States prohibit chemicals forever. The industry is fighting back

In 2021 James Kenney and his husband were in a Big Box Store bought a piece of furniture when the sales employee asked if they wanted to add fabric protection. Kenney, the cabinet secretary of New Mexico’s environmental department, asked for the product data sheet. Both he and his husband, a chemical engineer, were shocked when he was listed forever chemicals as ingredients in the protective agent.

“I think of your normal, everyday New Mexican, who tries to get through, keep your furniture a little longer, and you think:” Oh, it’s safe, great! “It’s not safe,” he says. “It just happens that you tried to sell it to the environmental secretary.”

Last week, the legislation of New Mexico passed a few legislative templates that Kenney hopes to protect consumers in their state. If the governor were signed, the legislation would ultimately prohibit consumer goods products that have added PFAs- per- and polyfluorinated alkyl substances, which, due to their persistence in the environment, are known to be known as “forever chemicals”- by the sold in New Mexico.

Since health and environmental concerns use chemicals forever with regard to the nationwide mount of chemicals, New Mexico follows a small but growing number of countries that are limited to consumer goods – and in some cases prohibited -. New Mexico is now the third state that adopted a PFAS ban by the legislator. Ten other states have bans or borders for additional PFAs in certain consumer goods, including cookware, carpet, clothing and cosmetics. This year, at least 29 states-one record-point law enforcement templates before the state legislation according to a analysis Of the invoices of Safer States, a network of state interests, which deal with problems about potentially uncertain chemicals.

The chemical and consumer goods industries have taken note of this new wave of provisions and provides a counterattack that praises state legislation in order to work for the safety of their products – and in one case to prevent the law from entering into force. Some of the most important exceptions in New Mexico emphasize some of the big battles in which the industries hope that they will win across the country in Stagehouse: fights that they already lead to a new industry-friendly US environmental protection authority.

Pfas is not just a chemical, but a class of thousands. The first pfas were developed in the 1930s; Thanks to their non -Steak real estate and their unique durability, their popularity in industrialists and consumers grew in the post -war period. The chemicals were soon omnipresent in American life, coated cookware, preventing furniture and carpets from coloring and acting as a surfactant in the fire brigade foam.

In 1999 a man in West Virginia A submitted a suit Against the US chemical giant Dupont, who claimed that environmental pollution from her factory killed his cattle. The lawsuit showed that Dupont had hidden evidence of the negative health effects of PFAs on employees from the government for decades. In the years since then, the chemical industry has triggered billions of comparison fees in terms of PFAS lawsuits: in 2024, the American multinational 3M agreed to pay Between 10 and 12.5 billion US dollars for US public water systems that had discovered PFAs in their water supply to pay for renovation and future tests, although the company had not approved any liability. (Dupont and its separate chemical companies Chemours continue to refuse all the complaints they concern, including the original suit from West Virginia.)