Chemours

Emily Donovan is the co-founder of Clean Cape Fear, a North Carolina community advocacy group formed after residents discovered their drinking water had been contaminated with PFAS compounds discharged by a nearby DuPont facility for decades.

DuPont and Chemours used the Cape Fear region as a PFAS sacrifice zone for nearly half a century without our knowledge or consent.

She brought that story to a House Energy and Commerce subcommittee hearing on PFAS liability in December 2025.

Our contamination crisis was so bad the United Nations Human Rights Council investigated our area and called out DuPont, Chemours, federal, and state regulators for failing to stop business-related human rights abuses.

DuPont maintains that it does not own the North Carolina site where Cape Fear River contamination originated.

The company asserts it never manufactured PFAS at the plant, saying its 2015 spin-off, The Chemours Company, which operates the facility, is solely responsible.

In the years and decades that followed, the evidence for toxicity kept accumulating, and PFAS-like compounds continued to spread around the globe.

And as manufacturers faced pressure to phase out the most notorious compounds, they didn't stop.

It answers a harder question.

Who pays if the company still doing the cleanup cannot finish the job? North Carolina announced on September 10 that Chemours, DuPont, Corteva, and EIDP had agreed pay $455 million over 15 years to resolve PEEF and other historical discharge claims tied to Chemours' Fayetteville Works facility, along with separate state claims unconnected to the site.

The state values the full agreement at $590 million, with $380 million earmarked directly for 10 counties, municipalities, and the Lower Cape Fear Water and Sewer Authority near the plant.

The companies put the settlement's net present value at roughly $355 million, and $18 million of the total covers contamination unrelated to Fayetteville Works.

Under a 2021 cost-sharing agreement among the three companies, Chemours covers half the payments and expects to pay about $50 million over the next 12 months.

DuPont's pre-tax present value share is about $126 million, with 44% of that reimbursed by Cuniti Electronics and covered by existing accruals.

The settlement also satisfies the company's remaining contribution obligations to that 2021 arrangement, including a $50 million payment that had been due this month and credits roughly $210 million of prior qualifying spend against it.

The $135 million reserve covers what the cash payment does not.

And I want to put that in a bottle and resell it.

They can't do that unless they get the blessings from the patent owner of being successful Chemours and Honeywell, there's an agreement, which I don't understand all the details.

They have to get permission before they can even do that.

So when we had the shortage, there were reclaimed companies that weren't allowed to provide the refrigerant because they didn't have the authorization to do that.