New Jersey agreed to a $393 million settlement with a South Jersey chemical company to pay for the cleanup of decades of PFAS pollution around its Gloucester County site. The payment, which officials said is the largest of its kind in state history, ends a years-long court fight between the company, Solvay Specialty Polymers, and the state Department of Environmental Protection.
The company agreed to pay to remediate land and water contaminated with the so-called forever chemicals in a 37-square-mile area around its West Deptford factory; help pay for upgrades that remove the chemicals from public water systems; investigate PFAS impacts on nearby water systems and private wells and compensate the public for harm to natural resources caused by the pollution.
‘Today, we send a clear message to any corporation that exposes our New Jersey communities to PFAS toxins or injures our natural resources with any hazardous substance. You will face consequences for your actions.’ — New Jersey Attorney General Matt Platkin
About $100 million of the settlement will be used to address PFAS pollution in nine public water systems and private wells in five towns, even where the contamination source is disputed. Solvay will be required to post a $214 million bond so that the DEP can finish the cleanup if the company is unable to. The company will pay another $75 million for damages to natural resources, and $3.7 million to compensate the DEP for its past direct costs in addressing the contamination.
Attorney General Matt Platkin called the agreement a “historic step” that requires Solvay to own up to its actions after years of denying responsibility for the contamination. Platkin added that the settlement is a warning to other PFAS polluters that the state will require them to account for their actions.
“Today, we send a clear message to any corporation that exposes our New Jersey communities to PFAS toxins or injures our natural resources with any hazardous substance. You will face consequences for your actions,” Platkin said at a Trenton news conference Wednesday.
Solvay’s side of the story
Solvay said in a statement it has been cleaning up PFAS near its factory since 2013 and eliminated the use of all such chemicals there in 2021. In the past decade, it said it has worked with the town of West Deptford to install a drinking water treatment system on a municipal well; capped soil around its factory to stop the potential migration of contaminants; and installed an offsite system to treat affected groundwater.
While the company acknowledged the agreement resolved the DEP’s litigation, it also insisted that it was not responsible for some local PFAS contamination.
“Solvay’s investigations over the years have revealed other significant sources of PFAS contamination in the region, including PFNA, which Solvay did not manufacture and stopped using as a process aid in 2010,” the company said in a statement. “This includes users of fire-fighting foams, which Solvay has never manufactured or used at its West Deptford facility, and other facilities that produce or use PFAS. Solvay will continue seeking to recover remediation costs from other sources.”
The DEP directive
The settlement is the first outcome of a directive that the DEP issued to Solvay and four other major chemical companies in 2019. The state at the time ordered them to clean up damage caused to natural resources, including groundwater contaminated by PFAS. All fought the order, and the other four remain in litigation with the DEP. One of the other companies, DuPont, did not respond to a request for comment on the settlement.
The settlement is the latest in a series of actions by New Jersey to protect the public from the chemicals linked to a range of serious health conditions, including some cancers, decreased immune-system response to vaccines, developmental problems in young children and elevated cholesterol.
‘Our PFAS challenges in New Jersey are deep, they are significant and they won’t be resolved by this one action alone.’ — Department of Environmental Protection Commissioner Shawn LaTourette
In 2018, the state became the first in the country to set a health limit for PFNA, a common type of PFAS, in drinking water. It followed that with regulatory limits on two other chemicals, PFOA and PFOS, establishing itself as a national leader in efforts to protect public water supplies from the chemicals.
The health limits were recommended by the Drinking Water Quality Institute, a panel of scientists and water company executives that advises the Department of Environmental Protection.
NJ’s PFAS heritage
New Jersey has a higher rate of PFAS contamination than many other states because of its long industrial history and, until recently, lax regulation. The manmade chemicals have been used for waterproofing and heat resistance in a variety of consumer products since the 1940s. They are especially prevalent in groundwater near military bases such as McGuire-Dix-Lakehurst where they were used for years in firefighting foam.
Scientists say PFAS contamination in public water supplies is so common that the chemicals can be found in the blood of virtually every American. PFAS are known as “forever chemicals” because they accumulate in the human body and barely break down in nature.
DEP Commissioner Shawn LaTourette welcomed the settlement as a significant step to cleaning up a pervasive pollutant but said it is just the beginning of fixing a serious statewide problem.
‘It should not have to take a years-long enforcement action to bring a responsible party to the table. But if that’s what it takes, that’s what we will do.’ — Shawn LaTourette, DEP commissioner
“Our PFAS challenges in New Jersey are deep, they are significant and they won’t be resolved by this one action alone,” LaTourette said. He warned that more than 70 public water systems do not meet New Jersey’s required health limits for three kinds of PFAS chemicals, and that number is likely to rise into the “hundreds” if the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency finalizes its much stricter health limits on PFAS in drinking water, expected late this year or early 2024.
LaTourette castigated Solvay for denying full responsibility for the problem and promised to hold other polluters accountable. “It should not have to take a years-long enforcement action to bring a responsible party to the table. But if that’s what it takes, that’s what we will do,” he said.
Steve Miano, an environmental attorney with Hangley Aronchick Segal Pudlin & Schiller in Philadelphia, called the settlement a “significant” win for New Jersey because it will show other corporations that the state is determined to obtain compensation for PFAS contamination.
“This is a big deal in the state of New Jersey because they issued a directive to those companies to do all that work, and this is the first result,” Miano said. “It’s precedential in that sense, and I suspect that the others eventually will follow suit.” The other companies named in the 2019 directive are 3M, DuPont, Chemours and Dow DuPont.
Miano said Solvay is likely to have determined that it would have to pay more if it took the DEP suit to trial than it did by settling and so abandoned its earlier defiance of the DEP directive, along with its litigation against the agency.
EPA ready with stricter standards
Although New Jersey’s PFAS limits have been some of the strictest in the country, they were eclipsed by new national standards for six of the most commonly found chemicals, as proposed by the EPA in March. Those standards, sharply lower than in any state, are expected to be adopted by the end of 2023 and would replace the New Jersey levels.
In 2020, the state sued Solvay, accusing it of dumping tens of thousands of pounds of PFNA near its factory, resulting in what at the time was the world’s highest recorded level of the toxic chemical in groundwater.
In 2013, PFNA was found in a public water well in nearby Paulsboro at 11 times the level later set by New Jersey as the maximum for safe drinking. Now, the town’s residents are participating in a national study of the health effects on communities exposed to PFNA and related chemicals.
Three environmental groups who have long accused Solvay of PFAS pollution reserved judgement on the settlement until they had examined its terms. But Tracy Carluccio of Delaware Riverkeeper Network, one of the groups, said Solvay should have to pay for its pollution.
“Solvay’s deep pockets should pay for what otherwise will cost the public, who didn’t even know that they were being exposed to toxic chemicals that could severely harm their and their families’ health,” she said. “And the terrible human health toll that has resulted here will continue to be borne by individuals, without any relief.”