Saint-Gobain completes demolition of Merrimack facility embroiled in PFAS pollution scandal

By William Skipworth | New Hampshire Bulletin | July 7, 2025

Read the full article by William Skipworth (New Hampshire Bulletin)

"Saint-Gobain Performance Plastics, the multi-national corporation widely blamed for contaminating southern New Hampshire’s air and water with dangerous levels of PFAS chemicals, has finished demolishing the Merrimack manufacturing facility at the center of the controversy, the company announced Thursday.

The state of New Hampshire has long blamed the plastics manufacturer with contaminating the air and water in Merrimack, Londonderry, Bedford, Litchfield and Hudson. In 2016, per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, or PFAS, were discovered in hundreds of wells in the area surrounding the company’s Merrimack facility and many more have been discovered in the years since.

Saint-Gobain did not admit to wrong-doing but in 2022, the company agreed in court as part of a consent decree to provide clean drinking water to approximately 1,000 homes whose water was contaminated. The following year, it announced it was closing the facility, which had been operating since 1986, ostensibly as part of a corporate restructuring across the company’s North American operations."