Just one week after North Carolina Attorney General Josh Stein announced his lawsuit against Chemours and its original parent company DuPont for PFAS pollution, private citizens in Bladen County have filed two legal actions of their own. These lawsuits seek financial compensation for Chemours’ Fayetteville Works plant poisoning their drinking water supplies with GenX and other PFAS “forever chemicals.”

The cases both seek to move forward as class actions in which the named individual plaintiffs are taken as fair representatives of a much larger group of people dealing with similar damages. When a class action lawsuit succeeds, each member of the class is given the opportunity to share in the damage award. It’s often an effective tool for stopping bad actors such as major polluters from continuing an irresponsible activity, under the assumption that the harm to any given individual will be limited and hard to prove.