8 New Types of ‘Forever Chemicals’ Found in River Linked to US Cancer Cluster

People living by the Cape Fear River have been plagued by PFAS pollution for years. Now, the problem looks even more drastic.

In 2017 news broke in North Carolina that the water downstream of the Fayetteville Works Plant, owned by the Chemours Company (a spin-off of DuPont), and public water systems reliant on the Cape Fear River contained high levels of per-and poly-fluoroalkyl substances (PFAS). These contaminants, which are common in everyday products like adhesives, food packaging, and cookware, are dubbed “forever chemicals” because they don’t break down easily in the environment and can linger in the body while causing numerous health problems. And indeed, in the years after the positive PFAS tests, evidence emerged on suspected thyroid cancer clusters in local communities.

The Cape Fear River remains tainted to this day, and many of the residents of southeast North Carolina feel its presence in their lives. “We have a lot of pockets of strange illnesses,” says Dana Sargent, executive director of the nonprofit advocacy group Cape Fear River Watch. She notes that people in the area still buy bottled water and are anxious about the pervasive pollution.

Chemours has been sued multiple times for dumping chemicals in public waterways. But scientists and environmental groups are still investigating the extent of the contamination.  In recent research using novel chemical-analysis tools published in the journal Science Advances, scientists from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and North Carolina State University found 11 types of PFAS in the Cape Fear River that were previously undetected in those waters. Even worse, eight of those 11 compounds had never been reported to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), marking them as new forever chemicals. While it’s incredibly difficult to detect and identify toxins scientists aren’t aware, the study authors says this is a crucial step to studying and regulating PFAS that are still under the radar.