Forever in the Ground: The PFAS Story, Start to Finish

By Robert O'Neal, Society Hill, South Carolina. A plain-language series in a prequel and ten parts, each with its own sources.

Part 0 (the prequel): Before the refrigerator, how the South kept cool

Before we get to the lab accident that started PFAS, let's go back further, to a time when a block of ice in a South Carolina summer was close to a miracle. The whole PFAS story grew out of one plain human wish: to keep food cold without anybody getting hurt.

Keeping cool the old way

For most of history, Southern families kept food the way their grandparents taught them. Meat was salted, smoked, and cured in the smokehouse. Vegetables were canned, pickled, or stored in a root cellar. Milk and butter went down to the springhouse, where cold spring water ran over the crocks, or got lowered in a bucket into the well. Some farms dug an ice house, a deep pit or thick-walled shed packed with sawdust or straw to hold ice through the warm months. In our climate, there usually wasn't much winter ice to fill it.

Ice by ship from Boston

That changed because of a stubborn Boston businessman named Frederic Tudor, later called the "Ice King." He was born in 1783 into a wealthy family; his father, a Boston judge, had advised George Washington as Judge Advocate of the Continental Army.

In 1805, when Frederic was 21, his brother joked at a party that pond ice could be cut and sold to rich folks in the Caribbean. Frederic took the joke seriously. In February 1806 he shipped what was probably the first cargo of ice ever exported from any country. Most people thought he was crazy, and at first they were right: the ice melted, and he lost $4,000. He went deep into debt, and by 1833 he was nearly bankrupt again.

But he kept learning. He had men cut blocks from frozen New England ponds, packed them in sawdust, and built insulated ice houses at every port he served. In 1817 he opened an ice house in Charleston, and soon Charleston was the hub for ice deliveries across the Lowcountry. Savannah followed the next year, and New Orleans in 1820. Charleston was one of his strongholds, and when a rival dared to sell ice there, Tudor met him with a price war.

The business that shipped 130 tons of ice in 1806 was shipping 146,000 tons fifty years later, to Charleston, Savannah, New Orleans, Havana, and as far away as Calcutta and Singapore. Henry David Thoreau, watching a hundred men cut ice from his pond at Walden, grumbled that the sweltering people of Charleston and New Orleans were drinking from his well.

Here's a detail that ties right back to our story. The ice trade worked because ships were already carrying Southern cotton up to the textile mills around Boston. Instead of sailing back south empty, they hauled ice. Cotton went north to the mills, and ice came south in the same ships. Even then, textile mills and the South were tied together.

Ice wasn't just for cold drinks. Doctors used it to bring down fevers, and hospitals depended on it. It was valuable enough to be called "liquid gold."

A Florida doctor makes his own ice

In the 1840s, a doctor named John Gorrie in Apalachicola, Florida, was treating patients burning up with yellow fever and malaria. He used shipped ice to cool their rooms, but the ice often ran out. So he built a machine that could make ice. In 1851 he got a patent for it, one of the first ice machines in the world.

It should have changed everything. But investors wouldn't back him, and newspapers mocked the idea of man-made ice. Gorrie came to suspect the Ice King himself was behind the campaign against him. He died in debt in 1855.

The war that cut off the ice

Then came the Civil War. Once the fighting began in April 1861, shipments of Northern ice to Charleston stopped, and the Union blockade sealed off Southern ports. The South had come to depend on Yankee ice, and now it was gone.

So men in New Orleans did something bold. They bought small French ice machines, invented by Ferdinand Carré, and ran them through the blockade on smuggling ships. After the war, in 1868, New Orleans opened the Louisiana Ice Manufacturing Company, the world's first industrial ice-making plant. The South had gone from depending on Northern ice to making its own.

The iceman cometh

Ice plants spread across the South. By 1875 there were plants in Florida, Louisiana, Alabama, and Mississippi, and by 1920 the country had 4,800 block-ice plants making about 40 million tons of ice a year. Families bought iceboxes, and the iceman came around with his wagon or truck, hauling blocks into the kitchen with tongs. Older folks around here may still remember him. Ice was so important that during both world wars, a man could be excused from service if he worked at an ice plant.

The dangerous new refrigerator

By the 1920s, electric refrigerators began to replace the icebox. But there was a deadly catch. Those early machines ran on gases like ammonia (the same chemical the old Carré ice machines used), sulfur dioxide, and methyl chloride. They were poisonous, and some could catch fire. A leak at night could fill a house with gas. People were afraid of them, with good reason.

In 1928, a General Motors engineer named Thomas Midgley Jr. came up with a fix: a gas made with fluorine that didn't burn and didn't poison. At a chemistry meeting in 1930, he breathed in a lungful of it and blew out a candle to prove it was safe. GM and DuPont went into business together to sell it under the name Freon.

Freon made fluorine chemistry big business for DuPont. So in 1938, DuPont put a young chemist named Roy Plunkett to work looking for the next fluorine refrigerant.

He never found it. He found something else instead. That's Part 1.

(Forever in the Ground, Part 0, the prequel. From the springhouse to the iceman to the electric fridge, every step was about keeping food cold and people safe. One of those steps led straight to PFAS.)

Part 1 of 10: It started with an accident in 1938

The chemicals now in our soil and water here in Darlington County began as a lab mistake nobody meant to make. And the man who made it was a farm boy.

A farm boy from Ohio

Roy Plunkett was born in 1910 in New Carlisle, Ohio, and grew up poor on his parents' farm during the hard years of the Great Depression. He worked his way through a small college in Indiana, where his roommate, Paul Flory, would later win a Nobel Prize in chemistry. Plunkett went on to earn his PhD from Ohio State University in 1936, and that same year he landed a good-paying job with DuPont, one of the biggest chemical companies in the country.

The job: a safer refrigerator

As Part 0 told, the early refrigerators ran on gases like ammonia and sulfur dioxide, which regularly poisoned food-industry workers and people in their own homes. DuPont was already selling a safer fluorine-based gas called Freon, and Plunkett's first assignment at the company's Jackson Laboratory in Deepwater, New Jersey, was to make new kinds of Freon.

To do it, he made a large batch of a gas called tetrafluoroethylene, about 100 pounds of it. He packed it into small metal cylinders and stored them on dry ice overnight, so it would be ready to use the next day.

April 6, 1938: the cylinder that wouldn't empty

The next morning, Plunkett and his assistant, Jack Rebok, hooked up a cylinder and opened the valve. Nothing came out.

Plunkett's first thought was that the gas had leaked away. But when they weighed the cylinder, it was just as heavy as a full one. Whatever was in there hadn't gone anywhere. So they did what any curious farm boy might do: they took a saw to it, cut it open, and looked inside.

The inside was coated with a white, waxy powder. Overnight, the gas molecules had linked together into long chains and turned into a solid. Plunkett had accidentally made a brand-new material: polytetrafluoroethylene, or PTFE.

A "failure" that wouldn't quit

At first it looked like a failed experiment. But instead of throwing the stuff out, Plunkett and his assistant tested it. They found that it was extremely slippery, and it didn't react with most chemicals. It didn't melt easily. Acids didn't eat it. Almost nothing stuck to it.

Plunkett then worked out how to make it happen on purpose in the lab, and he received a patent for PTFE in 1941. It was the first of the chemicals we now call PFAS.

Its first job: the atomic bomb

At first, PTFE was so expensive to make that DuPont wasn't sure it would ever find a market. Then World War II gave it one. The Manhattan Project, the secret program that built the atomic bomb, needed to handle a gas made from uranium and fluorine that destroyed almost every material it touched. PTFE held up. It was used to coat valves and seals in the pipes at the uranium plant in Oak Ridge, Tennessee.

From the war to the kitchen

After the war, the name Teflon was registered as a trademark in 1945, and the first Teflon products sold in 1946 were machine parts for military and industrial uses.

Here's a name to remember: when DuPont opened its first commercial Teflon plant, it built it in Parkersburg, West Virginia. That's the same town whose drinking water turned up poisoned decades later. Hold onto that. It's the heart of Part 3.

When Plunkett won a big science award in 1951, every guest at the banquet went home with a Teflon-coated muffin tin. Then, in 1954, a French engineer named Marc Grégoire, who'd been using the slippery stuff on his fishing tackle, coated a frying pan with it at his wife's urging. The non-stick pan was born. It reached American kitchens in 1961.

What happened to Plunkett

Plunkett didn't stay with Teflon. The next year he was put in charge of DuPont's production of tetraethyl lead, the additive in leaded gasoline, another chemical invented by Thomas Midgley from Part 0, and another one later banned for the harm it caused. Plunkett spent his whole career at DuPont, retired in 1975, and died in 1994, celebrated as a great inventor.

Two roommates, two different paths

Remember Plunkett's college roommate, Paul Flory? Like Plunkett, he went on to Ohio State and then to DuPont. But Flory spent his career figuring out how long-chain molecules called polymers behave, and in 1974 he won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for it. Teflon is one of those polymers.

Flory's best-known work explains whether a polymer will mix with a liquid or separate from it. In plain terms, it's the science behind "like dissolves like." That science now helps researchers design the fine filters and plastic "sponges" used to pull PFAS out of water. A 2025 study at Montclair State University found that a plastic with a fluorine-rich section built into it removed PFOA from water much better than plastics without one, because fluorine is drawn to fluorine. It uses fluorine to catch fluorine.

So the two roommates went in different directions. One accidentally made the first PFAS. The other worked out the polymer science that researchers now use to help clean it up.

Why this matters to us

Plunkett didn't set out to hurt anybody. He was trying to make refrigerators safer. But the very thing that made his discovery a miracle, that it won't react, won't break down, won't let go, is the exact same thing that makes PFAS a nightmare today. A chemical that never breaks down is wonderful in a frying pan. It's a disaster when it's in your well water, because it never leaves.

Over the next few parts, I'll walk through how it got from that one lab cylinder in 1938 all the way to farm fields in South Carolina. Follow along.

(Forever in the Ground, Part 1 of 10. Share this with anyone who should understand it too.)

Part 2 of 10: Why they call them "forever chemicals"

You've probably heard PFAS called "forever chemicals." That nickname isn't marketing. It's chemistry, and it's worth understanding, because it explains why this problem won't just wash away on its own.

PFAS aren't one chemical. They're a whole family. Thousands of cousins, all built the same basic way: a chain of carbon atoms wrapped tight in fluorine. That bond between carbon and fluorine is the key to everything.

Think of it this way. Most pollutants, given enough time, break down. Sunlight, rain, and the tiny bugs in soil and water chew them up and turn them back into harmless stuff. That's nature's cleanup crew, and it works on almost everything.

It does not work on PFAS. The carbon-fluorine bond is one of the strongest bonds in all of chemistry, so strong that the bacteria, the sunlight, the enzymes, none of them can pull it apart. So the chemical just sits there. In the soil. In the water. In a cow. In a person's blood. For years. For decades. Essentially forever, as far as a human lifetime is concerned.

That toughness is exactly why industry loved them. A raincoat the water rolls right off. A pan nothing sticks to. A carpet that shrugs off stains. All of that is the same unbreakable bond doing its job. The trouble is that a chemical built to never give up doesn't know the difference between your jacket and your drinking water.

Two names you'll see again and again as this story goes on: PFOA and PFOS. They're two of the most studied and most worrying members of the family, because once they're in your body, they build up and stay. PFOA also goes by the nickname "C8." Remember that one, because it's coming back in the next part.

(Forever in the Ground, Part 2 of 10. The chemistry is the whole reason this matters, so folks understand why "forever" is the right word.)

Part 3 of 10: How one accident became everywhere

After World War II, industry figured out that these never-break-down chemicals could do all kinds of useful jobs. Production exploded. Here's how PFAS went from one lab cylinder to just about every house in America.

The non-stick pan. To actually manufacture Teflon coatings, DuPont needed a helper chemical in the factory. Starting in the early 1950s, at a plant near Parkersburg, West Virginia, they used one nicknamed "C8." That's the PFOA from the last part. It was never supposed to end up in your kitchen. It was a factory tool. But it had to be made and dumped by the ton.

Scotchgard. Around the same time, the company 3M up in Minnesota started making a different PFAS for Scotchgard, the spray and treatment that made fabric shrug off stains. That's how these chemicals got woven into carpets, couches, and clothes all across the country.

Firefighting foam. The third big one is the foam used to smother fuel fires at airports, military bases, and fire departments. It works incredibly well. It's also packed with PFAS that soak straight down into the ground and the groundwater everywhere it's sprayed.

For decades, almost nobody outside these companies knew any of this. That changed in Parkersburg. People living near that DuPont plant noticed their water tasted strange, their livestock were getting sick and dying. In 2001 they filed a lawsuit saying the company had knowingly poisoned their drinking water for years.

And here's the gut-punch: the company's own internal records later showed they knew C8 was dangerous. One document admitted the chemical would seep through protective gloves given enough time, while workers and neighbors were being told not to worry. That case blew the whole thing wide open and kicked off the lawsuits and regulations still rolling out today.

If that story of sick livestock and bad water near an industrial site sounds familiar, well, hold that thought. We'll get there.

(Forever in the Ground, Part 3 of 10.)

Part 4 of 10: Who actually makes these chemicals

Here's something that surprises people: for all the billions of PFAS-containing products out in the world, only a handful of companies actually make the chemicals themselves. It's a short list.

The two names at the center of the whole American story are 3M and DuPont. 3M made the PFAS behind Scotchgard and firefighting foam going back to the 1950s. DuPont made the C8 behind Teflon. DuPont later spun its chemical business off into a company called Chemours, which still earns a huge share of its money from PFAS.

But it's a global business. Big chemical makers in Japan, France, Belgium, Germany, India, and China all produce PFAS too, names like Daikin, Arkema, Solvay, and BASF.

Now, you'd think with all the lawsuits and bad press, these companies would be racing to get out of the PFAS business. A few are. 3M has said it's winding down. BASF says it'll phase most of it out. A company called Ecolab says it'll be out by the end of 2026.

But here's the twist that ought to make everybody pay attention. A watchdog group reported in 2026 that most of the major producers are actually expanding, building more capacity, not less. Why? Because the booming world of AI data centers, computer chips, and electric-car batteries all need these chemicals. So even as the cleanup bills pile up, production is growing.

That's the backdrop to keep in mind: this is not a problem from the past that's winding down. It's an active, growing industry. That's all the more reason the rest of us need to understand it.

(Forever in the Ground, Part 4 of 10.)

Part 5 of 10: They're in almost everything (and that's the problem)

A few companies make PFAS. But the list of who uses them is just about everybody. Anytime a product needs to resist water, grease, heat, or stains, chances are PFAS got the call.

Look around your own house and you'll find them:

• Non-stick pots and pans
• Stain-resistant carpet, couches, and clothes
• Grease-proof food packaging: fast-food wrappers, microwave popcorn bags, pizza boxes
• Waterproof jackets and rain gear
• Some makeup, dental floss, and paper products
• Firefighting foam at airports and military bases

It's so widespread that a national study found PFAS in the blood of 97 percent of Americans tested. Not 97 percent of people near a factory. 97 percent of everybody. That's how thoroughly these chemicals have spread.

Now here's the part that hits closest to home, and it's important to get it right. A textile mill, the kind that used to run here, does not make PFAS. It uses them.

Think about what a finishing mill does. It takes fabric and treats it so it resists stains and repels water, the same Scotchgard-type magic from Part 3. To do that, the mill buys fluorochemical finishes by the drum and runs them through the fabric. And all that leftover rinse water, now carrying PFAS, goes down the drain.

Where does it go from there? To a wastewater treatment plant. And that is exactly where the next chapter of this story picks up, because what happens at that plant is how these chemicals found their way out of the factory and onto the land.

(Forever in the Ground, Part 5 of 10.)

Part 6 of 10: The treatment plant that can't stop them

So the PFAS go down the drain from a mill, from a factory, and from every house washing stain-proof carpets and waterproof coats. Everything flows to the same place: the wastewater treatment plant. You'd hope that's where the problem gets cleaned up. It isn't.

First, understand the three ways PFAS get into that plant. One, industry sending its process water down the sewer. Two, the ordinary wear and washing of PFAS products in thousands of ordinary homes. A little sheds off every wash. Three, things getting thrown away and their runoff reaching the system. All of it legal. All of it routine.

And here's the heart of the whole problem. A wastewater plant is built to let bacteria eat and break down the waste. That works beautifully on normal sewage. But remember Part 2. PFAS are the chemicals that nothing can break down. The bacteria can't touch them. The plant was never designed to remove them, and it simply can't.

So the PFAS don't vanish. They split into two streams leaving the plant. Some stays in the treated water that flows out. But a lot of it clings to the solid gunk that settles out, the sludge. Once that sludge is processed, it gets a friendlier name: biosolids.

Hold onto that word, because biosolids are the missing link. They're how a chemical that started in a factory drain ends up out on open farmland. That's the final step, and it's the next part, and the most important one.

One more thing worth saying plainly: because the plant can't remove PFAS, the only thing that actually works is keeping them out in the first place. You can't filter your way out of this at the end. You have to stop it at the source.

(Forever in the Ground, Part 6 of 10.)

Part 7 of 10: How it ends up in a farmer's field

This is the part that brings it all home, right down into the dirt. Everything so far has been leading here.

Remember those biosolids from the last part, the leftover sludge the treatment plant can't clean the PFAS out of? The plant has to do something with all of it. There are three choices: bury it in a landfill, burn it, or spread it on farmland. That third option is common, because the sludge is cheap and full of nutrients. It even gets a nice-sounding label: a "beneficial use" soil amendment. Free fertilizer, they say.

But if that sludge came from water carrying PFAS, then spreading it on a field means spreading forever chemicals on the ground. And forever means forever. They don't break down, so they stay in that soil.

From there, the chemicals keep moving:

• They soak down into the groundwater and run off into creeks, contaminating wells and streams.
• Crops pull them up out of the soil and into the food.
• Livestock eating that feed or grazing that ground build the chemicals up in their bodies, their milk, and their meat.
• People drink the water and eat the food, and the chemical that beat the treatment plant now sits in us and won't leave.

And the worst loads of all come from sludge that started with heavy industrial PFAS, say from a textile or chemical plant upstream. Some states have already restricted or stopped spreading sludge from those industrial sources once they figured out what was in it.

Now put the whole chain together, because this is the Darlington County story in one breath: a textile mill using PFAS, its wastewater going to a plant that couldn't remove it, the leftover sludge spread on farm fields, and the contamination then turning up in the soil, the water, and the people living on that land.

Everything from Roy Plunkett's 1938 accident funnels down into that one field. That's why this matters here. That's why I'm sharing it.

(Forever in the Ground, Part 7 of 10.)

Part 8 of 10: Check your own house

The parts so far have been about how PFAS got into our fields. This one is closer still: the PFAS sitting in your kitchen, your closet, and your bathroom right now. You don't have to throw everything out. But you should know where to look.

The rule of thumb is simple. If a product is sold on being non-stick, waterproof, stain-proof, or grease-proof, there's a good chance PFAS are doing that job. Let's go room by room.

In the kitchen

• Non-stick pots and pans. The original Teflon use. Scratched, worn, or overheated pans are the ones to retire first.
• Grease-proof food packaging. Fast-food wrappers, microwave popcorn bags, some pizza boxes, and some paper plates and bowls. The coating that keeps grease from soaking through is often PFAS.
• Some baking and air-fryer liners sold as non-stick.

In the closet

• Waterproof jackets, rain gear, and hunting or outdoor clothing. The "water beads right off" finish is the giveaway.
• Stain-resistant or wrinkle-free clothing, including some work pants, school uniforms, and "performance" shirts.
• Waterproofed boots and shoes, and the waterproofing sprays sold for them.

What about Gore-Tex? It's the best-known waterproof fabric there is, and the classic version is PFAS. The waterproof layer inside a Gore-Tex jacket or boot is a thin membrane called ePTFE, which is a stretched-out form of PTFE, the same stuff Roy Plunkett discovered in 1938. The outside got a water-repellent coating too, and those coatings were historically made with long-chain C8 compounds, the same family as the C8 from Part 3.

The good news: in 2024 Gore announced it was replacing that membrane with a new one made of expanded polyethylene, called ePE, for consumer products. If you own older Gore-Tex, it almost certainly has the PTFE membrane. If you're buying new, look for "ePE" or "PFAS-free" on the tag. Two catches: Gore says its PFAS-free products are made without intentionally added PFAS but may still contain trace amounts, and the newer water-repellent finishes need washing and re-proofing more often to keep water beading off.

In the living room and bedroom

• Stain-resistant carpet and rugs.
• Couches, chairs, and mattresses treated to resist spills and stains.
• Fabric protector sprays, the Scotchgard-type treatments from Part 3.

In the bathroom

• Some dental floss, especially the kind that glides extra smooth.
• Some cosmetics, mostly long-wear and waterproof products like mascara, foundation, and lipstick.
• Some cleaning products sold as stain-repelling.

In the garage

• Some car waxes and polishes. A 2023 review found 14 car wax or polish products with "Teflon" or "PTFE" on the package or in the name, and an earlier study found PFOA in two car waxes.
• Some lubricants and spray coatings. The same review found 14 vehicle lubricants, most with PTFE in the name, and a pilot study of 18 automotive lubricants found 13 types of PFAS.
• The label won't always tell you. Most of those products listed no PFAS on their safety sheets, and some makers claimed trade secrets. Your best clue is "Teflon" or "PTFE" on the bottle. Old-fashioned carnauba wax is a good swap.

Where does it go? Wash your truck in the yard and the runoff goes into the ground or the storm drain. At a car wash, the water runs through settling tanks, and the gunk that collects there is pumped out as sludge. PFAS have turned up in car wash wastewater and nearby groundwater at several sites. Same story as the rest of this series: what goes down the drain upstream comes out somewhere downstream.

In the barn and shed

This one matters for farm families. A 2024 study found that 66 pesticide active ingredients approved in the U.S. qualify as PFAS, about 14 percent of all of them, and nearly a third of the ones approved in the last ten years. Companies add them partly because they help the product last longer in the field. The same study found eight approved "inert" pesticide ingredients are PFAS too, Teflon among them. One catch: the EPA uses a narrower definition of PFAS, so it doesn't count many of these as PFAS. Firefighting foam, some lubricants, and some sealants round out the list.

How to spot them on a label

Most products won't say "PFAS." Look instead for:

• PTFE or Teflon
• Any ingredient with "fluoro" in the name
• Claims like stain-resistant, water-repellent, grease-proof, or non-stick
• A "PFAS-free" or "PFOA-free" label. But be careful. "PFOA-free" only means one chemical is gone. Another PFAS may have taken its place.

Simple swaps

• Cook in cast iron, stainless steel, carbon steel, or glass. Your grandmother's skillet was PFAS-free.
• Pop popcorn on the stove instead of in a bag.
• Skip the fabric protector spray. Wipe spills fast instead.
• When you buy rain gear, carpet, or furniture, look for brands that say "PFAS-free" outright.
• Floss and makeup brands now advertise PFAS-free versions. They cost about the same.

The states are starting to act

Some states aren't waiting on Washington. On January 1, 2026, new PFAS rules took effect in Colorado, Connecticut, Maine, Minnesota, Vermont, and Washington. Maine now bans intentionally added PFAS in cleaning products, cookware, cosmetics, children's products, and more, and it plans to ban them in nearly every product by 2032. Minnesota's law, named "Amara's Law," banned PFAS in 11 product categories starting in 2025, carpets, cookware, and dental floss among them.

South Carolina isn't on that list. Many national brands are changing their recipes so they can keep selling in those states, and that helps us too. But here, it's still on us to read the label.

None of this is about panic. It's about knowing. Clean water and clean ground start upstream, and every PFAS-free choice at the store is one less drop headed for the drain, the treatment plant, and the field.

(Forever in the Ground, Part 8 of 10. Share it with anyone who's ever wondered what's in their own kitchen.)

Part 9 of 10: The new reason they're making more: AI

If you've followed this series, you might figure PFAS are an old problem winding down. Lawsuits, settlements, state bans. Surely the companies are getting out. Here's the hard truth: most of them are making more. And a big reason is artificial intelligence.

Those giant AI data centers going up around the country need three things that lean on PFAS.

1. The computer chips. Every AI system runs on powerful chips, and the factories that make those chips use PFAS because the chemicals hold up under extreme heat and harsh acids. By one estimate, PFAS are used in up to 1,000 steps of chip manufacturing. So a lot of the PFAS behind AI never shows up at the data center at all. It's built into the supply chain upstream, at the chip plants.

2. Cooling the servers. AI chips run hot. Really hot. One newer way to cool them is to dunk the whole server in a bath of liquid. In "two-phase immersion cooling," the servers sit in a pool of PFAS that boils as the hardware heats up, carrying the heat off as vapor. Companies pitch it as saving water and electricity.

And guess who's selling the newest cooling fluid? Chemours, the company DuPont spun off, the same family from Parkersburg back in Part 3. Its fluid, Opteon 2P50, was still awaiting federal approval and not yet sold in the U.S. as of 2026.

To be fair and accurate here: most data centers don't cool this way. Air cooling and liquid cooling without PFAS are far more common, and Microsoft has said it doesn't add PFAS to its data-center cooling. But the industry is betting this use will grow, and a single large center could need tens of thousands of liters of the fluid.

3. Everything else in the building. Data centers are packed with servers, chips, cooling systems, and fire suppressants, all possible sources of PFAS. The huge banks of backup batteries count too, since lithium-ion battery materials are another driver of PFAS demand.

Why this should matter to us

This is why the makers aren't backing off. A watchdog group found that nine of the ten biggest PFAS makers plan to expand, pointing to AI chips and data-center cooling. Arkema, one of the companies from Part 4, has announced a new $60 million production unit in Kentucky.

And almost nobody is checking what comes out of these places. As of late 2025, no testing had been done for PFAS air or water pollution from data centers, and companies weren't required to report what they use or release.

Think back to Part 6. Factories make it, it goes down the drain, the treatment plant can't stop it, and it ends up on somebody's land. More production means more of it in that same pipeline. That's the lesson from Darlington County: what goes in upstream comes out downstream. If a data center or chip plant comes to your county, it's fair to ask what chemicals they'll use, and where the waste goes.

(Forever in the Ground, Part 9 of 10. The story of PFAS isn't over. It's still being written, and we all deserve to know the next chapter.)

Part 10 of 10: What it means, and what we can do

Thank you for following this all the way through. Let me pull the thread together and talk about where we go from here.

In one breath, here's the whole story: a chemical discovered by accident in 1938, built so tough that nothing in nature can break it down, got used in almost everything we own. When those products are made and washed and thrown away, the chemicals wash into treatment plants that can't remove them. The leftover sludge gets spread on farmland as fertilizer, and from there it goes into our soil, our water, our crops, our livestock, and us. Forever.

That can feel heavy. But understanding it is the first real step, and there are things that help:

• Know your water. If you're on a private well near farmland or an old industrial site, PFAS testing is worth looking into. You can't taste it or smell it. Testing is the only way to know.
• Ask where the sludge comes from. Communities have a right to ask what's being spread on nearby fields and where it originated.
• Push for source control. The only thing that truly works is keeping PFAS out of the water in the first place. That's a policy fight, and it's winnable, but only if enough people understand the problem.
• Share what you've learned. Most folks have never heard any of this. Every person who understands the chain is one more voice that can ask the right questions.

This isn't about panic. It's about ordinary people, farmers, neighbors and families, understanding what's in their ground and their water, and having the facts to stand on. That's the whole reason I put this series together.

If these parts helped you understand it, share them. Pass them to a neighbor. The more of us who get it, the harder we are to ignore.

Want the story of the company behind it? Read The DuPonts next.

(Forever in the Ground, Part 10 of 10. Thank you for reading, and for caring about the ground we all stand on.)