This story was originally produced by the New Hampshire Bulletin, an independent local newsroom that allows NHPR and other outlets to republish its reporting.
Saint-Gobain Performance Plastics, the multi-national corporation widely blamed for contaminating southern New Hampshire’s air and water with dangerous levels of PFAS chemicals, has finished demolishing the Merrimack manufacturing facility at the center of the controversy, the company announced Thursday.
The state of New Hampshire has long blamed the plastics manufacturer with contaminating the air and water in Merrimack, Londonderry, Bedford, Litchfield and Hudson. In 2016, per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, or PFAS, were discovered in hundreds of wells in the area surrounding the company’s Merrimack facility and many more have been discovered in the years since.
Saint-Gobain did not admit to wrong-doing but in 2022, the company agreed in court as part of a consent decree to provide clean drinking water to approximately 1,000 homes whose water was contaminated. The following year, it announced it was closing the facility, which had been operating since 1986, ostensibly as part of a corporate restructuring across the company’s North American operations.
“Over the course of the past 18 months, the company has been working to diligently and responsibly wind down operations at the facility in Merrimack and complete the facility demolition in line with our decommissioning and demolition plan,” Saint-Gobain said in its statement. “The demolition process is now complete. We have coordinated closely with state and local authorities and regulators throughout this process and will continue to fulfill our remediation commitments in the region.”
PFAS chemicals, often referred to as “forever chemicals” because they are so hard to break down, have been linked to cancer risk, reproductive complications and other health issues. The state Department of Health and Human Services found elevated rates of kidney cancer in Merrimack from 2009 to 2018, according to a 2023 report. Further analysis found that kidney cancer rates were rising in Merrimack and across New Hampshire while those rates remained stable across the rest of the U.S. DHHS wrote there was “a statistically significant, albeit modest excess of cases of kidney cancer in Merrimack.”
A class action lawsuit against the company brought by a group of New Hampshire residents is ongoing. Other class action lawsuits over PFAS contamination at the company’s other facilities in Vermont and New York have ended in settlements.
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