The Australian government said Thursday it was suing 3M for more than $1.4 billion in damages, alleging the U.S. industrial conglomerate withheld information about the harmful effects of “forever chemicals” used at more than two dozen military sites across the country.
The lawsuit is the largest ever brought by the Australian government, Michelle Rowland, the country’s justice minister, told reporters in the capital, Canberra.
“This is a government that is prepared to take on one of the largest multinational corporations in the world,” said Ms. Rowland.
The case is the latest in a wave of lawsuits against the Minnesota-based company over contamination linked to PFAS, or per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances. In 2024, 3M agreed to pay $10.3 billion over a decade to public water suppliers in the United States. State and local governments, including those in Minnesota, Alabama and New Jersey, have also sued the company and received settlements.
The so-called eternal chemicals – so called because they do not break down naturally – have been linked to liver damage, developmental problems, reduced immune function and cancer. They became ubiquitous, used in everything from clothing to the nonstick coating to frying pans to firefighting foam.
This foam was widely used on military bases around the world, both to extinguish fuel fires and during emergency training exercises. The US Department of Defense has identified 723 installations where PFAS may have been used or released, and Congress has since authorized hundreds of millions of dollars to pay for cleanup efforts.
In Australia, PFAS-containing firefighting foams were phased out in 2003 due to environmental concerns, although the Australian Department of Defense did not begin its own phase-out until 2004. Before the government stopped using the foam, 28 military sites had been contaminated, according to the lawsuit.
An earlier investigation by Australia’s Department of Defense found PFAS contamination was concentrated in areas where the fire-fighting foam had been used, stored or disposed of. Since 2020, the department has paid out more than $366 million to settle class-action lawsuits related to its use of the foam.
Mrs. Rowland said 3M withheld environmental tests conducted by its own laboratory that showed “significant” adverse environmental effects associated with the firefighting foam. She added that the company had said the foam could be disposed of safely and posed “no significant adverse environmental impact.”
“This misconduct has contributed to significant costs to Defense and the Australian taxpayer, including over $1 billion to date to investigate, remediate and mitigate PFAS contamination,” she said.
Australia plans to use the $1.4 billion it is seeking in damages to help treat contaminated land and water and provide alternative water supplies to communities near the military sites, said Peter Khalil, assistant defense minister.
In a statement, 3M said it planned to fight the case in the court system, noting that it had “never manufactured PFAS in Australia” and that it stopped selling the product in question in Australia about 20 years ago.
“Despite this, the Department of Defense continued to use PFAS-containing firefighting foam for nearly two decades longer,” 3M said.
In 2022, 3M said it would stop manufacturing PFAS by the end of 2025, while maintaining that the chemicals could be produced and used safely. At the time, the company said its annual net sales from PFAS-related products totaled about $1.3 billion.
Concerns about PFAS contamination extend far beyond military domains.
A New York Times investigation found that in the early 2000s, 3M researchers had learned that the toxic chemicals — which the company’s own research had linked to birth defects and cancer — were showing up in wastewater that was later spread as fertilizer on farmland across the United States.
In Minnesota, 3M disposed of its manufacturing waste at several sites in the eastern Twin Cities metropolitan area from the 1950s to the 1970s. Minnesota’s attorney general sued the company in 2010 alleging its disposal practices contaminated drinking water, resulting in an $850 million settlement.
