A coalition of environmental groups has expressed concern about PFAS chemicals in wastewater from GlobalFoundries, a semiconductor manufacturing plant in Essex Junction that regularly discharges wastewater into the Winooski River.
A group called Chips Communities United issued a statement Tuesday morning calling attention to the levels of PFAS found in data collected by the state Department of Environmental Conservation and using the numbers to call for further investigation at other semiconductor plants across the country. PFAS are also known as “forever chemicals” because they don't break down naturally in the environment.
“We don't think companies should be dumping highly toxic, permanent chemicals into our waterways because we don't know what the safe levels are,” said Judith Barish, coalition president of Chips Communities United. “It should be cleaned up at the point of use.” The Washington, D.C.-based organization was created to ensure that federal investments made to semiconductor makers are made in a “fair and sustainable” way, Barish said.
The Vermont Department of Environmental Conservation began collecting data on PFAS from GlobalFoundries' wastewater in 2021 and expanded data collection to include more types of PFAS in October 2023.
A GlobalFoundries spokesperson did not respond to VTDigger's request for comment on Tuesday.
Matt Chapman, chief of the department's waste management and prevention division, said GlobalFoundries contacted the department in mid-May after seeing the results and developed a response plan. The department does not believe the wastewater levels pose an immediate safety concern, he said.
Chapman said the company is looking into replacing PFAS in some of its manufacturing processes, and plans to “build a dedicated waste line for PFAS waste, send it to a holding tank where we will manage the waste stream separately from our industrial waste discharge stream” and find a proper disposal method.
The latter part of GlobalFoundries' plan is contained in a permit modification recently granted by the department, Chapman said.
Although there are drinking water limits, there are no state or federal limits on the amount of PFAS (per- and polyfluoroalkyl chemicals) that industry can discharge into local waterways. Vermont is one of the few states that requires semiconductor manufacturers to report any PFAS they discharge into the environment.
This lack of regulation has prompted environmental groups like CHIPS Communities United, the Vermont PFAS/Military Toxics Coalition, and the Vermont Sierra Club to advocate for greater regulation of PFAS contamination in semiconductor manufacturing, especially considering that the semiconductor industry as a whole has received $150 billion from the federal government in the past four years alone.
“I'm not saying semiconductors are unnecessary. I'm not saying semiconductors should immediately stop using PFAS,” Renee Siegel, executive director of the Center for Public Environmental Monitoring, which Siegel runs in Mountain View, Calif., told VTDigger in an interview. “What I'm saying is that government subsidies to industry provide an opportunity to involve the public and workers in monitoring industry practices.”
Siegel, whose report on Vermont data was the basis for CHIPS Communities United's release Tuesday, lives next to a semiconductor factory in Mountain View and has called for stronger regulation of pollutants from the industry as a whole.
In recent years, awareness of the toxicity of certain PFAS chemicals has grown, and state and federal governments have established standards for the chemicals in drinking water. There are thousands of different types of PFAS, some of which have been studied more thoroughly than others.
In Vermont, the state Department of Natural Resources has been regulating PFAS in public drinking water systems since 2016, after state officials found high levels of PFAS in private drinking wells in the Bennington area.
Vermont's drinking water standards state that the combined concentration of five PFASs cannot exceed 1 part per trillion. The federal government recently released standards that state that the chemicals PFOA and PFOS cannot exceed 1 part per trillion, and the other four PFASs cannot exceed 1 part per trillion.
According to a press release from CHIPS Communities United, GlobalFoundries and the state identified 17 different PFAS present in measurable amounts in the plant's wastewater, a figure confirmed by Chapman of the Vermont Department of Conservation.
The agency measures PFAS concentrations in wastewater quarterly, with data most recently available from June 2024. Over the three quarters recorded so far, levels have ranged from an average of 126.67 parts per trillion for perfluorobutanoic acid (PFBA) to an average of 1.38 parts per trillion for perfluorooctane sulfonate (PFOS). Perfluorooctanoic acid (PFOA), the chemical that contaminated homes in Bennington, averaged 19.33 parts per trillion.
While many of the PFAS levels exceed state and federal drinking water standards, Chapman said those standards should not be used as a gauge for the relative danger of PFAS in surface waters.
“Drinking water standards are set based on the drinking water that an individual consumes every day over their lifetime, right?” Chapman said. “So we wouldn't recommend that anyone drink water that comes out of an industrial drain.”
In terms of immediate safety, “I don't think it's going to have a significant impact,” he said.
Still, Chapman said the numbers are “a sign for regulators, particularly in manufacturing facilities, that they need to look at where PFAS is being used in their processes and how they can mitigate, remove or sequester and manage it.”