When Madeleine Sparrow was in middle school, she spent an afternoon at her best friend’s house in Pittsboro, a small town in central North Carolina. Sparrow walked to the kitchen to fill a glass of water when her young friend interjected.
“Don’t drink from the sink,” she told Sparrow. “It has PFAS in it.”
Sparrow, who was twelve years old at the time, didn’t yet know what PFAS were. Her friend explained that invisible chemicals were polluting the water, making it unsafe to drink.
“Unsafe” was putting it lightly. Perfluoroalkyl and polyfluoroalkyl substances, known as “forever chemicals” or PFAS, are synthetic chemicals pervasive in the groundwater and drinking supply. The numerous risks of consumption include cancer, immune system suppression, developmental delays, and infertility.
Sparrow didn’t drink the cup of water that night, and ten years later, she enrolled at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill to study environmental health sciences. Today, she is part of the Coronell Research Group, a professor- and student-led research initiative that specializes in water filtration and contamination. Her area of focus is creating granular sorbents that filter PFAS out of water by binding to and capturing the toxic chemicals. It’s one of the few tools to combat what may be the most pervasive water quality issue in the United States.
In North Carolina, major chemical manufacturers are widely recognized as the largest producers of PFAS—multiple types of which have been classified by the International Agency for Research on Cancer as carcinogenic or likely carcinogenic. Industry giants, such as 3M and Chemours, pioneered the use of these chemicals to create products resistant to grease and water, including firefighting foam.
Crucial water sources in North Carolina—like the Haw River and its watershed, Jordan Lake, which provide drinking water to nearly one million residents— have endured decades of deadly pollution as a result of runoff and discharge operations from nearby manufacturing sites and military bases. Widespread PFAS contamination has been discovered in water systems in nearly every county in the state. In 2024, a test of an elementary school’s well in rural Asheboro found PFAS contamination at levels 233 times over federal safety standards.
“In North Carolina, it’s a big deal,” Sparrow says. “Most people either know someone or have had [PFAS] contaminated water at some point in their lives.”
But the federal government appears reluctant to intervene in a meaningful capacity. In June, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the U.S. Department of Justice announced a controversial $450 million settlement with Chemours that would compel the manufacturer to pay out $22.5 million in civil penalties for alleged toxic waste violations in North Carolina, West Virginia, and New Jersey. Further millions are then expected to be allotted to provide a supply of clean drinking water in New Jersey and West Virginia. But in North Carolina, Chemours is expected to compensate only in the form of “[evaluating] options and [implementing] corresponding controls to reduce releases of PFAS.”
State officials in North Carolina called out Chemours and the EPA for their evasiveness, slamming the proposal as a backroom deal reached through negotiations in which they were not included. What’s more, they pointed out, the settlement did not include a guarantee of water cleanup or relief for residents impacted by the PFAS contamination.
The EPA’s unwillingness to make stricter demands of a manufacturer whose pollution impacts millions of Americans is symptomatic of an industry-friendly agency. In the months since President Donald Trump’s second inauguration, the EPA has stripped grant funding for national PFAS research, delayed compliance deadlines for PFAS manufacturers, and moved to rescind Biden-era maximum containment levels for four common types of PFAS. Without federal guidelines, states have to grapple with PFAS on their own.
“There’s not a clear pathway for how the [settlement] money is going to show up in our state and actually help us,” says Dr. Kelly McConnell, a pediatrician and chair of the Sierra Club’s chapter in southeastern North Carolina.
McConnell’s chapter is based out of Cape Fear, a community of about 22,000 residents who have felt major impacts from decades of PFAS distribution from Chemours and DuPont at the Fayetteville Works Plant. The nearly 2,000-acre chemical manufacturing facility is situated along the Cape Fear River, which flows into a river basin that provides drinking water to 1.5 million people in the state.
In 2022, installing specialized PFAS filters at a water treatment plant cost the Cape Fear Public Utility Authority nearly $50 million in engineering and construction alone.
“Our state has spent so much money putting in this really expensive filtration system, and [Chemours] should be paying for that extra work and extra cost,” says McConnell. “And my concern is that this doesn’t address all the money we’ve already spent.”
To further complicate the crisis, North Carolina does not yet have its own state-enforceable regulations on PFAS in public drinking water. The years-long struggle to develop them has included tough lobbying by wastewater and manufacturing industries.
North Carolina’s most recently proposed rules for PFAS monitoring and minimization reveal a jarring dissonance between residents’ health and the interests of lobbyists that cannot or will not be federally curtailed. In 2024, the state’s Republican-appointed Environmental Management Commission (EMC) rejected a proposed set of rules backed by years of public health research. Since the beginning of 2026, the EMC has been in the process of considering a replacement: a controversial, industry-friendly replacement proposal that offers no official numeric limits for PFAS in surface water. Instead of requiring dischargers to reduce their PFAS contamination, this proposal allows dischargers to monitor their own PFAS distribution and lists no penalties for noncompliance.
Advocates say this isn’t a surprise: Some commissioners on the environmental commission own stock in companies that have publicly lobbied against PFAS. Water protection advocates and environmental attorneys have slammed the proposal since its conception. But without federal guidelines in place, there is no higher authority with which to demand more accountability.
“These [proposed] rules have no teeth to actually protect us,” McConnell says. “These companies can continue dumping and nothing will happen to them.”
In April, North Carolina state environmental officials held a public comment session in Wilmington about the rules put forth by the EMC. So many residents and advocates showed up that doorkeepers had to turn some individuals away.
“Though I did feel powerless to see and understand the makeup of the EMC and the rules they proposed,” McConnell says, “it did feel really good to see how big of a public response there was.”
Linda Schoeni, a retired Wilmington-area resident and Sierra Club volunteer, says the comment session was a “packed house.” In the days leading up to the hearing, Schoeni helped coach prospective attendees on how to effectively relay their concerns during their comment, which was limited to three minutes per person.
“We told them to talk about how PFAS has personally impacted [them], and to talk about what [they’re] most concerned about as a citizen that consumes water in this area, that participates in water sports, that enjoys the beach,” Schoeni says. “We told them to speak from the heart, and that was really what we heard.”
Some organizers are hopeful the state will listen to North Carolina residents’ opposition to the proposed rules and change course. McConnell recounts a time in 2024 when residents’ opposition to construction on the western bank of the Cape Fear River directly caused the planning board to vote against the development plan.
“We have examples in the last couple of years of getting the community to stand up and speak up, and it has changed the course that our government was going on,” McConnell says. “Rather than going, ‘The EMC is a mess and so industry friendly; nothing’s going to happen,’ I try to look at it as, ‘Every time we have a big [public] showing, we do see a shift.’ I hope that happens with these rules.”