.C. Gov. Roy Cooper.

N.C. Newsline first reported that the EPA had approved Chemours’ request to ship the wastewater and that the N.C. Department of Environmental Quality was unaware the approval had been granted.

“We appreciate that the EPA heard the concerns shared by the Governor and the residents directly affected by PFAS contamination from Chemours. North Carolina is committed to reducing PFAS pollution and today’s reversal aligns with that goal,” DEQ Secretary Elizabeth Biser said in a statement.

In his letter to Cooper, Regan also noted that Chemours has a history of PFAS releases, including emitting more GenX than allowed under a 2019 consent order and inadequately designing a water treatment system required under the same agreement.

Chemours is located near the Cape Fear River, upstream of intakes for Wilmington-area utilities. Before installing a thermal oxidizer that captures and destroys PFAS, the plant also released forever chemicals as air emissions that have been linked with groundwater contamination more than 20 miles away.

Reacting to Wednesday’s announcement, Geoff Gisler, a program director at the Southern Environmental Law Center, said in a statement, “Chemours cannot be trusted to import toxic chemicals after contaminating a significant portion of our state with GenX and other PFAS, including the drinking water for about 500,000 people.”

Recycling GenX

After learning about the shipments, DEQ officials asked Chemours a series of questions about how the materials in the shipments would be used, their storage and how much there would be. A Nov. 13 response Chemours provided to those questions revealed the inaccurate information that was the basis for Wednesday’s denial.

“EPA is committed to protecting public health and the environment from PFAS pollution. To deliver on that mission, it is imperative that it receives accurate information to inform our decisions. In this case, by Chemours’ own admission, the information it submitted in its notification was inaccurate,” an EPA spokesman said in an email.

Chemours identified and “proactively disclosed” the error, Cassie Olszewski, a Chemours spokeswoman, told The News & Observer on Wednesday.

“The amount being imported is in fact far below the levels approved by EPA in the original permit. We regret that misinformation about HFPO-DA recycling has dominated the media landscape and raised unnecessary alarm. We are working to correct the information and will continue to engage with authorities on the path forward,” Olszewski wrote.

Olszewski also argued that recycling GenX is more environmentally sound than manufacturing “new compound.” In the Nov. 13 letter, Fayetteville Works Plant Manager Dawn Hughes wrote that manufacturing new GenX results in higher emissions than recycling the materials.

Hughes also wrote that all of the recycled GenX would be returned to Dordrecht rather than being used in different production lines at Fayetteville Works. The facility where GenX is made and recycled at Fayetteville Works has never discharged into the Cape Fear River, with GenX historically reaching the river after being created as an unintentional byproduct from other manufacturing lines.

Additionally, Hughes told DEQ that Fayetteville Works also recycles GenX from material coming from the Washington Works facility in Parkersburg, West Virginia.

All of the material that will be recycled is stored in an enclosed building at Fayetteville Works, Hughes wrote. In 2021, the last year shipments from the Netherlands took place, that building ranged between 15% and 60% full.

For the Dordrecht plant whose shipments are in question, Fayetteville Works can handle between 22,000 and 37,500 pounds of waste each month.

Shortly after the first reports, amid outcry from local community groups and elected officials, the EPA asked Chemours to halt any shipments while it reviewed documents the company had provided regulators. EPA officials previously said that although the shipments were approved in September, none took place in 2023 before the Nov. 6 pause.

Political, international concern

Last week, 70 organizations and community groups sent the EPA a letter calling on it to deny Chemours’ request. Signers included Cape Fear River Watch, Clean Cape Fear and the N.C. Conservation Network.

The approvals also caught the attention of United Nations human rights officials, who questioned officials from Chemours and the Netherlands about the shipments in letters alleging human rights violations from forever chemical contamination in the Lower Cape Fear basin.

“We are concerned about the role the Netherlands might be playing in PFAS pollution in North Carolina by exporting GenX waste to the Fayetteville facility,” the UN officials wrote in their letter to the Netherlands.

In their rebuttal, Netherlands officials said they had followed standard international shipping protocol and that the United States had agreed that the shipments would be recycled “in an environmentally sound manner” at Fayetteville Works.

Officials from both major political parties criticized the EPA’s initial decision to allow the shipments.

On Nov. 3, Gov. Cooper sent Regan a letter calling for the shipments to be prevented. During Cooper’s first term in office, he hired Regan to serve as secretary of DEQ. Chemours and PFAS quickly emerged as one of the largest environmental issues facing the state during Regan’s tenure as secretary.

“This approval should be reconsidered and reversed,” Cooper wrote. “The introduction of a large quantity of PFAS-containing waste material into North Carolina is a significant setback for our ongoing efforts to limit PFAS impacts on the environment in North Carolina.”

Under Regan’s leadership, EPA has taken a number of actions on per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, also known as forever chemicals. That includes requiring utilities nationwide to monitor for GenX and announcing plans to regulate GenX in drinking water along with three other PFAS as part of a hazard index.

Congressional Republicans including Sen. Thom Tillis, Fayetteville-area Rep. Richard Hudson and Wilmington-area Republican Rep. David Rouzer sent Regan a Nov. 15 letter questioning why the EPA had agreed to allow shipments of GenX, a chemical the agency has said it intends to propose adding to a list of hazardous substances.

“To this day, we still do not fully know the scope of the presence and impact of these chemicals. It should be no surprise that we find the news of these imported chemicals to the Fayetteville Works facility where extensive water contamination has occurred for years to be disturbing,” the Republicans wrote.

This story was produced with financial support from the Hartfield Foundation and 1Earth Fund, in partnership with Journalism Funding Partners, as part of an independent journalism fellowship program. The N&O maintains full editorial control of the work.