North Carolina’s Cape Fear River Is a ‘Forever Chemical’ Hotspot—What Does That Mean for Its Birds and People?

South Pelican Island belongs to the birds. Royal Terns circle and screech above this spit of sand and shrub, which juts out of North Carolina’s winding Cape Fear River. Grackles hop among the bushes as sandpipers dart along the water. And as the name of the island suggests, Brown Pelicans abound.

On a gleaming August morning, people have ventured into this avian realm to set up a temporary health clinic along the shore. Two volunteers perched on overturned buckets try to steady their current patient, a young Brown Pelican stretched across their laps. The bird ruffles its downy feathers and lets out dinosaur-like squawks as Lindsay Addison, a coastal biologist with Audubon North Carolina, examines its leg.

She gently inserts a needle to draw deep red blood, while volunteer Marylou Moeller offers comfort. “Good job, buddy,” Moeller says. “Easy, easy, easy.” The vial goes into a cooler as the team—which works under a federal bird banding permit—secures a silver band around the bird’s leg, plucks several feathers, and swirls a swab down its yawning throat pouch and another around its cloaca.

After it’s released, the bird trundles back to its colony, where other chicks waddle among the reeds. Later its samples will be ferried to a series of labs, where scientists are trying to figure out: Is the Cape Fear River, home to these waterbirds, also making them sick?

In 2017 a Wilmington paper broke the news that drinking water drawn from the river was contaminated with GenX—a shorthand for a compound made by a chemical manufacturing plant upstream. The substance belongs to a class of chemicals called per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, or PFAS. Also known as “forever chemicals,” they are infamously long-lasting. They are also increasingly linked with health risks in both wildlife and people.

Amid the public outcry that followed, state officials who investigated learned that for nearly 40 years, the Fayetteville Works plant, a facility owned by DuPont until 2015, had been discharging GenX into the waterway, which provides drinking water for half a million people and key habitat for nesting birds. “If you lived here at all and drank tap water, you drank this stuff,” Addison says. “And if you are a wild animal living anywhere around here, you were exposed to this stuff as well.”

The situation in the Cape Fear region offers an acute example of a widespread issue. After decades of use with little regulation, PFAS have made their way to just about every corner of the world—and the chemicals’ very design means there’s little hope of getting rid of them entirely. As health concerns about this pollution grow, federal, state, and local officials are increasingly working to limit PFAS and clean them up. Meanwhile, scientists like Addison are trying to figure out exactly what PFAS are doing to life on Earth, now and in the long term.

Addison, a Wilmington resident, feels an unfortunate kinship with the birds she’s sampling. “We all had the same experience, unknowingly getting these chemicals into our systems, and we don’t know how it’s going to affect us,” she says. “It’s a really clear illustration of: If you’re doing something to the ecosystems that you’re living in, you’re doing it to yourself.”

The blessing and the curse of PFAS is that they’re hard to destroy. These remarkably durable molecules contain super-strong carbon and fluorine bonds that don’t occur in nature. They resist high heat and corrosion. They repel both water and oil.

Chemists created the first PFAS in the 1930s and were quick to put their innovation to use, including in the Manhattan Project, which built the first atomic bomb. By the ’50s the chemicals were becoming key ingredients in industrial processes and mass-produced consumer goods. DuPont used them for its Teflon nonstick pans, 3M for its Scotchgard stain-proofing spray, and food manufacturers for anti-grease packaging. Over the decades, researchers developed a slew of variations—at least 14,000 PFAS exist today, by some definitions—and manufacturers put them in an astonishing range of products, such as raincoats, upholstery, paint, dental floss, and mascara. 

Yet while the chemicals have been a boon for business, they are a bane for nature. Once PFAS get into the environment, they break down only very slowly or not at all, says Natalie Karouna-Renier, a research ecologist at the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS). That means nearly all the PFAS created over the past century are still lingering, in some form, somewhere. 

Industrial sites that produce or use a lot of PFAS can harbor high concentrations. Military bases and airports, which have long used PFAS-containing firefighting foams for training and emergencies, are also hotspots: The Department of Defense has identified hundreds of sites where PFAS contamination may pose problems. At Holloman Air Force Base in New Mexico, for example, scientists this year found “extraordinary” levels of the chemicals in waterfowl and small mammals, including kangaroo rats that had some of the highest concentrations of PFAS ever recorded in wild animals.

As PFAS and products containing them are created, used, and discarded, the chemicals spread far and wide. When factories emit them from smokestacks or waste, PFAS travel in the air and seep across landscapes. People may absorb small amounts from products like cookware or cosmetics. And the compounds slip through the filtration systems at many landfills and wastewater treatment plants and end up back in the environment. Because some treatment plants sell sewage sludge for fertilizer, they also make their way into crops. The EPA in January said PFAS levels in fertilizer could exceed its safety thresholds “sometimes by several orders of magnitude.”

By now, PFAS have been found snowing down on Antarctica, flowing in air currents over the remote Amazon rainforest, and submerged deep in the ocean. They’re in at least 45 percent of the nation’s tap water, the USGS estimates, and the bloodstreams of nearly all U.S. residents, according to the CDC. Globally, they’ve been detected in hundreds of wildlife species.

Knowledge about the hazards of PFAS pollution dispersed far more slowly than the chemicals themselves. Though internal research suggested as early as the 1960s that PFAS could have toxic effects, lawsuits later revealed that the industry kept those findings under wraps. A turning point came in the early 2000s, when residents of Parkersburg, West Virginia, where DuPont manufactured Teflon for decades, sued the company for contaminating their water and won a class action settlement.

The settlement’s terms required DuPont to fund long-term medical monitoring, resulting in a milestone study that involved more than 69,000 participants. By 2012, this research had established links between exposure to one type of PFAS called PFOA and higher risks of certain cancers, thyroid problems, and bowel disease, among other effects. Since then, according to the EPA, studies of exposed populations have linked PFAS with various health problems, including reproductive issues, developmental delays, immune system suppression, and hormonal interference.  

Today mounting scientific evidence has prompted limits on some PFAS, even as the chemical industry maintains the compounds are essential and can be used safely. In the past two decades, under pressure from regulators and consumers, companies have largely phased out PFOA and PFOS, the most widespread and widely studied of these chemicals. During the Biden administration, the EPA and other agencies made PFAS a major focus and finalized a number of regulations, including establishing the first federal drinking water standards for them. States are also taking varied actions. California banned the chemicals in menstrual products, for example. Maine outlawed them in carpets.

But when it comes to addressing the problem’s full scope, the regulatory system isn’t keeping up, says North Carolina State University environmental engineer Detlef Knappe, whose research with EPA scientists discovered PFAS in Wilmington’s drinking water. The current framework treats PFAS as “innocent until proven guilty,” he says, regulating individual chemicals only after years of painstaking research. 

The EPA’s regulations so far, for example, cover just a handful of specific PFAS out of the thousands in circulation. Meanwhile, companies churn out new versions, sometimes with only minor variations. “It’s just Whac-A-Mole,” Knappe says. “We fix this thing, and this next thing pops up over here that is one atom different.”

The Fayetteville Works plant along the Cape Fear River illustrates the limits of that one-by-one approach. In the early 2000s it produced PFOA, which DuPont used to manufacture Teflon. As PFOA’s risks became a growing public concern, the plant switched to producing a different kind of PFAS, one it claimed would be safer. That replacement was GenX.

Fayetteville Works in rural Bladen County sits in a dense woodland between a highway and the river. Along the waterway’s 100-mile path from the plant to the ocean, municipalities pull tens of millions of gallons a day into drinking water systems. “It’s the lifeblood of this community, that river,” says Dana Sargent, executive director of the nonprofit Cape Fear River Watch. Today people across the region are embroiled in a complicated battle to protect the river—and their health. 

As DuPont phased out PFOA, the company applied to the EPA, under the Toxic Substances Control Act, for permission to manufacture new chemicals—including HFPO-DA, commonly called GenX after the patented technology platform it’s used in. While data were limited at the time, EPA reviewers raised concerns that, like PFOA, the chemicals “will persist in the environment, could bioaccumulate, and be toxic to people, wild mammals, and birds.” DuPont agreed to a range of safety requirements that included preventing 99 percent of GenX from exiting through wastewater and air emissions. In 2009 the agency gave the company the go-ahead.

What regulators seemingly didn’t know, Knappe says, is that long before the factory produced GenX commercially, it had been discharging the chemical as a waste by-product of other manufacturing processes. Those releases came to light after the Wilmington Star-News published its story about  water contamination downstream of the plant. The discharges stretched back to 1980, when the factory first got into the PFAS business, representatives from Chemours—the DuPont spin-off that has owned and operated the plant since 2015—told officials in meetings that followed. “It turned out that they were generating GenX as a by-product from day one,” Knappe says. 

The reaction was swift. The state’s Department of Environmental Quality (DEQ) filed suit against the company, alleging Chemours had “failed to disclose and even made statements that misled DEQ” about PFAS in the factory’s wastewater. Cape Fear River Watch sued Chemours, as well as the DEQ for failing to take stronger action.

The problem went beyond GenX in the river. The facility was also releasing various PFAS into the air through its stacks and into the soil and ground­water, says Jean Zhuang, an attorney with the Southern Environmental Law Center, which represented Cape Fear River Watch in its lawsuit. Studies since 2017 have  detected a wide range of different PFAS in the area, including some known to be produced at the Fayetteville plant. Chemours noted there are many other sources of PFAS in the state.

The company settled the lawsuits with the DEQ and Cape Fear River Watch in a 2019 consent order, which required plant upgrades to limit GenX emissions in the air, water, and soil. The order also required Chemours to pay for bottled water and in-home filtration systems for residents whose wells were contaminated. (In a statement to Audubon, a Chemours spokesperson said that the company was already working to reduce PFAS emissions before the consent order and has invested more than $400 million in containment, treatment, and cleanup efforts at the Fayetteville Works site.) Some local utilities, too, have added systems of massive water filters that use carbon particles to catch PFAS before they flow to the tap. So far, utilities and their ratepayers are funding these upgrades, though some are suing Chemours to recoup costs—including the water authority for downstream Wilmington, which finished a $43 million upgrade project in 2022.

Despite such mitigation measures, the chemicals are a fact of daily life for locals. An ongoing North Carolina State University study found that in 2023, residents in the agricultural area near the plant, along with those in Wilmington, still had higher-than-average levels of various PFAS in their bloodstreams, though levels were lower than they’d been in earlier rounds of testing. The years of exposure have left many with a sense of dread and uncertainty and have upended their relationships with their lands and waters.

In the Gray’s Creek neighborhood, a few miles from the plant, plastic water bottles are stacked on Jamie White’s front porch. She grows tomatoes, spinach, and other vegetables in raised beds to keep them out of the soil. Out back, next to her horse’s paddock, a nondescript shed houses a PFAS filtration system that Chemours was required to install after White’s well tested above the state’s provisional limit of 140 parts per trillion for GenX. (The EPA’s drinking water standard set last April is far stricter, at 10 parts per trillion—a level more than 2,000 wells in 10 North Carolina counties have exceeded, according to the DEQ.) But White and some of her neighbors don’t trust these measures. “How do we know that we’re actually safe?” says Mike Watters, who leads a local PFAS community outreach group. “I’m buying bottled water for use in cooking and all that.”

Mitchell Porter grew up hunting in the woods and fishing in the river near Fayetteville Works, but now he hunts elsewhere and no longer eats his catch. He worries that PFAS exposure is contributing to health problems in the community, like his daughter’s hyperthyroidism. “That’s my biggest fear in the world, is my kids are sick. I mean, they drank this stuff their whole life,” Porter says. “We just don’t know.” Some studies have linked PFAS to increased thyroid disease risk, though effects in specific cases are exceedingly hard to prove. 

Chemours maintains that HFPO-DA—the chemical name for what many refer to as GenX— doesn’t pose a risk to human health and notes that it was not one of the PFAS detected in the residents’ blood samples. “Over a decade of scientific data confirms HFPO-DA’s safety profile,” the company said in a statement to Audubon. “Multiple studies demonstrate that HFPO-DA does not bioaccumulate and, if incidental exposure were to occur, it would be rapidly eliminated from the body.”

Indeed, there’s still limited but emerging data on newer PFAS like GenX, which are built in shorter carbon chains that could pass through the body more quickly than older chemicals like PFOA. But the evidence so far has scientists and regulators concerned: The EPA’s 2021 toxicity assessment for GenX, based on lab animal studies, linked the chemicals with damaging effects, especially on the liver.  

A larger-scale, long-term study like the one near the Teflon factory in West Virginia could help residents better understand their risk, says Emily Donovan. The grassroots group she cofounded, Clean Cape Fear, is pushing for such a project, but hasn’t secured funding. “The science is still unfolding to determine if all the illnesses we’re seeing in this area are related to our PFAS exposures,” Donovan says. “But we deserve the right to know.”

As hard as it may be to conduct health studies on humans, it’s even harder with wild animals. “They do not respond to questionnaires,” Addison says. “They don’t have phone numbers.”

Out on the river in August, those challenges are on full display.  Possibly dehydrated, the chicks on South Pelican Island weren’t bleeding well, so the team shifts to another nesting site. On Battery Island, where birds perch amid gnarled trees and dense, spiky underbrush, volunteers spend the afternoon muscling through branches and scampering up trees to track, herd, and coax pelicans. After Addison draws a vial from the day’s 32nd and last bird, the group cheers. “Way to stick with the day,” Addison calls as the team packs up, bearing small scratches and a distinct musky smell.

Audubon North Carolina has, for decades, managed barrier islands in the Cape Fear estuary for seabirds and shorebirds, providing crucial nesting habitat away from the rapid development and disturbance along mainland shores. But such isolation hasn’t protected the species from PFAS, as Addison and EPA physical scientist Anna Robuck discovered. In 2017 and 2018, after learning about the river contamination, Addison sent dead pelican chicks from the estuary to Robuck for testing. The subsequent analysis found various PFAS in the chicks, including some GenX and other newer chemicals, as well as older ones now out of production.

When it comes to birds and other wildlife, most research has focused simply on figuring out whether PFAS are turning up in their bodies. The short answer, says Robuck, is they are: “It is just very rare for wildlife not to have some PFAS in them.” Animals are likely picking up the chemicals in some of the same ways people do, she says: breathing them, drinking them, or eating them in their food. 

Unraveling the effects of PFAS, as Addison and her collaborators aim to do, is far more complicated. Using the samples collected in August and the previous summer, the team will investigate whether PFAS are compromising the pelicans’ immune systems. Researchers at the USGS Eastern Ecological Science Center will check for PFAS in plasma samples from the Cape Fear pelicans and in samples from birds on a small, remote island in the Outer Banks, which are potentially less exposed to the chemicals. The team will compare those PFAS levels with measures of the birds’ health in the two groups, including checking for viruses and testing how their immune cells fight bacteria.

Although the team hasn’t finished its analysis, a growing number of field studies around the world already suggest wildlife health is suffering. By comparing animals in highly polluted areas with those in less exposed control groups, studies have linked PFAS with a range of impacts, such as reduced hatching success in Tree Swallows, thyroid disruptions in Peregrine Falcons, and lower body mass in Great Black-backed Gulls.

Scott Belcher, an environmental toxicologist at North Carolina State University, tested alligators in the Cape Fear River after noticing they had lingering open wounds, a surprising sight for the quick-healing species. His lab had previously found high levels of PFAS in the river’s striped bass, and he suspected the chemicals could be contributing to the fish population’s dwindling numbers. Now, he found heightened PFAS levels in the reptiles’ blood, as well as signs their immune systems were turning on themselves: deformed blood cells, changes in autoimmune gene expression, and antibodies that target the body’s own DNA.

On a basic level, PFAS bind with proteins in the body, which can throw animals’ systems out of balance, Belcher says. However, it’s tricky to draw conclusions about broad effects on wildlife given all the variables involved: Different species and different PFAS may react in different ways, and at varying levels of exposure. For example, the chemicals could overstimulate immune systems, or depress them and make it harder to fight infections. But while the specifics may change, he says, the overall effect is clear: These chemicals are taking a toll.

In some ways, the story of PFAS follows a familiar arc: Scientists create a useful chemical, industries send it into the world, and regulators reckon with the fallout. The specter of DDT still hangs over Brown Pelicans, which were devastated by the insecticide’s eggshell-thinning effects and only rebounded after its 1972 ban. “That happens all the time, with all sorts of different chemicals,” says the USGS’s Karouna-Renier, who is testing Addison’s pelican samples. “We create our messes before we know how to deal with them.”

This particular mess is especially hard to remedy. While filtration systems can pull PFAS out of water pipes and other specific sources, the chemicals remain intact and must be stored. Scientists are testing ways to break the seemingly unbreakable molecules, from blasting them in high pressure and heat to releasing microbes that eat through the chemical bonds. But even as funding has ramped up, no method to feasibly destroy PFAS at a large scale is currently available. “Are we going to get it all out of the environment?” Karouna-Renier says. “I doubt it.”

Still, there’s hope that regulation can curb the damage. Drinking water has been the EPA’s priority: The rules finalized last April require water utilities to limit six kinds of PFAS, including GenX, to very low levels by 2029. (For PFOA and PFOS, these limits are set at 4 parts per trillion—the lowest feasibly detectable levels—but the agency notes “there is no level of exposure to these two PFAS without risk of health impacts.”) The EPA estimates that 6 to 10 percent of public drinking water systems subject to this rule need upgrades, which would cost around $1.5 billion a year to implement.

While the rules represent major progress, they place the financial burden on communities, not polluters—and still don’t keep PFAS out of ecosystems, Zhuang says. Advocates are pushing for regulation, including stronger Clean Water Act enforcement, to prevent the pollutants from being released into waterways in the first place. In 2024 environmental agencies in North Carolina, New Mexico, and New Jersey filed a petition asking the EPA to regulate the chemicals as air pollutants, too.

The EPA has taken some further steps toward a more ecosystem-wide approach. Last year it announced updated pre-­manufacture review processes under the Toxic Substances Control Act and drafted a plan to limit PFAS in industrial discharges. The agency also added PFOA and PFOS to a list of chemicals that polluters must pay to clean up under federal Superfund law.

The future of such efforts is unclear. EPA administrator Lee Zeldin supported some PFAS regulations during his tenure in Congress, and said during his confirmation hearing in January that the chemicals would be a “top priority.” But President Trump has also appointed former chemical industry executives to the agency and has withdrawn in-progress regulations pending his administration’s review, including the proposal to limit PFAS in wastewater. Such moves have environmental groups concerned that progress will stall or reverse—even as leaders like Clean Cape Fear’s Donovan say cleaning up PFAS is a cause that unites their communities across the political spectrum.

In any case, for some scientists and environmental and health advocates, the federal government hasn’t gone far enough, especially as companies continue to create more PFAS and more waste. A growing number argue that regulations should tackle the substances as a class of chemicals, instead of one by one. Even though research hasn’t untangled all the impacts of various PFAS—and some may indeed be less harmful than others—Sargent, of Cape Fear River Watch, says it’s imperative to stop producing the chemicals entirely and look for alternatives. There is some movement in this direction in the European Union, which is evaluating a proposed blanket ban of around 10,000 PFAS. Certain U.S. states are also taking a more comprehensive approach. Starting this year, Minnesota has outlawed PFAS in 11 product categories, including cookware and kids’ products, with plans to phase out all “nonessential use” by 2032.

Some, like Knappe, also hope the problem of PFAS could one day break the toxic cycle of allowing chemicals to become widespread before regulators are sure they’re safe—shifting to an approach known as the precautionary principle. “You err on the side of caution and say, ‘Well, we don’t know much about this chemical, but it’s maybe not a good idea to just dump it in a drinking water source,’ ” he says. 

The far-reaching effects of PFAS underscore how human health is inextricably linked with the health of our surrounding ecosystems. Yet for Addison, they’ve also exposed a gulf. The Brown Pelicans she’s sampling can’t understand that they’re picking up poison from the river. Neither can the Black Skimmers that ply the water’s surface to scoop up shiny herring, or the Ruddy Turnstones that probe and prod above the waterline. “They can never know, and they can never give consent,” she says. 

For a long time, Addison points out, the people of North Carolina also didn’t know the risks in their waters. But now that they’re aware, they are the ones who can fight to get the Cape Fear River cleaned up—for every living thing that depends on it.