Contamination Without Consent
How One Woman Helped Ignite A Grassroots Movement Against Corporate Pollution.
Countless communities throughout the U.S. are speaking up and bringing more awareness about toxic PFAS chemicals in their drinking water and their impact on our health.
In fact, new data from the U.S. EPA shows an additional 6.5 million Americans have drinking water contaminated with PFAS, bringing the total number of people at risk of drinking contaminated tap water to about 165 million across the U.S.
Laurene Allen is one of those people who stepped up when her New England community was exposed, helping to protect thousands of families from contaminated drinking water.
With no formal training in environmental science or chemistry, Laurene did what any determined person would do: she taught herself.
This year, she was awarded the Goldman Environmental Prize, which honors the achievements and leadership of grassroots environmental activists from around the world. The Prize recognizes individuals for sustained and significant efforts to protect and enhance the natural environment, often at great personal risk.
“Our story shows that in spite of a dominant narrative that is a blatant lie, when people become informed and come together, change is possible,” she said at her acceptance speech for the award in April. “Together, let’s hold PFAS manufacturers accountable… Let’s be as persistent as PFAS.”
Laurene Allen, 2025 Goldman Environmental Prize Winner
Her story is like so many other unexpected environmental heroes. The clinical social worker moved to Merrimack, New Hampshire, a small, idyllic town in the 1980s. At the time, it had plenty of green spaces, clean air, and it seemed like a healthy place to raise her family.
In the early 2000s, Saint-Gobain, an international, multi-billion corporation, came to town and purchased a fabric coating facility in the town, renaming it the Saint-Gobain Performance Plastics plant. The plant produced protective gear, antennae enclosures, and other fabric-coated PFAS items. The products were submerged in a liquid PFAS mixture, then dried in ovens to create resistant coating. The plant’s operations included smokestacks that, Laurene says they never bothered to filter.
Watch her tell her story below
In 2016, the New Hampshire Department of Environmental Services (NHDES) tested groundwater wells in Merrimack for the first time. Can you guess what they found?
The town relied (and still relies) entirely on a mix of private and public wells for its drinking water. Two of the town’s six public drinking wells, along with dozens of private wells, had PFAS contamination greater than the EPA health advisory limit at that time of 70 parts per trillion (ppt). These results triggered fear and upset that the plant was poisoning Merrimack residents.
FYI: The current enforceable EPA regulation for PFOS and PFOA are 4 ppt.
As a reminder, per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, commonly known as PFAS, are odorless and tasteless substances that have been dubbed “forever chemicals” because of their toxic longevity. Exposure to PFAS is linked to cancer, reproductive harm, immune system damage and other serious health problems, even at low levels.
NHDES convened a community meeting in March 2016 to inform Merrimack residents about the water testing results, downplaying the risks. Laurene left the meeting furious at the authorities’ dismissive attitude toward concerned community members.
She also reflected on unexpected health troubles within her own family and the stories of health issues emerging from other community members. That same night, Laurene reviewed the NHDES slide presentation. After enlarging the corner logo on the slides, she realized that the agency had pulled directly from presentations by the plastics corporation 3M—one of the country’s largest manufacturers of PFAS.
She started researching available PFAS studies and investigated reports of water contamination from the Saint-Gobain plant. She started hosting monthly meetings at her home and cofounded the Merrimack Citizens for Clean Water, a volunteer group seeking to address the contamination crisis in Merrimack. Laurene’s rallying cry became, “Stop the source and regulate upstream.”
Laurene contacted scientists, PhD students, and elected officials to learn more about the issue. She spent her evenings reading public health studies. Her group went door-to-door and conducted a community health survey in Merrimack that uncovered high numbers of health outcomes known to be associated with PFAS exposure.
The results were contested by Saint-Gobain and New Hampshire health and environmental authorities; officials responded that there wasn’t a way to connect exposure to health outcomes. Minimizing Laurene’s concerns, they accused her of fearmongering, and branded her a “crazy lady.”
The town later learned that the contamination of the wells came from air emissions of PFAS use at the Saint Gobain facility that accumulated in soil and traveled into groundwater. The didn’t filter their air stacks, which spewed into the environment.
As Laurene explains in the video above, “they did this because they knew the regulations weren’t really here.”
In 2018, NHDES announced a consent decree with Saint-Gobain that would provide bottled water and filtration systems for some families within a small contamination area of approximately 1,000 homes within Merrimack and adjacent towns.
However, it quickly became clear that the decree severely underestimated the scale of the contamination.
By 2019, EPA testing revealed that Saint-Gobain smokestacks were emitting 190 different PFAS, affecting not only Merrimack but also five neighboring towns. Water sampling showed that all six of Merrimack’s public wells were contaminated, along with thousands of private wells. Yet, Saint-Gobain was still legally responsible only for the limited area outlined in the 2018 consent decree.
Building A Movement, Running for Office
Members of the Merrimack Citizens for Clean Water group decided not to rely on a corporate entity or the state to rectify the situation, so they identified members of their group to run for elected office, both as state legislators (three of whom became the “water warriors,” as they worked tirelessly on PFAS policy) and as local water commissioners.
In 2020, the new commissioners helped facilitate the filtering of public wells for PFAS and worked with the water district to fund the treatment of all public drinking water.
At the state level, Laurene ramped up her visits to the state capital, testifying in public hearings, pushing for stricter statewide regulations for PFAS in drinking water, and joining the state’s newly formed PFAS commission.
Soon, New Hampshire became a leader in state PFAS regulations.
MCFCW kept up local pressure, staging protests outside of the facility and bombarding state regulators with complaints and environmental testing results. The group persuaded the state health department to conduct a cancer incidence report, eventually resulting in an acknowledgement of increased kidney cancer cases. In addition, collaborative engagement with Dartmouth College and Boston University signaled that the findings in MCFCW’s 2017 community survey were not an anomaly.
When the plant’s air permit was up for renewal in 2023, Laurene took every measure possible to contest it, testifying at community hearings, providing public comment, and rallying residents in opposition. Despite public backlash and an ongoing contamination crisis, NHDES renewed the Saint-Gobain air permit for five more years.
(This what I mean when I say that advocacy sometimes looks like two steps forward, two steps back).
Less than a week after receiving its air permit renewal, in August 2023, Saint-Gobain announced its plan to close the Merrimack plant. After fulfilling its production contracts, the facility ceased all manufacturing activities in May 2024.
Laurene’s relentless activism created an untenable reality for Saint-Gobain, effectively running the company out of town. Nevertheless, current plans to address the area’s legacy contamination—which will take thousands of years to dissipate—are unclear due to disagreements between NHDES and Saint-Gobain. Saint-Gobain seeks to demolish the plant without conducting the necessary toxic abatement.
“Without citizen engagement and action, profits will remain prioritized over the well-being of our people and planet,” Laurene shared in her award speech.
The fight continues. Laurene continues to organize efforts to hold Saint-Gobain accountable for remediation efforts on the facility site and in affected communities, as well as document the full scope of environmental and health impacts from PFAS contamination.
This story is one that should never have happened, not in Merrimack or anywhere else, but when one person refuses to accept poisoned water as “normal,” it can ignite a movement.
Her transformation from concerned citizen to environmental advocate illustrates both the power of determination and the failure of institutions meant to protect public health.
Much of this story was sourced from https://www.goldmanprize.org/recipient/laurene-allen
Additional Resources
Follow Laurene and Merrimack Citizens for Clean Water:
Read ATSDR’s Summary of the Merrimack Wells
Want to run for local office? Learn more at these resources:
Water Filters
If you know or suspect the presence of PFAS in your tap water, a home filtration system is the most efficient way to reduce exposure. Reverse osmosis and activated carbon water filters can be extremely effective at removing PFAS.
Another Movie to Watch
This 2019 documentary is about PFAS contamination in drinking water, and the activists who are trying to correct the situation.
Bad Water. Small Town. Deaf Ears. Everything You Need to Know About PFAS, But Don't Know How to Ask
Plus, don’t forget these steps you can take in a water crisis.
What are your takeaways from Laurene’s story? Are you inspired? The work continues, but so does the inspiration to keep going.