Environmental groups raise concern about PFAS from GlobalFoundries

A coalition of environmental groups is raising concerns about the presence of PFAS chemicals in effluent from GlobalFoundries, a semiconductor manufacturing plant in Essex Junction. The plant routinely discharges into the Winooski River.

The organization Chips Communities United issued a statement Tuesday morning calling attention to the levels of PFAS, shown in data collected by the state’s Department of Environmental Conservation, using the numbers to back a call for further investigation of other semiconductor plants elsewhere in the country. PFAS are also called “forever chemicals” because they don’t break down naturally in the environment.

“We don’t know of any safe level, so we don’t think that companies should be dumping very toxic forever chemicals into waterways,” said Judith Barish, a coalition director with Chips Communities United. “They should be cleaning it up at the point of use.” The organization, based in Washington D.C., was founded to ensure that federal investments funneled toward semiconductor manufacturers are implemented in a way that is “equitable and sustainable,” Barish said.

Vermont’s Department of Environmental Conservation began collecting data about PFAS from GlobalFoundries’ effluent in 2021 then expanded the data collection by including more types of PFAS in October 2023.

A spokesperson for GlobalFoundries did not respond to VTDigger’s request for comment on Tuesday.

Matt Chapman, director of the department’s Waste Management and Prevention Division, said GlobalFoundries reached out to the department in mid-May after seeing the results and has developed a response plan. The department does not see the effluent levels as an immediate safety concern, he said.

The company is looking to replace PFAS in one part of its manufacturing process, Chapman said. In addition, it plans to build a “PFAS waste-specific disposal line that will go to a storage tank where they’ll manage that waste stream outside of their industrial waste discharge stream” and find an appropriate way to dispose of it, he said.

The second part of GlobalFoundries’ plan is included in a permit modification that the department recently granted, Chapman said.

There are no state or federal limits for the amount of PFAS, or per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, that industries can discharge into local waterways, though drinking water limits are in place. Vermont is one of the only states that requires semiconductor manufacturers to report the PFAS they send into the environment.

That lack of regulations has prompted Chips Communities United and other environmental organizations, including Vermont PFAS/Military Poisons Coalition and the Vermont Sierra Club, to argue for more restrictions on PFAS pollution in semiconductor manufacturing, especially considering the industry as a whole has received $150 billion from the federal government in the last four years alone.

“I’m not arguing that we don’t need semiconductors. I’m not even arguing that they should immediately stop using PFAS,” Lenny Siegel, executive director of the group Center for Public Environmental Oversight, run by Siegel out of Mountain View, Calif., said in an interview with VTDigger. “What I’m saying is that the government subsidies to the industry provide an opportunity to involve the public and workers in the oversight of the industry’s practices.”

Siegel, who crafted the report based on Vermont data that formed the basis for Chips Communities United’s announcement on Tuesday, lived next door to a semiconductor plant in Mountain View. He has been calling for more regulation of the contamination coming from the industry as a whole.

Awareness has surged in recent years about the toxicity of some types of PFAS chemicals, and both the state and the federal government have established standards for the chemicals in drinking water. While thousands of types of PFAS exist, some have been studied more closely than others.

In Vermont, the state’s Agency of Natural Resources has been regulating PFAS in public drinking water systems since 2016, after state officials discovered high levels of the substance in private drinking wells in the Bennington area.

Vermont’s drinking water standard states that levels should not exceed 20 parts per trillion of a combination of five types of PFAS. The federal government recently issued a standard stating there should be no more than 4 parts per trillion for the chemicals PFOA and PFOS and 10 parts per trillion of four other types of PFAS.

GlobalFoundries and the state have identified 17 types of PFAS that exist in measurable quantities in the plant’s effluent, according to a press release from Chips Communities United. Chapman, with the Vermont Department of Conservation, confirmed the numbers.

The department measures the concentration of PFAS in effluent quarterly, and took data as recently as June 2024. Over the three quarters logged so far, the numbers ranged from an average of 126.67 parts per trillion for Perfluorobutanoic Acid, or PFBA, to an average of 1.38 parts per trillion for Perfluorooctanesulfonic Acid, or PFOS. Perfluorooctanoic Acid, or PFOA, the chemical that contaminated homes in Bennington, averaged 19.33 parts per trillion.

While many of the PFAS levels exceed the state and federal drinking water standards, Chapman said those standards shouldn’t be used as a metric for gauging the relative dangers of PFAS in surface water.

“The drinking water standard is established based on an individual’s consumption of drinking water on a daily basis over their life, right?” Chapman said. “And so, we would never recommend that anyone drink the water coming out of the pipe to an industrial discharger.”

In terms of immediate safety, he doesn’t “think this poses a significant impact,” he said.

Still, Chapman said the numbers are “a sign for regulators that, especially in manufacturing facilities, that we should be looking at processes to see where PFAS is being used in their process, and how we can mitigate it, eliminate it, or isolate it and manage it.”

Read the story on VTDigger here: Environmental groups raise concern about PFAS from GlobalFoundries .