Chemours, DuPont and Corteva have reached a settlement with the State of North Carolina and eleven local entities to resolve litigation over PFAS and other historical discharges from one of the companies’ North Carolina production sites, along with separate state claims of PFAS contamination unrelated to that site, including from the use of firefighting foam. The parties involved include Bladen, Brunswick, Columbus, Cumberland, New Hanover, Robeson and Sampson counties, the City of Lumberton, the Town of Wrightsville Beach, the Village of Bald Head Island and the Lower Cape Fear Water and Sewer Authority, all of them located near the affected facility, in the vicinity of which the eleven entities had been excluded from the 2024 US Public Water System Class Settlement.
Payments will total 455 million dollars over fifteen years, with Chemours covering half, around 180 million dollars on a net present value basis. The agreement also credits the substantial investments and progress made under Chemours’ 2019 Consent Order with North Carolina, which reduced PFAS emissions from the site and mitigated off-site impacts on surrounding communities, and it sets out procedures to address remaining obligations, including implementation of drinking water programmes. Court approval and dismissal of the underlying lawsuits are still needed before it takes effect.
A pattern of separate settlements
North Carolina is the latest entry in a sequence of PFAS agreements involving the same three companies, each one addressing a gap the previous deal left open.
It starts with the January 2021 memorandum of understanding between DuPont, Corteva and Chemours, which set the template every later settlement follows: a 50/50 cost split between Chemours on one side and DuPont and Corteva on the other, backed by a shared escrow account for future legacy PFAS liabilities.
That framework was first put to use at scale in June 2023, when the three companies agreed to a 1.185 billion dollar national fund to compensate public drinking water utilities directly for the cost of testing and treating PFAS in the water they supply. That settlement, however, carried built in exclusions: it left out water systems owned by a state or the federal government, and Cape Fear River Basin utilities in North Carolina were only covered if they specifically opted in. State attorneys general, pursuing broader environmental and natural resource claims rather than utility cost recovery, were never part of it.
New Jersey filled part of that gap in August 2025, when the companies agreed to pay 875 million dollars over 25 years to resolve the state’s claims across four current and former operating sites, plus statewide AFFF contamination.
Then came a federal enforcement settlement in June 2026, brought jointly by the Department of Justice, the Environmental Protection Agency and West Virginia’s environmental regulator. That 450 million dollar deal, addressed alleged unpermitted PFAS discharges into the Ohio, Cape Fear and Delaware rivers, requiring Chemours to install pollution controls on its surface water discharges, pay civil penalties, and supply clean drinking water to communities near its West Virginia and New Jersey sites.
3M and other manufacturers follow a similar path
Chemours, DuPont and Corteva are not the only companies working through this pattern of settlements. 3M, a much larger PFAS manufacturer, reached its own national public water system settlement alongside the June 2023 agreement, worth up to 12.5 billion dollars over 13 years, the largest drinking water settlement of its kind, and received final court approval in March 2024.
3M has since followed the same state-by-state route as Chemours. In May 2025, it agreed to pay New Jersey between 400 million and 450 million dollars over 25 years for claims tied to its historical PFAS supply to the Chambers Works site, making New Jersey the second state to reach such a deal with 3M after Minnesota settled for 850 million dollars in 2018.
By mid-2025, payments from the 3M and DuPont-linked national settlements combined had already begun reaching water providers, with more than 900 million dollars distributed in the first wave alone.
What comes next
The North Carolina settlement still requires the relevant courts to dismiss the underlying lawsuits before it becomes final, a step that took New Jersey’s settlement several months to clear in late 2025.
Personal injury claims and natural resource damage claims from other states remain largely outside every settlement reached so far. Broader regulatory developments, including the pace of enforcement under the EPA’s national PFAS drinking water rule, will also continue to shape how many more utilities and states pursue their own claims against the three companies.
Individual water systems are also still testing the limits of what the national settlements covered. The City of Hastings, Minnesota, sued 3M in August 2026 over PFOA contamination in five public wells, having opted out of the 2023 national settlement to pursue its own claim. More utilities may follow the same route.
