Maine municipalities are joining a national movement to sue large chemical companies whose products polluted wastewater systems and sent sewage disposal costs soaring.
Ten Maine lawsuits have added to the thousands across America against 3M, DuPont and 18 more companies that made PFAS or sold products containing it. The towns aim to recover costs to restore tainted wastewater treatment systems and dispose of PFAS-laden sewage solids.
The legal strategy by the municipalities rests on the success of a similar nationwide lawsuit where a large group sued over contaminated public drinking water systems. DuPont and 3M settled that case in 2023, agreeing to pay more than $13 billion over 13 years across the 10,000-plus plaintiffs.
Neighboring New Hampshire has received close to $8 million of the $56 million it is due from the settlement. SL Environmental Law Group, the attorneys for the Maine towns, hope to use that landmark lawsuit as a model and replicate its success. The lawyers are taking their fee as a percentage of any settlement and advancing expenses.
“I look to the drinking water claims as precedent because the idea is the same,” said Kenneth Sansone, a partner with SL Environmental in Concord, New Hampshire, which also was involved in the drinking water case. “You have this municipal resource contaminated with PFAS from these products from these manufacturers who didn’t disclose the dangers.”
Both the drinking water and wastewater cases are multidistrict litigation actions in which all cases are heard by one judge, but each lawsuit can receive its own settlement. Class-action cases are similar but they combine numerous claims into one single lawsuit in which the settlement typically is shared equally.
The Maine lawsuits each have specific claims. What they have in common are complaints that the chemical companies made PFAS or products containing it and were aware of the environmental and human health risks but didn’t disclose them to their customers or the public, and that is what resulted in widespread PFAS contamination.
The town of Camden and Mid-Coast Solid Waste Corp., which pumps contaminated water from its landfill in Rockport into Camden’s wastewater treatment plant, became the latest to file lawsuits in January. The other Maine clients that SL Environmental represents in the wastewater lawsuit are sewer operators in Bangor, Portland, South Portland, Wells, Scarborough, Brunswick, Sanford and York.
Most of Sansone’s clients operate in communities where there aren’t industrial discharges of the chemicals. Rather, the contaminants mostly come from people’s homes. PFAS gets into wastewater from washed clothing, flushed feminine hygiene products, washed cookware, discarded food packaging and other consumer items containing the chemicals.
Multidistrict litigation was created in 1968 and within 50 years became a dominant form of lawsuits on the federal docket. Tens of thousands of municipalities used it to file thousands of cases over PFAS impacts. As states began developing regulatory standards for PFAS in drinking water, the number of cases grew and took off after the EPA announced draft standards for PFAS in drinking water in 2023, Sansone noted.
The number of lawsuits grew again when more municipalities began testing wastewater and sludge. Maine’s ban in 2022 on spreading sewage sludge on land and on selling it in the state sparked the current group of municipal lawsuits, Sansone said. Large-scale shipments of wastewater sludge to New Brunswick ended.
Municipalities then found it far more expensive and difficult to get rid of the sludge. When Portland sued in 2024, it cited disposal costs doubling to $362 million over three years, according to the Portland Press Herald.
Bangor’s complaint seeks relief for both its wastewater treatment system and contamination from firefighting foam at its airport. City spokesperson David Warren declined to comment on the cost to handle biosolids, saying, “There are a lot of components to this issue and we want to hold off discussing it for now.”
The litigation, which is being heard by a federal district court judge in South Carolina, also includes public agencies and individuals who claim they have gotten sick or died from PFAS exposure and/or have contamination in their private wells or other property.
If the South Carolina court action does not resolve the lawsuits, the ones from Maine will be sent to federal court here for trial, Sansone said.
The judge has ordered the defendants to not respond to the individual complaints against them. 3M and DuPont did not answer questions from the Bangor Daily News about the Maine lawsuits.
The company phased out manufacturing of PFOA and PFOS, two better known PFAS chemicals, in December 2022 and stopped all PFAS manufacturing at the end of 2025, 3M spokesperson Grant Thompson said. The company said it has invested $1 billion globally in treatment technologies at its largest water-using locations.
“3M has taken, and will continue to take, actions to address PFAS manufactured prior to the phase out,” Thompson said.
Environmental health advocates welcomed the trend for Maine towns to take on the giant chemical companies.
“I don’t want me or my neighbors having to pay to clean up the mess of someone who’s got billions of dollars made off of making a mess,” said Emily Carey Perez de Alejo, executive director of the Portland nonprofit Defend Our Health.
Lori Valigra reports on the environment for the BDN’s Maine Focus investigative team. Reach her at lvaligra@bangordailynews.com. Support for this reporting is provided by the Unity Foundation, a fund at the Maine Community Foundation and donations by BDN readers.