Environmental watchdog Cape Fear River Watch is claiming that chemical manufacturer Chemours has failed to clean up forever chemical pollution in groundwater around its Bladen County plant and to control the substances in air emissions coming from the facility.
There are key pollution limits written into a consent order between Cape Fear River Watch, Chemours and the N.C. Department of Environmental Quality that was originally agreed to in 2019 and then amended in early 2020. The order addresses forever chemical contamination coming from the Chemours Fayetteville Works plant near the Cape Fear River.
The environmental group on Wednesday filed a formal notice saying the company's failure to mitigate groundwater contamination to levels required in the order mean that forever chemicals from the plant are also reaching surface water — including the Cape Fear River — at higher levels than those the company agreed to meet.
It alleges that is partly because Chemours only measures its consent order compliance based on 17 per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, not including so-called ultra-short chain PFAS that scientists have measured at high levels in groundwater around the plant.
“Chemours’ violations endanger families and communities from its ongoing PFAS pollution and cannot continue. With people suffering, it’s past time for Chemours to be held accountable," Jean Zhuang, a senior attorney at the Southern Environmental Law Center who is representing Cape Fear River Watch, wrote in a statement.
Chemours first received scrutiny for PFAS discharges and emissions in 2017, when the Wilmington StarNews reported that scientists measured significant levels of the forever chemical GenX in discharge from the plant and finished drinking water around Wilmington. That led to DEQ and environmental groups pushing Chemours to take steps to control exposure to GenX and other chemicals.
To this point, Chemours has spent about $1.2 billion complying with the 2019 order.
Now, much of that attention is turning to TFA, an ultra-short chain compound that has been found at high levels around Fayetteville Works can result from the degradation of other PFAS and is used in a car air conditioner refrigerant.
Chemours officials insist it has lived up to the consent agreement.
In a statement, spokeswoman Jess Loizeaux wrote, "Chemours has taken significant actions in implementing the Consent Order, including installing advanced emissions controls and abatement technologies, water treatment and remediation systems, monitoring programs, and replacement drinking water supplies."
Loizeaux declined to address specific allegations because they could become subject of a lawsuit.
Barrier wall and treatment
In 2023, Chemours finished building a roughly mile-long wall that extends about six stories underground between its plant and the Cape Fear River.
The wall is intended to control forever chemicals that have leached into groundwater around the plant, with pumps pulling that water out so it can be run through granulater activated carbon treatment systems before being discharged into the river. Its construction was part of the original consent order.
Cape Fear River Watch and its attorneys say that in practice, there are several major problems with how the barrier wall and treatment systems are working.
First, they write, granular activated carbon treatment systems like the one Chemours has built will not remove ultra-short chain PFAS like TFA and PFPrA. And because the filtration system isn't removing the chemicals, they allege, Chemours is also not meeting a targeted 75% reduction of PFAS levels in surface water around the plant, including the Cape Fear River.
In September 2025, for instance, samples taken by N.C. State University scientists found that water at the mouth of Old Outfall 002 contained 21,907 parts per trillion of TFA. In a March 2026 sample, that was 57,290 ppt of TFA.
"Any calculation that excludes these compounds understates the total PFAS loading to the Cape Fear River and cannot establish compliance with the 75 percent reduction requirement," lawyers wrote in the Cape Fear River Watch notification letter.
Notably, granular activated carbon is the same filtration technology that the Cape Fear Public Utility Authority, which serves hundreds of thousands of New Hanover customers, built to remove forever chemicals from drinking water.
The original consent order also requires Chemours to pump groundwater from its side of the wall at high enough rates that it cannot migrate around the wall and reach either Willis Creek or the Cape Fear River.
"Despite these clear obligations, groundwater is flowing around the barrier wall’s southern terminus, causing multiple seeps to discharge high levels of PFAS into the Cape Fear River and Old Outfall 002 stream (which flows into the Cape Fear River)," SELC lawyers wrote.
Cape Fear River Watch points to two groundwater seeps, in particular, known as the Lock and Dam Seep and Lock and Dam North Seep. If the barrier wall was working as intended, it says, that groundwater would have dried up.
"That has not happened. Chemours reports continued flow at both seeps," SELC lawyers wrote.
At the Lock and Dam Seep, Chemours has recently reported total PFAS levels of more than 130,000 ppt with GenX making up about 7,500 ppt. That does not include TFA, with N.C. State scientists in March finding levels there of more than 197,000 ppt.
Making matters more concerning, Cape Fear River Watch says, water that comes from the seeps run adjacent to a boat ramp that the public uses to access the Cape Fear River, including for fishing.
There are also a pair of groundwater seeps reaching Old Outfall 002 that Cape Fear River Watch believes are making their way around the barrier wall downstream of the treatment system.
"In other words, PFAS-contaminated groundwater continues to enter the creek, bypassing treatment and discharging directly into surface waters," the notification letter says.
Cape Fear River Watch is also arguing that Chemours has not completed a plan describing how it intends to mitigate groundwater contamination that was required in the original consent order, much less implemented such a plan.
The company submitted a version of that plan in 2020, but DEQ rejected it after determining that it failed to assess human exposure to PFAS and to evaluate groundwater contamination both on and off of the Fayetteville Works site.
Under federal water rules, companies like Chemours are required to reduce the levels of man-made chemicals without groundwater standards to as close to the level at which that chemical can be detected as is economically and technologically feasible.
"The company’s groundwater contamination has polluted more than 10,000 drinking water wells across ten counties in North Carolina, devastating thousands of families across the state. Yet Chemours has not developed and implemented a Corrective Action Plan that cleans up contaminated groundwater," SELC lawyers wrote.
Air pollution and another settlement
Earlier this month, Chemours, the N.C. Department of Environmental Quality and more than a dozen local governments announced a settlement of lawsuits brought against the company over its forever chemical contamination.
In total, that settlement is worth $590 million to the state and local governments, the largest recovery from environmental damages in North Carolina's history.
As part of that agreement, the state agreed that Chemours had met its air emissions requirements under the consent order. It also agreed to set out a plan to determine which of the groundwater requirements remain unmet and to create a schedule to achieve them.
But the original consent order requires that Cape Fear River Watch also deems mandates complete before they can be declared fully satisfied.
"The (air emissions) obligations imposed by Paragraph 7 cannot be deemed complete unless all parties, including Cape Fear River Watch, stipulate that the applicable requirements have been satisfied, and Cape Fear River Watch has not done so," lawyers wrote in Wednesday's notification letter.
To that end, Cape Fear River Watch is contending that Chemours has failed to meet at least two key air pollution benchmarks written into the consent order.
First, it says that Chemours is failing to meet a requirement that it use its thermal oxidizer to reduce PFAS emissions from its process streams by 99.99% because emissions from three of those streams don't go to the device.
Those areas, which are part of the polymer process, include the ion exchange membrane resins fluorinator, the polymers processing aid and the semi-works polymers unit.
Second, the environmental groups say a carbon adsorption unit in a vinyl ether manufacturing area is "frequently" failing to reduce GenX emissions by 93% as required in the order, with levels occasionally actually reaching higher than the baseline.
Cape Fear River Watch and its Southern Environmental Law Center attorneys are asking DEQ and Chemours for a meeting to discuss their concerns. If that doesn't happen, they wrote, they will seek court action to enforce the consent order.
