Worse Than Asbestos?

In 1999, West Virginia cattle farmer Wilbur Tennant sued chemical company DuPont after his herd of over 150 cows began dying from tumors, internal bleeding, and blackened teeth.

He surmised that a creek that ran through his property, which had turned black and foamy, was connected to both the deaths and to the nearby Washington Works plastic plant.

During the discovery process, internal documents revealed DuPont had dumped thousands of tons of perfluorooctanoic acid (PFOA) into a landfill next to Tennant’s farm in Parkersburg. PFOA is a compound belonging to the broader family of per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS), so-called forever chemicals. DuPont knew PFAS was toxic yet concealed this information from the public, regulators, and its own employees.

No one could anticipate it then, but the regional dispute would grow into a complex financial problem for tens of thousands of corporations and the global insurance industry.

Tennant settled his lawsuit for an undisclosed amount in 2001, but the legal battle over PFAS was just beginning. His attorney, Robert Bilott, used evidence from the case to file a massive class-action lawsuit representing West Virginia and Ohio residents in August 2001. As part of a $107.6 million settlement in September 2004, DuPont funded an independent panel of scientists to study the health of the 70,000 members of the class-action lawsuit exposed to the chemicals. On Oct. 29, 2012, the C8 Science Panel concluded that PFOA exposure has a probable link to six medical conditions: kidney cancer, testicular cancer, thyroid disease, high cholesterol, ulcerative colitis, and pregnancy-induced hypertension.

Because DuPont agreed beforehand to accept the panel’s scientific findings as legal truth, the decision established legal causation. This allowed roughly 3,550 affected class members with the specific medical conditions to file individual personal injury lawsuits without having to again prove the chemical’s toxicity.

Following several multimillion-dollar verdicts, DuPont and its corporate spinoff, Chemours, agreed to a global settlement in 2017, paying $670.7 million to resolve the remaining cases. Despite the settlement, individual and municipal legal claims involving PFAS exposure expanded nationwide to encompass multiple other defendants. The proliferation of new lawsuits led the federal judiciary in December 2018 to create a multidistrict litigation (MDL) framework to consolidate cases in the U.S. District Court for the District of South Carolina.

The litigation now includes over 15,240 federal lawsuits, up from 3,200 in early 2023. However, federal court records show the true number of PFAS-linked injury claims exceeds 100,000. The higher volume stems from an administrative registry established by the court, which allows mass tort law firms to officially register verified injury clients without immediately filing a formal complaint. The repository of unfiled registry claims represents a mix of military and civilian firefighters who handled aqueous film-forming foam (AFFF) to extinguish fires, as well as citizens who ingested municipal drinking water contaminated by foam usage in the area. Beyond the personal injury claims, the court is managing thousands of property damage and water contamination lawsuits filed by water districts and local governments regarding a wide array of other PFAS compounds.

As Leader’s Edge reported in a January 2023 article, “The Next Asbestos,” the industry’s losses could approach or exceed the $100 billion in net insured losses caused by asbestos-related health claims. Today, this outcome looks increasingly likely.

Asbestos was once considered a miracle material due to its unmatched heat resistance and industrial durability. PFAS was heavily used across commercial supply chains thanks to its corresponding indestructibility and flame-retardant qualities. The widespread application of these forever chemicals has generated an equivalent threat to human health and corporate pocketbooks.

Recent Developments

Since the 2023 Leader’s Edge PFAS article, a number of major developments have unfolded:

• The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) set strict drinking water limits for PFOA and perfluorooctane sulfonate (PFOS) concentrations on April 10, 2024, and issued compliance timelines and rules for other PFAS compounds on May 18, 2026.
• The EPA officially classified PFOA and PFOS as hazardous substances on April 17, 2024, granting the government greater power to mandate industrial remediation.
• Chemical giants DuPont and 3M finalized over $11.5 billion in settlements to fund drinking water cleanup across the country on Feb. 8, 2024, and March 29, 2024, respectively.
• Some states have implemented bans on PFAS in cosmetics, apparel, and food packaging.
• Plaintiffs expanded their legal targets beyond chemical producers to sue consumer brands and retailers over PFAS in finished goods.

Due to confidential settlements, no official public record exists for exactly how much the insurance industry has paid out for PFAS. However, casualty risk modeling firm Praedicat has tabulated a baseline expected loss figure of $80 billion, of which $65 billion is allocated for water contamination and $15 billion for bodily injury claims.

Many actuaries, legal scholars, and environmental scientists consider that amount conservative. For instance, actuarial firm Milliman in 2024 estimated that PFAS remediation for U.S. water districts alone could cost up to $175 billion. The widening scope of lawsuits also suggests the exposure will grow.

According to environmental nonprofit ChemSec, more than 99% percent of U.S. legal damages settled to date involving PFAS have been absorbed directly by eight primary chemical corporations: 3M, Chemours, DuPont, Corteva, Tyco Fire Products, KiddeFenwal, Solvay, and BASF. New targets span the commercial supply chain to encompass packaging companies, retailers, restaurant chains, apparel brands, and industrial coaters. In a worst-case scenario, retroactive claims cutting across third-party casualty, product liability, and directors and officers (D&O) lines could drive some underwriters into insolvency.

To mitigate this looming exposure, insurance carriers are relying on the absolute pollution exclusion—a post-asbestos-crisis industry standard introduced by the private Insurance Services Office in 1986 that eliminates coverage from standard commercial general liability policies for environmental remediation costs, bodily injuries, and property damages caused by business-related contamination. However, the standard does not protect carriers from legacy claims hitting policies that were written long before those absolute exclusions existed.

Plaintiff attorneys, frequently backed by third-party litigation funding firms, are testing a legal theory that these absolute pollution exclusions should be limited strictly to traditional environmental pollution, says Robert Hartwig, clinical associate professor of finance at the University of South Carolina. This would exempt newly discovered hazards like PFAS that were never originally intended to be excluded.

Insurers are fiercely defending these policy boundaries because a defeat would leave them completely exposed to the legal framework governing U.S. environmental liability. Three powerful principles under the federal Superfund law—the 1980 Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act (CERCLA)—make cleanup liabilities exceptionally dangerous for corporations and their insurers.

“U.S. environmental law is strict, retroactive, and joint-and-several,” explains Drew Flynn, president of MMA Environmental, a consulting and risk advisory company within the Marsh McLennan Agency. “This liability applies seamlessly from the primary chemical manufacturer down to the final industrial user.”

In other words, the liability extends to every link in the supply chain: the chemical manufacturer that creates the compound, the distributor that reformulates it into secondary components, the industrial facility that discharges it, and the retailer that sells the finished goods incorporating the material. Furthermore, property owners of PFAS-contaminated land—including private airports, landfills, and manufacturing facilities— face equal exposure.

“While plaintiff attorneys are currently targeting the largest manufacturers with the deepest pockets, mandatory testing and reporting laws ensure that the litigation will work its way entirely through the supply chain, eventually capturing retailers and any commercial entity operating under an active pollution emission permit,” says Flynn, emphasizing that government permits offer zero protection if a substance is later deemed hazardous.

The list of retailers exposed to class-action and product liability lawsuits involving both consumer bodily injury and financial damages from deceptive advertising is sweeping. It spans big-box and department stores, home goods and furnishing outlets, cosmetics and personal care brands, apparel and footwear companies, and grocery and fast-food chains. Legal vulnerabilities stem primarily from companies explicitly advertising goods as “safe,” “non-toxic,” or “clean,” or highlighting performance traits like “waterproof” and “stain-resistant” while failing to disclose the presence of forever chemicals.

“The commercial property and casualty insurance industry is looking at the tip of a massive legal and regulatory iceberg,” says Toby Smith, CEO for the Americas of specialty insurer Mosaic Insurance. “While the multidistrict litigation has generated approximately $15 billion in public drinking water system settlements from PFAS manufacturers and AFFF producers, the largest remaining source of outstanding [litigation] exposure rests on the unresolved backlog of more than 15,000 individual bodily injury claims, a figure at risk of growing substantially.”

Contaminated Water

The outcomes of these personal injury claims largely depend on the October 2012 findings of the C8 Science Panel that investigated the Parkersburg contamination.

Public water utilities subsequently organized to recover the immense costs of filtering local drinking supplies. Their coordinated effort resulted in some of the largest environmental payouts in U.S. history, beginning in mid-2023 with agreements by DuPont for $1.185 billion and 3M for up to $12.5 billion. Other major foam manufacturers followed suit to resolve their own liabilities: Tyco Fire Products agreed to a $750 million payout, Carrier Global offered a $730 million settlement tied to its bankrupt KiddeFenwal subsidiary, and BASF contributed $316.5 million to the nationwide water class.

Consumer brands also confronted severe financial penalties for using these chemicals in manufacturing. For example, footwear manufacturer Wolverine Worldwide and 3M agreed to a $54 million class-action settlement in March 2023 to compensate Michigan residents whose private properties and water wells were contaminated by historical tannery sludge. Since the case explicitly excluded personal injury claims, the resolution focused strictly on property restoration and water remediation.

With public water utility claims largely resolved by these massive settlements, the MDL court presided over by Judge Richard Gergel has turned its full attention to thousands of outstanding personal injury claims. These remaining individual lawsuits involve two distinct exposure pathways: direct occupational exposure—primarily affecting military and civilian firefighters who handled PFAS-laden foams and wore treated gear—and environmental exposure suffered by local residents who ingested contaminated groundwater.

Before the individual lawsuits can proceed to trial, the court is holding Daubert hearings to decide what scientific evidence can be used. Named after a landmark Supreme Court case addressing expert testimony in federal cases, a Daubert hearing is a mandatory procedure in which a federal judge evaluates whether an expert witness’s scientific methodology is reliable and relevant. If a judge deems the science speculative or unproven, that expert is barred from testifying in front of a jury.

“If the judge excludes the plaintiffs’ expert testimony as scientifically unreliable or speculative, entire categories of lawsuits or specific disease claims could be barred from court before they ever reach a jury because plaintiffs would lack admissible evidence or general causation, thus limiting corporate liability exposure,” Smith says.

Conversely, if Gergel admits the plaintiffs’ expert witnesses, the decision would pressure corporate defendants to secure massive settlements prior to facing a jury. Plaintiffs’ medical position gained significant ground when the World Health Organization’s International Agency for Research on Cancer in 2023 officially reclassified PFOA as a Group 1 carcinogen, placing it in the same toxicity category as asbestos and tobacco. This epidemiological certainty directly fueled the rigid federal safety standards the EPA implemented under the Safe Drinking Water Act in April 2024, which established an enforceable maximum contaminant level of just four parts per trillion for PFOA and PFOS.

To put this metric into perspective, four parts per trillion is equivalent to a single drop of liquid diluted inside five Olympic-sized swimming pools. “Measuring and treating a chemical at this minuscule, parts-per-trillion level requires highly complex, exceptionally costly technology that is still actively being developed and implemented,” says Cameron Douglass, West Coast regional director of the environmental casualty practice at Gallagher. While the EPA in May 2026 offered drinking water systems an optional two-year extension to the compliance deadline, to April 2031, they must still implement comprehensive testing for PFAS compounds by April 2027. To fund the massive capital and extensive time needed to make the mandatory upgrades, municipal utilities are turning to the MDL framework in South Carolina, filing lawsuits against AFFF producers and chemical manufacturers.

Proving Causation in Personal Injury

While public utilities can point to measurable, objective parts-per-trillion PFAS violations in their wells, individual personal injury claimants cannot provide such straightforward proof of exposure. Once Gergel issues his highly anticipated Daubert rulings later this year, the path will be clear for bellwether trials to begin in early 2027. To manage the immense caseload, the bellwether program is using a representative pool of 28 test cases strictly limited to plaintiffs alleging kidney cancer, testicular cancer, thyroid disease, or ulcerative colitis. While the outcomes of the upcoming trials do not bind other plaintiffs, they serve as critical indicators enabling both sides to gauge individual case value in front of a jury.

The outcome of the personal injury litigation depends entirely on whether the trial bar can establish true scientific causation, a high obstacle underscored by the court’s August 2025 decision to postpone the initial kidney cancer test trial from that October. Jamie Carsey, managing partner in the Chicago office of international law firm Clyde & Co., highlights the unprecedented challenge in establishing a direct link between exposure to this chemical and a specific diagnosis.

While mesothelioma is almost exclusively tied to asbestos exposure, making medical causation straightforward in litigation, the four specific conditions designated by the MDL court do not have an exclusive chemical signature. “Because each of these illnesses can occur naturally in the general population without any PFAS history, plaintiffs face a much steeper hurdle in proving that PFAS is the definitive cause of their diagnosis,” Carsey explains.

To determine whether forever chemicals actually cause these illnesses, plaintiff and defense lawyers have exchanged dozens of complex expert scientific reports to establish the admissibility of their scientific evidence. This high volume of legal filings triggered the postponement of the kidney cancer bellwether trial, as the court required more time to untangle the competing epidemiological models.

The defense bar is using Daubert motions aggressively to challenge the validity of the plaintiffs’ expert witnesses. Both corporate defendants and their commercial insurers view the current medical causation evidence as exceptionally weak. Carsey notes that the court’s final ruling on these expert challenges will dictate the true scope of the industry’s exposure.

“The success or failure of the scientific challenges will determine whether the bodily injury litigation triggers an uncontrollable flood of nationwide lawsuits rivaling asbestos, or remains a more contained, intermediate crisis similar to recent opioid or sports concussion litigation,” he says.

The Quest for Coverage

The threat of expanding litigation is shifting the financial burden directly to commercial insurance carriers. As litigation moves down the supply chain to smaller entities and municipalities lacking multibillion-dollar cash reserves, insurance carriers are bracing for an onslaught of claims. Relentless regulatory pressures are forcing both public entities and smaller corporate defendants to look to their decades-old insurance policies to survive mounting defense costs and fund anticipated settlements.

Because pre-1986 historical commercial general liability (CGL) policies are completely silent on PFAS, they provide broad coverage for regulatory cleanup demands, bodily injury, and property damage, Flynn says. This legacy coverage is highly valuable to policyholders because it was written before the insurance industry implemented the absolute pollution exclusion, which permanently removed environmental coverage from standard CGL programs and forced the market in 1986 into stand-alone environmental impairment liability policies. Policyholders are not uncovering this contamination by choice; instead, the aggressive new government testing mandates are forcing businesses to discover and report it. Assuming the required tests reveal PFAS, companies can immediately file claims under their legacy CGL policies, which explicitly promise to pay for any pollution cleanups ordered by environmental authorities.

Policyholders have secured recent high-profile victories regarding the scope of the older policy terms. For instance, in Town of Harrietstown v. Westchester Fire Insurance Co., the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit ruled in May 2026 that Chubb-branded insurers must defend a New York town facing a state-ordered environmental cleanup for PFAS contamination at a local airport. The state blamed the pollution on AFFF used for routine training drills and emergency crash responses. Chubb, citing a combined claims provision, argued that because training pollution was excluded from the town’s airport owners and operators general liability coverage, the entire claim was disqualified.

However, the federal appeals court rejected this defense, ruling that an official regulatory demand letter from the state counts as a unified request for coverage. Because the state issued its cleanup order as a collective action, the insurer could not slice that demand into separate pieces to escape its broad duty to defend the town.

For retailers and other businesses in the marketplace for environmental impairment liability insurance going forward, the coverage hurdles are steep. Many insurers are responding with total PFAS exclusions on standard programs, instead deploying advanced predictive modeling to underwrite and price chemical risk. To isolate exposure, carriers are engineering highly restricted, single-exposure products. These include stand-alone site pollution liability policies that cover only specific, preapproved locations and contractor’s pollution liability extensions that carry small dollar limits and only cover lawsuits filed while the policy is active.

Finally, companies are using corporate restructuring tactics to quarantine old PFAS liabilities away from their core operations. By setting up specialized, self-insured legal entities or transferring past risks to third parties, businesses can protect their active corporate balance sheets—provided they can afford the strict upfront cash and collateral requirements.

Regulatory Uncertainty

The federal government’s immense enforcement powers under its April 2024 CERCLA hazardous substance designation for PFOA and PFOS add another layer of financial uncertainty for companies already facing PFAS-related personal injury and environmental claims, says Smith. PFAS liability will continue to evolve from a “still-uncertain regulatory environment,” in addition to scientific advances and litigation outcomes, he adds.

In welcome news for corporations and insurers, the EPA in May 2026 withdrew proposals that would designate PFAS compounds as hazardous waste or a constituent part of hazardous waste under the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act (RCRA). Consequently, contaminated materials can still be legally deposited into standard landfills, allowing companies to avoid immediate, high-cost mandates for specialized disposal. Had the federal government executed the RCRA designation, the operational cost of landfill disposal would have immediately multiplied. Landfill operators would have faced severe mandates to treat all inbound waste, conduct forensic sampling, and manage chemical leaching. Businesses would have been forced to use expensive, specialized facilities engineered to break apart the virtually indestructible chemical bonds of the compounds.

While the EPA deferral provides a temporary reprieve at the federal level, individual states have stepped in with a chaotic patchwork of legislation. States are aggressively enacting independent restrictions aimed squarely at holding downstream businesses like retailers and product packagers responsible for contamination rather than large chemical manufacturers.

State enforcement actions seek hefty per-violation civil fines, often from $10,000 up to $25,000 daily, forfeiture of corporate profits from banned goods, and consumer restitution for deceptive marketing. Furthermore, courts are granting injunctive relief to mandate immediate retail product recalls and force violating manufacturers to fund state-backed public health education campaigns.

“If a primary chemical manufacturer or a regional water treatment utility enters bankruptcy under the weight of active lawsuits, the outstanding liabilities immediately flow down the chain of commerce to the deep-pocketed retail corporations that sold the finished consumer goods,” says Brian McBride, head of environmental broking for North America at WTW.

Historically, suppliers have exploited a loophole in supply-chain transparency rules by arguing that they didn’t deliberately formulate their products with forever chemicals. This allowed them to sidestep legal liability while ignoring trace contamination in their raw components, notes George Buermann, partner at Goldberg Segalla and vice chair of the law firm’s environmental practice group. “To eliminate this wiggle room, states like Minnesota are passing strict chemical reporting laws. These mandates require companies to conduct forensic supply-chain audits, update safety data sheets, and secure verified laboratory data proving their finished items are free of all trace PFAS.”

Altogether, at least 18 states have enacted class-based PFAS consumer product restrictions, with lawmakers introducing nearly 100 additional bills in 2026 alone to enhance rules in states with and without existing restrictions.

Failing to meet the reporting requirements, or filing inaccurate data, exposes companies to immediate regulatory penalties. More importantly, the state disclosures create a permanent public record of a company’s chemical use. Plaintiff attorneys can easily access these filings and use a corporation’s own state paperwork as undeniable proof of chemical exposure in court. Because this transparency completely eliminates the “we didn’t know” defense for any entity that handled the product, it increases the probability that downstream companies and retailers will settle ongoing lawsuits rather than risk an unwinnable battle in front of a jury, Buermann says.

The Path of Least Resistance

As the multidistrict litigation expands beyond primary PFAS producers, the pressure on the broader business community to settle out of court has intensified. Managing litigation of significant scale creates an unsustainable financial burden, as astronomical defense fees can exhaust corporate resources long before cases ever reach a jury. Furthermore, downstream defendants face a crushing volume of claims, impending Daubert rulings and bellwether trials, and strict EPA hazardous substance listings for PFAS. Consequently, observers expect that negotiations will commence on a massive, global personal injury settlement once the first few bellwether trials establish a financial baseline.

Resolving tens of thousands of claims without trying each case individually traditionally requires a tiered settlement process. A court-approved matrix acts as a standardized scoring system that categorizes plaintiffs based on objective criteria, such as verified medical diagnoses and documented levels of chemical exposure. By establishing clear brackets, participating parties can distribute compensation equitably, ensuring that the highest payouts go to those who suffered the most severe physical harm.

While results vary, legal projections formulated by mass tort analysts and plaintiff-side steering committee attorneys managing the AFFF multidistrict litigation place estimated individual settlement ranges into three tiers based on exposure length and severity of illness:

• Tier 1 ($200,000 to over $600,000): Covers individuals with long-term occupational exposure, like military firefighters, who receive severe diagnoses such as kidney or testicular cancer. Making up 10% to 15% of the current registry, Tier 1 costs are projected to land between $2 billion and $9 billion.
• Tier 2 ($150,000 to $200,000): Covers moderate, traceable exposure resulting in systemic conditions like ulcerative colitis or thyroid disease. Accounting for an estimated 30% of the outstanding caseload, total costs for Tier 2 are projected to reach between $4.5 billion and $6 billion.
• Tier 3 (Under $75,000): Addresses shorter-term or limited environmental exposure with documented but less severe chronic health impacts. Because this tier encompasses the vast majority of the remaining 100,000 registered claims, it is expected to add another $3.5 billion to $4 billion to the ultimate tally.

Added up, the total personal injury settlement value within the multidistrict litigation is projected to land between $10 billion and $19 billion, according to actuarial liability data from insurance data firm Verisk. And that amount is just a piece of the total pie. Tallying up the remainder—$15 billion to $41 billion in independent state-level natural resource damage claims modeled by Praedicat, $20 billion to $40 billion in corporate soil and site remediations estimated by Planet Tracker, and the $175 billion cost of national water infrastructure upgrades mapped out by Milliman—the total ground-up liabilities will likely meet the historical $200 billion to $275 billion cost of asbestos litigation.

The ultimate question is how much of the total will hit insurance carrier balance sheets. Assuming a standard historical insurance absorption rate of 40% across the multilayered exposures, the theoretical net insured loss from PFAS would land near $83 billion. When the dust settles, this figure comes close to the $100 billion net insured loss baseline of asbestos. With widening cleanup mandates, PFAS may in fact kick asbestos down a notch to become the most expensive mass tort in global history.

Or not. As Hartwig notes, PFAS is just the latest entry in a long line of historical hazards labeled as the next asbestos.

“Nearly 20 years ago, the insurance industry faced widespread panic over toxic mold, which was widely predicted to break the market but was ultimately contained and put to rest. Similar fears emerged regarding cellular phones causing brain tumors, a narrative that 30 years of empirical data eventually disproved,” he says.

The entire mass tort depends on whether the trial bar can definitively connect low-dose PFAS exposure to specific bodily diagnoses. While federal and state PFAS mandates create significant vulnerabilities for a broad range of policyholders, Hartwig is confident the combination of absolute pollution exclusions, targeted underwriting renewals, and severe class-certification hurdles will successfully contain the financial damage to the insurance market.