A high-stakes environmental trial is unfolding in New Jersey, where the state is taking on E.I. DuPont de Nemours and its related entities over widespread PFAS contamination at the former Chamber Works facility in Salem County. The outcome of this case — one of the most closely watched environmental proceedings in the country — could have a significant ripple effect on how other states pursue PFAS-related claims and how corporate defendants approach these increasingly high-profile cases.
In this case, New Jersey alleges that DuPont and its successors — including Chemours discharged PFAS compounds and other hazardous substances into surrounding soil and waterways for decades, creating long-lasting contamination the state is now seeking to remediate and penalize under a variety of environmental statutes.
New Jersey’s case is built on the backbone of three key state environmental laws:
- The Spill Compensation and Control Act (Spill Act): This is the state’s primary environmental liability statute. It imposes strict liability — meaning fault or intent doesn’t matter — on any party responsible for a hazardous substance discharge. The state is leveraging the Spill Act to seek recovery of cleanup costs and damages to natural resources related to historical contamination at the Chamber Works site.
- The Water Pollution Control Act (WPCA): This law governs the discharge of pollutants into New Jersey’s surface and groundwater. It requires compliance with permits and prohibits unauthorized discharges. The state claims that DuPont and Chemours violated this act through long-term discharges into bodies like the Delaware River.
- The Industrial Site Recovery Act (ISRA): ISRA requires industrial property owners to investigate and, if necessary, remediate environmental contamination when triggering events occur, such as a sale or shutdown of operations. Given the Chamber Works facility’s decades-long operational history and corporate restructuring — including the creation of Chemours — this law plays a key role in determining who’s responsible for contamination discovered after those changes.
In addition to these statutory claims, the state plans to pursue common-law causes of action, including negligence and strict liability, in a later phase of the case. Those claims will seek damages for injury to natural resources and may include a request for punitive damages, raising the financial and reputational stakes even further.
What really sets this litigation apart is the court’s decision to break the case into a series of six consecutive bench trials, each focused on specific aspects of liability or defenses. This procedural roadmap allows the court to work through the sprawling factual and legal issues in manageable, topic-specific phases, rather than tackling everything at once in a single, chaotic proceeding.
Here’s how the trials are structured:
- Trial 1: Covers the State’s Spill Act and remediation claims against the original DuPont entity (“Old DuPont”).
- Trial 2: Focuses on the same claims, but against Chemours.
- Trial 3: Addresses WPCA violations alleged against both Old DuPont and Chemours.
- Trials 4 and 5: Deal with specific defenses raised by defendants, including one based on a 2005 Compensatory Restoration Administrative Consent Order (CRACO) and another invoking the government contractor defense.
- Trial 6: Examines fraudulent transfer and ISRA-related claims targeting Old DuPont.
This phased approach has several strategic advantages. It allows the court to build a record step-by-step, clarify legal questions early on, and potentially narrow the remaining issues ahead of a future jury trial focused on damages. It also gives the parties more clarity for potential settlement discussions at each stage, depending on how the court rules.
The implications of this trial series go well beyond New Jersey. Courts, regulators, and corporate counsel nationwide are closely watching for how the court interprets key doctrines — especially strict liability for legacy pollution, the extent of natural resource damage claims, and the success (or failure) of defenses based on regulatory consent orders or government direction.
Because PFAS litigation is still relatively new but rapidly expanding, any legal precedent established here — whether in interpreting environmental statutes or assessing corporate liability across complex successor structures — could set the tone for future litigation in other jurisdictions.
This case also illustrates the unique challenges of environmental litigation involving long-term contamination. The state must present decades of technical and scientific evidence, establish causation through complex environmental modeling, and parse liability across corporate reorganizations and spin-offs. It’s a case study in how environmental law intersects with regulatory history, corporate structure, and cutting-edge science.
The New Jersey v. DuPont trial series could mark a turning point in PFAS accountability. If the state prevails on key statutory and common-law claims, it could embolden other states to bring similarly aggressive cases and could lead corporations to reevaluate their risk exposure and litigation strategy.
At its core, this case is about more than just one site or one set of chemicals: It’s about how we assign responsibility for environmental harm, how we interpret environmental statutes in the face of evolving science, and how courts can manage massive, high-stakes disputes in a practical and structured way.
As the trials continue, environmental lawyers across the country will be watching for lessons that go far beyond the borders of New Jersey.