States Are Banning Forever Chemicals. Industry Is Fighting Back

Originally published in Wired.

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.”