
NORTH CAROLINA — The Department of Environmental Quality is extending the public comment period for the revised permit of one of North Carolina’s largest known PFAS dischargers.
Lear Corporation is a global automotive manufacturer whose Kenansville textile facility releases PFAS in the northeast Cape Fear River, which flows downstream to Wilmington. The Department of Environmental Quality required suspected industrial polluters including Lear to carry out wastewater sampling in 2019; the company’s PFAS discharges were as high as 1,863 parts per trillion.
Lear’s Kenansville facility has faced 49 permit violations since its last permit renewal in October 2018. The multinational company earned $573 million in profits last year.
“Those are just the violations that got caught,” Cape Fear River Watch Riverkeeper Kemp Burdette told Port City Daily. “It’s obvious that they’re doing plenty of discharging that doesn’t get seen.”
Burdette twice informed the Department of Environmental Quality of Lear’s foam discharges in recent years but the agency only issued one notice of violation after receiving his complaints.
DEQ’s original 2024 draft renewal permit for Lear only required it to monitor PFAS emissions without mandated limitations. After receiving hundreds of public comments demanding tangible restrictions on Lear’s PFAS discharges, DEQ extended the public comment period for Lear’s permit in March.
“It is clear to me that those living upstream in the Cape Fear River Watershed regard the Lower Cape Fear River as their personal dumping ground,” retired public health engineer Brayton Willis wrote to DEQ — “their toilet if you will, for disposing of industrial, CAFO, coal ash, municipal, and other point, and non-point sources of waste.”
Last week, DEQ announced it had revised Lear’s permit and would again extend public comment period until Jan. 10. The new draft permit requires the company to perform a study of optimal technology for reducing PFAS in wastewater, expand its monitoring, and implement best available practices.
Port City Daily reached out to Lear to ask about its PFAS transition plan but did not receive a response by press.
Under the 1972 Clean Water Act, the federal government delegates the authority to issue permits that regulate pollutant dischargers to states. The Environmental Protection Agency has determined permit holders that release undisclosed compounds, including PFAS, are in violation of the Clean Water Act; Lear’s permit renewal application did not include its PFAS wastewater concentrations.
Cape Fear River Watch Riverkeeper Kemp Burdette collected fish for tissue sampling downstream of the Kenansville facility in July. A year earlier, the North Carolina Department of Health and Human Services issued a fish consumption health advisory due to high levels of PFOS found in fish sampling in the lower Cape Fear River.
GEL Laboratories LLC analyzed the tissue and found PFOS concentrations at far higher than those that triggered the health and human services advisory:
- PFOS levels in largemouth bass downstream of Lear Corporation were 559 parts per billion, more than 20 times higher than levels that triggered the DHHS advisory
- PFOS levels in large bluegill were almost eight times greater than the DHHS advisory
- PFOS levels in small bluegill were almost 12 times greater than the DHHS advisory
“This is a devastating discovery as largemouth bass and bluegill sunfish are two of the most important subsistence fish in the Northeastern Cape Fear ecosystem,” the Southern Environmental Law Center wrote to the North Carolina Department of Environmental Quality on behalf of Cape Fear River Watch in August. “This fish contamination highlights the need for strict pollution control in Lear’s NPDES permit.”
States have several means of enforcing the Clean Water Act through discharge permits, including “narrative standards” regulating individual facilities and statewide numerical standards — which North Carolina remains without for PFAS — that put a specific limit on compounds.
The Southern Environmental Law Center, Cape Fear River Watch, and three other North Carolina nonprofits submitted a petition to the Environmental Protection Agency in August requesting federal intervention in North Carolina’s PFAS regulation. The groups argued elected and appointed officials have systematically obstructed DEQ’s ability to restrict the compounds with narrative or numerical standards through legislation limiting DEQ authority, expensive litigation, and by underfunding the agency.
However, former EPA Office of Science and Technology director Betsy Southerland told Port City Daily DEQ had another means of enforcing tangible PFAS limits in Lear’s permit:
“The Clean Water Act clearly says that if EPA has not done technology-based standards nationally for a particular pollutant for a particular industry the state is fully authorized to do what’s called ‘best professional judgment’ permit limits. They are technology based and you don’t have to have water quality standards in place, because that takes years.”
Environmental Protection Agency scientist Bridget Staples emailed DEQ in May stating technology-based limits were the minimum level of control that must be included in Lear’s permit. DEQ carried out groundwater well testing near the facility later that month finding a few PFAS levels in high concentration, including PFOS and PFOA levels of 15 — DEQ’s proposed standards for the compounds are 0.7 and 0.001 — and PFHxS levels of 170, 17 times higher than DEQ’s proposed limit of 10.
DEQ environmental supervisor Doug Dowden responded to the EPA last month. He said EPA’s email did not include examples of the use of technology-based standards for textile manufacturers — Lear produces lace and fabric for automotive seating and interior trim. He added the agency believed Lear’s revised permit sufficiently addressed PFAS concerns.
Southerland noted the reason the textile industry does not have PFAS effluent guidelines is because it was the only sector to refuse to meet with EPA for its 2021 multi-industry PFAS study. However, she said there was no reason to believe traditional filtration technologies — granular activated carbon, reverse osmosis, and ion exchange — would be ineffective for Lear’s wastewater.
Dowden emailed Lear representatives a week after receiving SELC’s letter to confirm if it was moving away from PFAS and ask for documentation of the company’s transition plan unless it was “proprietary in nature.”
Gianna Cooley, a senior environmental engineer with Lear’s contractor WSP USA, said Lear removed PFOA and PFOS use at the facility from 2006 to 2008 and would eliminate PFAS chemicals that could contribute to wastewater concentrations by December 31. She told Dowden the documented plan could not be provided because it is proprietary.
Lear’s wastewater testing has shown continued discharges of PFAS compounds in recent years — including PFOA and PFOS — multiple times above EPA health advisory levels.
Southerland said permittees can request confidentiality to prevent agencies from publicly sharing proprietary information but she knew of no statute that would restrict regulatory agencies from accessing and reviewing it.
“[The permit] says they’re not going to discharge PFAS anymore,” Burdette said, “But it basically gives them coverage to do it for five more years. It’s just so strange, I cannot figure out what’s going on.”
[Update: This article has been updated to include comments from Cape Fear River Watch Riverkeeper Kemp Burdette.]
Tips or comments? Email journalist Peter Castagno at peter@localdailymedia.com.
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