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I grew up walking the boardwalk in downtown Wilmington, North Carolina, peering into the froth of the Cape Fear River. The name came from 16th-century mariners who feared its mouth, which was known to churn ships into wrecks. But for the last few decades, there has been something new to fear in the river.

The Cape Fear River was tainted with per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS), the Wilmington Star-News reported in 2017, a group of synthetic compounds now commonly known as “forever chemicals.”

As their name suggests, forever chemicals are renowned for their persistence. One of the strongest bonds in chemistry, carbon and fluorine, gives PFAS their nonstick properties. A seemingly endless list of products — dental floss, tampons, cellphones, wall paint, yoga pants, carpets, contact lenses, hair-straightening treatments, toilet paper — rely on those bonds to smooth, harden, slicken, and withstand heat and wear. But that chemical strength also means that PFAS don’t break down in the environment. They accumulate over time, contaminating our soil, produce, fish, and drinking water — and eventually finding their way into us.

These forever chemicals were flowing into the river from a production facility in Bladen County, North Carolina, operated by Chemours, a chemical company that manufactures Teflon, the coating used in nonstick cookware. When the news broke, I was 15 years old and had been drinking the city’s tap water all my life. Nearly all of Wilmington had: The Cape Fear, the state’s largest river, supplies 80 percent of the city’s drinking water. The water was clear, and it tasted fine — but that didn’t mean it was clean. The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has linked PFAS chemicals to a host of severe health issues, including increased risk of prostate, kidney, and testicular cancers, as well as decreased fertility, reduced ability to fight infections, and developmental delays in children.

After years of public outcry, state officials announced a breakthrough earlier this month. The state had reached a $590 million deal with Chemours and associated companies to provide residents with clean water and repair the damage the pollution has caused. Politicians hailed the payout — the largest environmental-damages settlement in North Carolina history — as a major step forward in holding the company accountable for decades of damage.

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But the agreement stops at the state line — while the contamination does not.

I had assumed, when I began researching Chemours’ pollution, that it was a local problem. But I quickly learned that it’s not just North Carolina struggling to navigate a new forever-chemical normal; it’s not even just the United States. The fluorochemical industry has a pattern of shuffling around PFAS production and waste, from North Carolina to Texas, from Italy to India. Every stop leaves a trail of contamination in its wake.

Chemours operates offices in North and South America, Europe, and Asia, as well as 21 production facilities across the world, not counting research and development sites. Alongside my home state, PFAS contamination has been reported around Chemours’ production plant in West Virginia, as well as around its facilities in Changshu, China, Villers-Saint-Paul, France, Dordrecht, Netherlands, and Mechelen, Belgium. One of the main PFAS chemicals made at Fayetteville Works has even been found in the snow at Antarctica’s Dome.

Tightening regulations in one state or country, I learned, pushes PFAS to another. And because PFAS are so durable, “destroying” them is more like moving them somewhere else for a while; common destruction methods, such as incineration, are often unable to fully destroy the compound. The Department of Defense has described thermal technologies like incineration as having “higher levels of uncertainties regarding their capacity to control the migration of PFAS into the environment.”

In other words, removing forever chemicals from one country, state, or river, such as the Cape Fear, just leads to a larger question: Where will they go next?

On an oppressively muggy day last July, I visited an organic farm in Castle Hayne, North Carolina, run by Ty Jacobus. He grows the essential ingredient in North Carolina’s favorite pie: pecans. Forty trees root in his grove, speckling the ground with shade. Closer to his house, he grows green and aubergine figs, including the “LSU Purple” variety, a deep violet-colored fruit bred at Louisiana State University.

“Everything has its little place,” he told me. Napoleon, Jacobus’ speckled rooster, squawked in the coop behind him.

In 2022, Jacobus decided to have the water in his farm’s well tested for PFAS. He had read in the local paper that, under a court order, Chemours was required to cover the costs of sampling private wells in New Hanover, Pender, Columbus, and Brunswick counties since its Fayetteville Works facility was roughly 80 miles upstream.

Jacobus didn’t think anything would come of the testing.

“I didn’t think we had [PFAS]. When we moved here in 2018, I put in a well that’s 95 feet deep,” he said. “My logic was that if there’s contamination, it’ll be closer to the surface.”

Jacobus recounted receiving the test results as a spreadsheet of chemical names and concentrations. To help him decode the results, he turned to Dana Sargent, then the executive director of Cape Fear River Watch, an environmental protection organization. The fight against PFAS was personal for Sargent: Her brother, a firefighter, passed away from brain cancer at age 46. Around the time that news of Wilmington’s water contamination broke, she learned that firefighting foam is also full of forever chemicals.

Chemours and its former parent company, DuPont, understood the risks of PFAS chemicals decades before I drank them in my sweet tea. A report written by DuPont’s Polychemicals Research and Development department in 1961 found that Teflon coatings (manufactured using PFAS) had “the ability to increase the size of the liver of rats at low doses.” In 1970, Haskell Laboratory, a lab founded and funded by DuPont to study its products, found a legacy PFAS chemical to be “highly toxic when inhaled and moderately toxic when ingested.” In 1992, an internal survey found elevated leukemia and kidney cancer rates among DuPont’s male workers at its Washington Works plant.

Rather than adapt to its findings, the company actively suppressed knowledge of the compounds’ potential effects on workers’ health, according to the nonprofit Environmental Working Group. In 1981, DuPont quietly removed many female employees from roles with high chemical contact. Managers told workers this was based on the results of a preliminary study of unborn rats. They didn’t share that two female workers that year had given birth to babies with eye and facial defects, with PFAS found in the umbilical cord blood of a third.

In 2015, DuPont spun off its Performance Chemicals unit into a new company, Chemours. A Chemours representative told me they “cannot comment on events predating the creation of Chemours in 2015.” But according to a complaint Chemours filed against its former parent company in 2019, DuPont had severely underestimated just how much cleaning up the Fayetteville Works’ contamination would cost — and it’d spun off the company in part to offload those liabilities.

As a result, Chemours was left holding the bag. In 2019, to settle lawsuits filed against it by state regulators and Cape Fear River Watch, the company agreed to a consent order requiring it to provide private well testing and supply replacement water for those affected by........

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