States are banning forever chemicals. Industry is fighting back

National Observer

15-05-2025

This story was originally published by Wired and appears here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration
In 2021, James Kenney and his husband were at a big box store buying a piece of furniture when the sales associate asked if they'd like to add fabric protectant. Kenney, the cabinet secretary of New Mexico's Environment Department, asked to see the product data sheet. Both he and his husband were shocked to see forever chemicals listed as ingredients in the protectant.
'I think about your normal, everyday New Mexican who is trying to get by, make their furniture last a little longer, and they think, 'Oh, it's safe, great!' It's not safe,' he says. 'It just so happens that they tried to sell it to the environment secretary.'
Last week, the New Mexico legislature passed a pair of bills that Kenney hopes will help protect consumers in his state. If signed by the governor, the legislation would eventually ban consumer products that have added PFAS—per- and polyfluorinated alkyl substances, known colloquially as 'forever chemicals' because of their persistence in the environment—from being sold in New Mexico.
As health and environmental concerns about forever chemicals mount nationally, New Mexico joins a small but growing number of states that are moving to limit—and, in some cases, ban—PFAS in consumer products. New Mexico is now the third state to pass a PFAS ban through the legislature. Ten other states have bans or limits on added PFAS in certain consumer products, including cookware, carpet, apparel, and cosmetics. This year, at least 29 states—a record number—have PFAS-related bills before state legislatures, according to an analysis of bills by Safer States, a network of state-based advocacy organizations working on issues around potentially unsafe chemicals.
The chemical and consumer products industries have taken notice of this new wave of regulations and are mounting a counterattack, lobbying state legislatures to advocate for the safety of their products—and, in one case, suing to prevent the laws from taking effect. Some of the key exemptions made in New Mexico highlight some of the big fights that industries are hoping they'll win in statehouses across the country: fights they are already taking to a newly industry-friendly US Environmental Protection Agency.
PFAS is not just one chemical but a class of thousands. The first PFAS were developed in the 1930s; thanks to their nonstick properties and unique durability, their popularity grew in industrial and consumer uses in the postwar era. The chemicals were soon omnipresent in American lives, coating cookware, preventing furniture and carpets from staining, and acting as a surfactant in firefighting foam.
In 1999, a man in West Virginia filed a lawsuit against US chemical giant DuPont alleging that pollution from its factory was killing his cattle. The lawsuit revealed that DuPont had concealed evidence of PFAS's negative health effects on workers from the government for decades. In the years since, the chemical industry has paid out billions in settlement fees around PFAS lawsuits: in 2024, the American multinational 3M agreed to pay between $10 billion and $12.5 billion to US public water systems that had detected PFAS in their water supplies to pay for remediation and future testing, though the company did not admit liability. (DuPont and its separate chemical company Chemours continue to deny any wrongdoing in lawsuits involving them, including the original West Virginia suit.)
As the moniker 'forever chemicals' suggests, mounting research has shown that PFAS accumulate in the environment and in our bodies and can be responsible for a number of health problems, from high cholesterol to reproductive issues and cancer. EPA figures released earlier this year show that almost half of the US population is currently exposed to PFAS in their drinking water. Nearly all Americans, meanwhile, have at least one type of PFAS in their blood.
For a class of chemicals with such terrifying properties, there's been surprisingly little regulation of PFAS at the federal level. One of the most-studied PFAS chemicals, PFOA, began to be phased out in the US in the early 2000s, with major companies eliminating the chemical and related compounds under EPA guidance by 2015. The chemical industry and manufacturers say that the replacements they have found for the most dangerous chemicals are safe. But the federal government, as a whole, has lagged behind the science when it comes to regulations: The EPA only set official drinking water limits for six types of PFAS in 2024.
In lieu of federal guidance, states have started taking action. In 2021, Maine, which identified an epidemic of PFAS pollution on its farms in 2016, passed the first-ever law banning the sale of consumer products with PFAS. Minnesota followed suit in 2023.
'The cookware industry has historically not really engaged in advocacy, whether it's advocacy or regulatory,' says Steve Burns, a lobbyist who represents the industry. But laws against PFAS in consumer products—particularly a bill in California, which required cookware manufacturers to disclose to consumers if they use any PFAS chemicals in their products—were a 'wakeup call' for the industry.
Burns is president of the Cookware Sustainability Alliance, a 501c6 formed in 2024 by two major companies in the cookware industry. He and his colleagues have had a busy year, testifying in 10 statehouses across the country against PFAS restrictions or bans (and, in some cases, in favor of new laws that would exempt their products from existing bans). In February, the CSA was one of more than 40 industry groups and manufacturers to sign a letter to New Mexico lawmakers opposing its PFAS ban when it was first introduced. The CSA also filed a suit against the state of Minnesota in January, alleging that its PFAS ban is unconstitutional.
Its work has paid off. Unlike the Maine or Minnesota laws, the New Mexico bill specifically exempts fluoropolymers, a key ingredient in nonstick cookware and a type of PFAS chemical, from the coming bans. The industry has also seen success overseas: France excluded kitchenware from its recent PFAS ban following a lobbying push by Cookware Sustainability Alliance member Groupe SEB. (The CSA operates only in the US and was not involved in that effort.)
'As an industry, we do believe that if we're able to make our case, we're able to have a conversation, present the science and all the independent studies we have, most times people will say well, you make a good point,' Burns says. 'This is a different chemistry.'
It's not just the cookware industry making this argument. Erich Shea, the director of product communications at the American Chemistry Council, told WIRED in an email that the group supports New Mexico's fluoropolymer exclusion and that it will 'allow New Mexico to avoid the headaches experienced by decisionmakers in other states.'
The FDA has authorized nonstick cookware for human use since the 1960s. Some research—including one peer-reviewed study conducted by the American Chemistry Council's Performance Fluoropolymer Partnership, whose members include 3M and Chemours, has found that fluoropolymers are safe to consume and less harmful than other types of PFAS. Separate research has called their safety into question.
However, the production of fluoropolymers for use in nonstick cookware and other products has historically released harmful PFAS into the environment. And while major US manufacturers have phased out PFOA in their production chain, other factories overseas still use the chemical in making fluoropolymers.
The debate over fluoropolymers' inclusion in state bans is part of a larger argument made by industry and business groups: that states are defining PFAS chemicals too broadly, opening the door to overregulation of safe products. A position paper from the Cookware Sustainability Alliance provided to WIRED lambasts the 'indiscriminate definition of PFAS' in many states with recent bans or restrictions.
'Our argument is that fluoropolymers are very different from PFAS chemicals of concern,' Burns says.
Some advocates disagree. The exemption of fluoropolymers from New Mexico's ban, along with a host of other industry-specific exemptions in the bill, means that the legislation 'is not going to meet the stated intentions of what the bill's sponsors want it to do,' says Gretchen Salter, the policy director at Safer States.
Advocates like Salter have concerns around the use of forever chemicals in the production of fluoropolymers as well as their durability throughout their life cycles. 'Fluoropolymers are PFAS. PFAS plastics are PFAS. They are dangerous at every stage of their life, from production to use to disposal,' she claims.
Kenney acknowledges that the fluoropolymer exemption has garnered a 'little bit of criticism.' But he says that this bill is meant to be a starting point.
'We're not trying to demonize PFAS—it's in a lot of things that we rightfully still use—but we are trying to gauge the risk,' he says. 'We don't expect this to be a one and done. We expect science to grow and the exemptions to change.'
With a newly industry-friendly set of regulators in DC, industry groups are looking for wins at the federal level too. In February, an organization of chemical manufacturers and business groups, including the American Chemistry Council and the Cookware Sustainability Alliance, sent a letter to the EPA outlining suggested 'principles and policy recommendations' around PFAS. The group emphasized the need to 'recognize that PFAS are a broad class of chemistries with very diverse and necessary properties' and recommended the agency adopt a government-wide definition of PFAS based on West Virginia and Delaware's definitions. Both of those states have a much more conservative definition of what defines PFAS than dozens of other states, including Maine, New Mexico, and Minnesota.
A federal definition like this could 'have a chilling effect on state legislation going forward,' said Melanie Benesh, the vice president of government affairs at the Environmental Working Group, an environmental activist organization. 'There would be this federal position that the chemical industry could point to, which might be convincing to some state legislators to say, well, this is what the federal government has said is a definition of PFAS. As you start excluding PFAS from the class, you really limit what PFAS are covered by consumer product bans.'
Shea, of the American Chemistry Council, told WIRED that the group believes 'that the federal regulatory approach is preferable to a patchwork of different and potentially conflicting state approaches.'
States with bans face a monumental task in truly getting PFAS out of consumers' lives. Vendors in Minnesota have been left with expensive inventory that they can no longer sell; Maine's law, one of the most aggressive, makes exemptions for 'currently unavoidable use' of PFAS, including in semiconductors, lab equipment, and medical devices. PFAS are used in so many of the products in our lives that it's almost unfathomable to think of phasing them out altogether, as soon as possible.
For advocates like Salter, it's a change worth making.
'There might be essential uses for PFAS right now,' she says. 'But we want to spur the search for safer alternatives, because we don't want to give a pass to chemicals that are harming human health. By exempting them altogether, you are completely removing that incentive.'