DuPont knowingly poisoned communities with PFAS 'forever chemicals' from Teflon manufacturing for decades

For decades, DuPont told regulators, workers, and the public that PFOA—a chemical used to manufacture Teflon nonstick coatings—was safe. The company's position was unequivocal: there was no evidence of harm. Meanwhile, in Parkersburg, West Virginia, residents were drinking contaminated water and developing illnesses they couldn't explain. It would take one attorney's persistence and thousands of internal company documents to expose what DuPont had known all along.

Robert Bilott, an environmental lawyer, stumbled onto the story in the late 1990s when a farmer approached him with a disturbing observation: his cattle were dying near a DuPont waste disposal site. That small inquiry would unravel a four-decade cover-up. What Bilott discovered through litigation was damning: DuPont had identified PFOA as a toxic substance in its own laboratories as far back as the 1960s. The company found the chemical in workers' blood. It detected birth defects in the children of exposed employees. It discovered contamination in the public water supply serving Parkersburg. And it did almost nothing to warn anyone.

DuPont's official stance during this period was dismissive. The company maintained that PFOA posed no documented risk to human health. Regulators largely accepted this characterization. The chemical continued to be manufactured and released into the environment. Meanwhile, internal memos and study results—buried in company files—painted a starkly different picture of what the company actually believed about its own product.

The turning point came through discovery in litigation. Documents obtained during Bilott's class-action lawsuit against revealed the company's knowledge and inaction. Memos showed that DuPont executives understood the chemical's toxicity but chose not to disclose findings to regulators or the public. A 2005 settlement agreement required DuPont to fund an independent health study—the C8 Health Project—which eventually examined thousands of Parkersburg residents. The results were definitive: PFOA exposure was linked to six diseases, including kidney cancer, testicular cancer, ulcerative colitis, thyroid disease, high cholesterol, and pregnancy-induced hypertension.