Settlements · $670M + $1.18B DuPont & "Forever Chemicals" — They Knew for Forty Years

For decades DuPont made Teflon using C8 (PFOA), a "forever chemical" that does not break down in the body or environment. Internal documents surfaced in litigation showed the company's own scientists had warning signs of C8's toxicity by the 1960s and evidence of birth defects in workers' children by the 1980s — yet DuPont kept discharging it into the air and water around its Washington Works plant on the West Virginia–Ohio border. After a class action and a science panel that linked C8 to kidney and testicular cancer and other diseases, DuPont and its spin-off Chemours settled roughly 3,500 personal-injury claims in 2017 for $670.7 million. In 2023, DuPont, Chemours and Corteva agreed to pay $1.185 billion to settle PFAS contamination claims by US public water systems serving most of the country (Chemours ~$592M, DuPont ~$400M, Corteva ~$193M), with further state settlements following (Ohio $110M, others). Tier note: these are settlements, and the companies expressly stated they were "not an admission of liability." What is documented beyond the settlements is the internal-knowledge trail — the decades-long gap between what DuPont knew and what it disclosed.