The major end user and polluter is usually the public government. People can absolutely sue the government, but they just end up paying for it themselves.
Most of the contamination is from firefighting foams. Government agencies decided that the pollution was an acceptable cost for their added benefit to saving lives and property.
PFAS firefoam is still widely used, as governments still deem it necessary. However, training with real PFAS fireform is now more restricted than it once was.
Ah yes, it's totally the fault of the occasional use of firefighting foam, and not the fault of literally every single food package being covered in the stuff.
If we're talking about groundwater contamination, then yes, the major contributor is firefighters and US Government facilities based on the numbers I've seen. It's not food packaging making it hundreds of feet underground and leaching out into rivers.
Scroll through these 180 pfas contamination Superfund sites and count how many are government facilities versus private companies.
If you want to get technical, this paper estimates the impact of different sources, Comparing airports and military sites to Major PFA industrial sites. There are ~350 PFA sources from airports and military, and 7 from industry (including 3M!).
The individual military and airports released more PFOS per SITE than industry.
The industrial sites are associated with about 5X the PFOA in the local water. However, we are still talking about 7 industrial sites vs 350 airports and military bases.
I'm mostly talking about breadth of harm, ie that PFAS is quite literally everywhere, rather than depth of harm, ie a couple hundred rivers have been made into poison. If the damage was exclusively contained to these rivers, the cleanup would be obscenely expensive, but possible. Currently cleanup is basically impossible.
I live on the site of a building rebuilt 13 years after a fire that was attempted to be put out by firefighters. Would that foam have contaminated the well water I drink from?
At least in my city, the Air Force is the major source of PFAS pollution in our waterway, because they dumped firefighting agents into it for decades at their airbase.
