Federal Court Unanimously Agrees PFOA & PFOS Are Hazardous Substances

This week a three-judge U.S. Court of Appeals panel unanimously rejected every petition filed by seven industry groups, including the US Chamber of Commerce and American Chemistry Council. They tried to erase the EPA rule naming PFOA and PFOS as hazardous substances. Clean Cape Fear joined the case as an intervenor with EarthJustice representing the National PFAS Contamination Coalition. Our community helped successfully defend the EPA rule in court.  

“This is more than a legal victory,” says Emily Donovan, co-founder of Clean Cape Fear. “This is a common-sense and moral victory, too. The land belongs to the people and forever chemical polluters must pay when they poison sacred resources like our water, air, soil and food supplies.”

This ruling protects the polluter-pays principle under Superfund law and ensures responsible parties pay for the clean-up. The court affirmed the science linking PFOA and PFOS to serious health harms through immune suppression in children and harms during pregnancy. The court also rejected industry pleas to only provide affected communities with bottled water instead of environmental remediation and restoration. 

PFOS has been detected at extreme levels in the sea foam along Brunswick and New Hanover county beaches. In 2025, Clean Cape Fear and NC State University’s analytical core staff, and community engagement experts, published a study finding extreme levels of toxic PFAS in the unusual “sea foam blooms” often seen along our local beaches. In one sample, PFOS was measured at 8,000,000 ppt, among the highest levels recorded anywhere. Because children and pets play in sea foam Clean Cape Fear renews our call for North Carolina’s state and local health departments to warn the public of these dangerous foam blooms.

"The threats we face now are not abstract or merely probability,” says Marlando Pridgen, Regional Coordinator for the Annie Catherine Pridgen Community Development Foundation and Clean Cape Fear leadership team member. “Our waterways face a guaranteed continued risk from several sources including but not limited to industrial discharge, aging infrastructure, and contamination that has already settled into the ground for a generation. Standing united on this — regardless of political affiliation — is not idealism or "green" false hope. It is survival. And it starts with something simple: being direct and specific about which pollutants threaten our lives, and refusing to let that clarity get lost in political noise.”

Pridgen adds, “There is a shift happening that rural North Carolina cannot afford to ignore. Water has always been essential for what we eat, how we bathe, and how we live. But increasingly, it is also becoming one of the most valuable commodities in the modern economy, driving everything from agriculture to the massive cooling demands of data centers powering artificial intelligence. As the value of clean water rises in every sector – technological, agricultural, industrial — so must our collective commitment to protecting it. This cannot be a fight left to environmental advocates alone. It must become a unified, bipartisan priority for lobbyists, lawmakers, and everyday citizens alike, because the cost of losing clean water will be paid by all of us, together."

This federal victory should motivate North Carolina’s Dept. of Environmental Quality to proactively set enforceable limits on PFAS discharges as a class, including ultrashort chain compounds like TFA and PFPrA which continue to leave Chemours Fayetteville Works site. Failing to comprehensively address the entire class of forever chemicals will continue to threaten our freedom to enjoy safe and healthy drinking water supplies, beaches, and locally caught fish.

North Carolina lawmakers should also meet this moment because the science is settled and a unanimous court agrees. Communities deserve state laws that strengthen the work being done federally. It’s time for state leaders to stop all PFAS pollution at the source and make polluters pay for clean up, not harmed communities.