I finally watched Dark Waters the week after I recorded my Concentrating on Chromatography conversation with Michelle Taylor, editor-in-chief of LabCompare. The movie came up during our discussion of LabCompare's two-part “Forever Chemicals” documentary series, and I had to admit on the record that I still hadn't seen it — despite it coming up constantly in PFAS circles for years. That admission stuck with me all week, so I finally sat down with it. Going in with our conversation still fresh turned out to be the right order to do this in. Michelle and I had just spent an hour on where PFAS testing and regulation stand today. The film showed me how we got here.
Watch the full conversation with Michelle Taylor:
The movie, in short
Dark Waters dramatizes attorney Robert Bilott's two-decade legal fight against DuPont, based on Nathaniel Rich's 2016 New York Times Magazine feature and Callie Lyons's earlier book on the same case. It starts in 1998, when West Virginia farmer Wilbur Tennant asks Bilott — at the time a corporate defense lawyer — to look into why 190 of his cattle had died with blackened teeth, tumors, and bloated organs. The trail leads to a DuPont-owned landfill above Tennant's farm, where the company had been dumping a chemical called PFOA, also known as C8. What Bilott eventually proves, through discovery documents DuPont itself was compelled to hand over, is that the company had studied PFOA's toxicity internally for decades and never disclosed it — not to regulators, not to the EPA, not to the community drinking the water downstream.
How much of it is true
More than most based-on-a-true-story films. Slate's fact-check found that the Tennant farm scenes are largely accurate, down to DuPont's internal testing for PFOA in the nearby river years before the company would publicly deny any problem. DuPont really did, in the 1960s, have employees smoke Teflon-laced cigarettes as an informal toxicity experiment — nine of ten in the highest-dose group reported flu-like symptoms within hours. The class-action medical monitoring program the film depicts was real too: nearly 70,000 residents near Parkersburg gave blood samples, funding an independent science panel that spent seven years establishing a “probable link” between PFOA and six diseases, including kidney and testicular cancer, before DuPont finally settled. The company ultimately resolved roughly 3,500 personal injury claims for $670.7 million.
Why this landed differently after the podcast, not before
If I'd watched Dark Waters first and then talked to Michelle, I think I would have walked into that conversation focused on the villain of the story — DuPont, the cover-up, the decades of delay. Watching it in the other order, I kept noticing what the film doesn't show: the actual analytical work. Michelle and I spent real time on tiered screening strategies, PTFE-free equipment, and how labs are managing detection limits that keep dropping into the parts-per-trillion range. None of that existed in any organized way during the years Dark Waters covers. The film ends with Bilott's early legal wins, decades before PFOA and PFOS actually got a federal drinking water limit. That didn't happen until April 2024, when EPA finalized the first-ever national Maximum Contaminant Levels for PFAS — 4 parts per trillion each for PFOA and PFOS. That number is not a typo. Four parts per trillion is close to the practical limit of what most certified laboratories can even measure, which tells you how far detection technology has had to come since the 1990s events the movie portrays.
The regulatory story isn't finished, either
As of this writing, EPA has proposed extending the PFOA/PFOS compliance deadline from 2029 to 2031, while separately proposing to rescind the 2024 limits on four other PFAS — PFHxS, PFNA, GenX, and a Hazard Index mixture of those three plus PFBS — and reconsider them under a different process. Public comment on both proposals closed July 20, 2026. Until EPA finalizes anything, the original 2024 limits and the 2029 deadline remain the law on the books. If you run a lab that supports public water systems, or you're a distributor fielding questions from customers about which PFAS still carry enforceable limits, this is exactly the kind of “watch the proposal, don't wait for the final rule” situation Michelle and I talked about on the podcast — because whatever version survives will hit testing volume fast, and there won't be much runway to prepare once it's final.
What Dark Waters gets right about the analytical side, even without showing it
The movie is a legal drama, not a lab procedural, so it understandably skips the instrumentation. But the underlying problem it dramatizes — an unregulated compound quietly building up in blood, water, and tissue faster than anyone could test for it — is still the operating condition of PFAS analysis today. PFOA and PFOS are now measurable at single-digit parts per trillion, and newer EPA methods extend that sensitivity to dozens of additional PFAS compounds across drinking water, wastewater, soil, and tissue matrices. It's worth remembering that the same nitrogen blowdown concentration step used across EPA Methods 533, 537.1, and 1633 depends on equipment that can't introduce its own background contamination. That's not a small detail. It's the same lesson Wilbur Tennant's cattle taught the country the hard way: what's supposedly inert can turn out not to be.
This is where our equipment actually lives
If you're setting up or auditing a PFAS workflow — whether you're prepping for the 2029/2031 compliance deadline, screening food or packaging samples the way LabCompare's second documentary covers, or just tightening up QA/QC ahead of a state inspection — the concentration step is a detail worth checking on every piece of equipment that touches your extract, not just the obvious ones. We put together a full breakdown of our PTFE-Free Nitrogen Evaporators for PFAS Analysis, which are utilized in EPA Methods 533, 537, 537.1, and 1633 and built specifically to eliminate fluoropolymer contamination risk during the concentration step. And if you're building out or reviewing a full PFAS workflow from collection through detection, we also maintain a much longer resource, PFAS Sample Preparation: A Definitive Guide, covering sample collection and handling, storage and transport, extraction techniques like SPE and LLE, pre-concentration methods, and contamination control practices specific to PFAS.
The bigger picture
Nearly everyone in the US has measurable PFAS in their blood at this point — ATSDR reporting on CDC's National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey found at least one PFAS compound in more than 99% of serum samples collected, a legacy of exactly the kind of decades-long, undisclosed contamination Dark Watrers portrays. Robert Bilott hasn't stopped; he filed a broader class action in 2018 covering PFAS exposure across essentially the entire US population, not just Parkersburg. Michelle told me on the podcast that LabCompare may follow its two food-and-water PFAS documentaries with a third, focused on PFAS in air — a matrix that barely registers in most people's mental model of “forever chemicals,” Dark Waters included.
Where to go from here
If you haven't seen the film, it's a genuinely well-made watch, and it'll change how you think about the chemistry problem your lab solves every day. If you have seen it and want the current, unregulated-drama-free version of where PFAS testing and compliance actually stand — tiered screening strategies, PTFE-free equipment considerations, EU versus US regulatory divergence, and more — that's exactly what Michelle and I covered in the full podcast episode. And if you're ready to get into the equipment and method specifics, start with our PTFE-Free Nitrogen Evaporators for PFAS Analysis page or work through the full PFAS Sample Preparation: A Definitive Guide — the equipment side of this story is one place where you don't have to wait 20 years for the science to catch up.