A major investigative collaboration among five newsrooms shows how chemicals used to make carpets stain-resistant have contaminated swaths of the South.
In the mills of northwest Georgia, workers treated carpets with these chemicals starting in the 1970s. Carried in manufacturing wastewater, the chemicals spread into rivers and, ultimately, drinking water.
The odorless and colorless compounds — called PFAS by scientists and known colloquially as forever chemicals because they take decades or more to break down — are now everywhere in the region. That includes in people, where PFAS circulate in blood and lodge in some organs…