Chemical Manufacturing Made New Jersey the ‘PFAS Toilet for the Country’

From our collaborating partner Living on Earth, public radio’s environmental news magazine, an interview by Paloma Beltran with Shawn M. LaTourette, New Jersey’s commissioner of environmental protection. 

Last month, New Jersey officials announced that they had reached a record-breaking $2 billion settlement with DuPont and related companies for a $875 million payout and up to $1.2 billion in cleanup costs. 

The deal holds DuPont and the others responsible for discharging a wide range of pollutants, including PFAS, or per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, at four former manufacturing sites in the state. The officials described it as “the largest environmental settlement ever reached by a single American state.” 

Today’s guest, Shawn M. LaTourette, is New Jersey’s commissioner of environmental protection. This interview has been edited for length and clarity. 

PALOMA BELTRAN: Welcome to Living on Earth, Shawn!

SHAWN M. LATOURETTE: It’s a pleasure to be with you.

BELTRAN: Tell us more about the contamination here. You know, how did PFAS exposure impact the residents of New Jersey?

LATOURETTE: So New Jersey is home, or rather, was home to a bit of a PFAS manufacturing epicenter in the United States, particularly in the southern half of the state. There were several facilities, DuPont being one of them, but there were also other manufacturers located in factories along the Delaware River in southern New Jersey and also along the Raritan River and Bay in central New Jersey, and we began understanding the existence of PFAS contamination in the early- to mid-2000s.

DuPont operated that site for a long, long time. They produced chemicals like Teflon, for example, and many other chemicals. And at that site, they had a large wastewater treatment plant, and DuPont sent its PFAS waste from elsewhere in the country, from other factories in West Virginia and North Carolina, etc. They sent their PFAS waste to be disposed of through the wastewater plant at Chambers Works. In effect, DuPont used the state of New Jersey as the PFAS toilet for the country. 

And so we find this contamination all over South Jersey and, of course, in other places as well. We find PFAS contamination in places you wouldn’t expect, like in the surficial soils of remote New Jersey forests that should be pristine.

BELTRAN: PFAS is deemed a forever chemical. It’s pretty ubiquitous. What will the restoration process entail?

LATOURETTE: It’s a lot more complicated than some of our traditional chemicals. New Jersey was once, less so now, a state pretty dense with chemical manufacturers, and we have a long history of making sure they clean up after themselves. But PFAS isn’t like petroleum hydrocarbons or metals or PCBs, because they circulate so widely throughout environmental media. 

And so we have to go through a process where we are identifying the major sources of PFAS and interrupting them from becoming continuing sources to another part of whether it’s the water cycle or the carbon cycle. 

I’ll give you an example. If a company is still making things with some types of PFAS, and they discharge their wastewater through a treatment plant, and that goes into the waterway, that PFAS is now circulating through the waterway, and it’s going to get picked up by a drinking water system, and then that drinking water system is going to have to pay to put on treatment to clean that PFAS out. 

But what if we catch it before it gets to the waterway and we interrupt the PFAS loading at that point in the water cycle. We’ve got to do this type of work at multiple points within the water cycle, within the carbon cycle. We’ve got to do things like putting in sentinel wells around some of our oldest landfills that could be leaching PFAS that are then reaching the water table, which is also a source of drinking water.

BELTRAN: And from what I understand, this settlement provides money for natural resource restoration. What does that mean? What will that process look like?

LATOURETTE: Natural resource restoration is different than cleanup. Natural resource restoration is based on a really simple principle, a principle of trusteeship, meaning, not unlike your 401k, right, or your investment accounts that a bank is holding for you in trust, and they have to take good care of it. 

The state government holds all of the natural resources in trust for the people, and if they’re harmed, we are obligated to pursue those who harmed the resources to not just clean them up, but to restore the value of those resources. 

So if pollution degrades a wetland, we need to make you create a new wetland that provides those same natural resource benefits for the public, because it’s the public’s resource, right—our air, our land, our water, our wetlands, our natural and historic resources. They don’t belong to the government. They belong directly to the people, and it’s just the job of folks like me to take good care of them, and if they’re hurt, it’s the obligation of the natural resource trustee to get your resources back.

“The stuff is harmful, and they knew it was harmful, and they kept making it anyway, and they kept putting it in products anyway, because the getting was just too good.”

BELTRAN: This seems like a turning point for PFAS accountability. What can other states learn from New Jersey?

LATOURETTE: I think what other states can learn is not something they don’t already know. Other states that have been impacted by PFAS to the extent New Jersey has, and there are other states that have experienced such impacts—North Carolina, West Virginia, Minnesota, the list goes on, particularly where there were industrial sites, you’re going to see those impacts be worse. 

So there’s a lesson for the states that have had a history of industrial PFAS manufacturing, but there’s also a lesson for states that didn’t have that industrial history, but still have a perpetuating PFAS problem, because it is diffuse within our environment. And in each of those instances there is an important lesson that comes out of this, which is No. 1, the public expects what my grandmother did. 

The public expects their government to hold folks accountable to ensure that they clean up after themselves and that the public will support you if you have to take on a big company to make them follow my grandmother’s rule, to clean up after themselves. And the other lesson, I think, is that these companies, who know they have these liabilities, will come to the table. You may have to fight with them for a few years and go through a little bit of litigation, but the science is clear. The stuff is harmful, and they knew it was harmful, and they kept making it anyway, and they kept putting it in products anyway, because the getting was just too good.

BELTRAN: And how will the people of New Jersey benefit from this decision? How will they benefit from this settlement?

LATOURETTE: Well, they’re gonna have cleaner water, that’s for sure. I think about small rural communities where people are not connected to a public water system, and how we have aquifers here in New Jersey and around the country that are contaminated with PFAS above safety standards. Many of them don’t know, right?

There’s no government entity in many instances, unless you’re selling your house, coming to test your water for you, if you have a private well, but you can and should test it yourself, and you should do it every year. I think that for those communities in particular, there’s a new resource for them that didn’t exist before at all. 

Public water systems, they’ve always had access to funding from the federal and state governments to improve their drinking water treatment. But potable well owners represent 15 percent of New Jersey. They don’t have that level of support, and this means they’ll get it. So we’re taking care of folks who’ve been forgotten, maybe even written off. 

And we’re not just going to make sure the water is clean. We’re going to enrich their environment, whether that is new rain gardens in their community that help absorb pollutants instead of circulate them, whether it’s making sure that the old landfill in your town that nobody ever checked to make sure it was closed right is not leaching into your waterway.

I think there’s a lot of positive impacts that will play out over several years coming from this, but at the same time, the PFAS liabilities are large, and they are forever chemicals. And new treatment that gets built because of this settlement will have to be operated into the long term. This settlement won’t fix everything, but it gives us one heck of a big head start.

BELTRAN: Shawn LaTourette is commissioner of the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection. Thanks for joining us.

LATOURETTE: It’s a pleasure. Thank you.