This story was published by the Border Belt Independent in collaboration with Inside Climate News.
Viv Tolson Wayne rang the large dinner bell on her front porch along Britt Road in St. Pauls, North Carolina. The crowd on her front lawn hushed their conversations and turned toward the 75-year-old, who wore a red T-shirt and white cowboy hat.
On that April day, Tolson Wayne gathered dozens of her sorority sisters to protest pollutants in the Robeson County Landfill, whose entrance is about a half-mile from Tolson Wayne’s front door.
“We are here to let people know that they have a voice,” Tolson Wayne said from her porch, “so environmental injustice turns to environmental justice.”
Tolson Wayne is a member of the St. Pauls Community Association for Progress. The group, along with the Southern Environmental Law Center, is suing Robeson County over what it describes as contamination that seeps into drinking water.
The lawsuit , filed in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of North Carolina on Tuesday, accuses the county of violating the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act. The law governs the treatment, storage and disposal of solid and hazardous waste. The lawsuit alleges that the county is causing “an imminent and substantial endangerment to health or the environment” by knowingly allowing the landfill to leach per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, a class of forever chemicals commonly called PFAS, since at least 2023.
PFAS exposure is linked to an increased risk of cancer, thyroid disease, reproductive problems and developmental delays in children, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency .
The lawsuit comes as the Robeson County Board of Commissioners seeks to expand the landfill, located in rural St. Pauls, home to about 2,700 residents. It would be the seventh expansion in 30 years, adding about 35 acres to the 537-acre site.
Commissioners delayed voting on the expansion last year after Tolson Wayne and other community members raised concerns about pollution.
Viv Tolson Wayne marches with her sorority sisters in St. Pauls on April 18. Credit: Morgan Casey
“I believe that the county is beginning to wake up, because we are not going to stop talking about it,” Tolson Wayne told the Border Belt Independent.
The landfill’s leachate—the water that runs through its trash—contains significantly higher amounts of several types of PFAS, including PFOS and PFOA, than most of North Carolina’s landfills.
One sample contained 1,060 parts per trillion of PFOS and 4,100 ppt of PFOA, according to a consultant’s sampling report released this year on behalf of the county. That’s over five times the average amount of PFOS and four times the average amount of PFOA in landfills across the state, according to a 2020 study that sampled nine in central and southeastern North Carolina.
Similar concentrations were found in leachate samples that were part of the landfill’s 2024 water quality analysis . That year, the N.C. Department of Environmental Quality sent a letter to Robeson County Solid Waste Director Gene Walters to alert him that the landfill’s groundwater exceeded the state’s allowed limits for various types of PFAS.
In a March letter to Walters, the division said that “further assessment efforts are warranted for a more thorough understanding of site conditions, extent of PFAS contamination associated with the facility, and possible contributing source(s).”
The lawsuit says the PFAS contamination is spreading to the county water through the Rocco Water Treatment Plant, which pulls water from wells as close as 2,089 feet from the landfill.
In November 2025, the Southern Environmental Law Center tested the county water from taps in more than a dozen homes within two miles of the landfill, including Tolson Wayne’s, for PFAS. Results showed the highest level of PFAS found in finished drinking water from any treatment plant in North Carolina.
“Comparable PFAS levels in Wilmington’s public water were considered a public health emergency,” said Maia Hutt, the center’s lead lawyer on the lawsuit. “So why isn’t this a public health emergency?”
Specific types of PFAS were found at alarming levels, Hutt said. Residents’ tap water contained almost 25 parts per trillion of GenX, the highest amount found in any water treatment system in the country. Two years ago, the EPA set a maximum contaminant level of 10 ppt for GenX, but President Donald Trump’s administration is eliminating that standard.
Chemours’ Fayetteville Works plant, nine miles northeast of St. Pauls, is the only source of GenX in North Carolina. Testing shows dozens of private drinking water wells in Robeson County contain GenX above 10 ppt, according to DEQ documents.
Some wells could have become contaminated with GenX through air deposition . The compounds are emitted through the Fayetteville Works’ stacks, travel on the wind, mix with rain and other moisture, then fall to the earth, where they contaminate ground…
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