South Kimberly Residents Sue Kimberly-Clark for PFAS

Two lawsuits have accused Kimberly-Clark of contaminating drinking water and soil in New Milford, Connecticut with PFAS from its paper products plant and an unlined landfill, and they have gone in opposite directions. A federal class action was dismissed in March 2026 after a judge called the claims speculative. A separate state court case, filed in October 2025 and focused on forcing cleanup rather than winning damages, is still pending.¹²

The Two Sites at the Center of the Cases

Kimberly-Clark has run a manufacturing plant on Pickett District Road in New Milford since the late 1950s, making Kleenex and, until 2004, Huggies diapers. The facility sits on about 60 acres along the Housatonic River.³ The company also owns a 165-acre landfill on Kent Road that it used from 1969 to 2010 to dispose of manufacturing waste.²

Both lawsuits allege PFAS reached the surrounding area two ways: airborne emissions from the plant’s smokestacks settling onto nearby properties, and leachate from the unlined landfill migrating into groundwater and toward the Housatonic River.⁴

The Federal Class Action That Was Dismissed

Three New Milford residents, Bethany DePaul, Arlene Quaranta, and Meredith Quaranta, filed DePaul v. Kimberly-Clark Corporation on February 28, 2024, in the U.S. District Court for the District of Connecticut. The proposed class covered residents within roughly three miles of the plant, and the complaint sought more than $5 million in damages.⁴²

The plaintiffs pointed to soil sampling from December 2023 that detected PFOA and PFOS on their properties and in nearby parks. Testing of one plaintiff’s drinking water well in January 2024 identified eight PFAS compounds, including PFOA at 15 nanograms per liter and PFOS at 14 nanograms per liter. On the health side, the complaint alleged “subclinical cellular injuries” from PFAS exposure and an increased risk of kidney, testicular, and thyroid cancers, along with reproductive harms.⁴

Why the Judge Threw It Out

On March 27, 2026, U.S. District Judge Kari Dooley granted Kimberly-Clark’s motion to dismiss in full.¹ Her memorandum of decision described six “speculative assumptions” stacked in the complaint:

An inference that Kimberly-Clark used PFAS based only on the fact that its product categories “traditionally” contain them, without direct evidence of purchases or use at this plant.
An assumption that the landfill’s waste was PFAS-laden because paper sludge is “notorious” for contamination, with no testing of waste from this specific facility.
Claims of landfill leaching supported by what the court called inconclusive indicators.
Use of a single stormwater test in a public culvert near the landfill to infer company-wide PFAS use.
No accounting for the dilution any leachate would undergo once it reached the Housatonic River.
No baseline comparison showing PFAS levels in New Milford were elevated above regional background readings.

Judge Dooley called the allegations “utterly speculative” and “largely conjectural,” denied the plaintiffs’ request to amend their complaint a fourth time, and dismissed the case.⁵

The State Court Case That Is Still Alive

Five months before the federal dismissal, Minah McBreairty filed suit in Litchfield Superior Court on October 17, 2025 against Kimberly-Clark, the Town of New Milford, and the New Milford Inland Wetlands and Watercourses Commission. McBreairty lives on Kent Road, across from the former landfill. The case was brought by Silver Golub & Teitell, the same firm behind the federal action.²

The strategy is different. The complaint does not seek monetary damages. It alleges violations of the Connecticut Inland Wetlands and Watercourses Act and the Connecticut Environmental Protection Act, claiming the company discharged PFAS into wetlands and the Housatonic River from an unlined landfill without required permits, and it asks the court to order Kimberly-Clark to stop the discharges, investigate and remediate the site, and set up long-term monitoring.⁶²

The town and its Inland Wetlands Commission are also defendants. According to the complaint, McBreairty notified the commission of contamination in February 2025, and the commission declined to investigate, citing limited resources.²

The Testing the New Case Relies On

The state complaint is built on site-specific sampling the federal case was faulted for lacking. Runoff leaving the landfill property in 2024 showed PFOS at up to 31.2 parts per trillion and PFOA at 9.33 parts per trillion, flowing through a culvert into the Housatonic River. McBreairty’s own well, tested in April 2025, showed PFOS at 8.74 parts per trillion and PFOA at 4.83 parts per trillion, both above the EPA’s 4-part-per-trillion drinking water threshold for each compound.²

The complaint also cites Kimberly-Clark patents from the 1970s that specified PFAS-containing additives made by 3M and DuPont for use in nonwoven products, and points to laboratory testing of vintage Huggies diapers and Kleenex products purchased on eBay that the plaintiff says confirmed PFAS content.⁶

What Kimberly-Clark Says

The company has denied the allegations in both cases. In a statement to Insurance Journal after the federal case was filed, Kimberly-Clark said, “We do not use PFAS in any of our U.S. consumer products,” called the claims “entirely unfounded,” and said it takes its role as a “responsible corporate citizen in New Milford seriously” and follows “all regulatory and legal requirements.”⁷ The company separately told the Hartford Business Journal it has phased out PFAS chemicals, without specifying when or how.² In its dismissal motion, the company argued the federal plaintiffs relied on “assumptions and guesswork” rather than evidence tying specific products or emissions to PFAS.³

No Regulatory Action, So Far

Available records do not show any state or federal environmental agency publicly investigating or taking enforcement action against the Kimberly-Clark facility or landfill over PFAS.² The company has paid smaller Connecticut environmental fines in the past, including a $14,418 air pollution penalty in 2025 and a $14,300 environmental violation in 2015, but none of those recorded penalties involved PFAS.⁸ For now, the legal pressure on the New Milford operations is coming from private plaintiffs, and the one active case is the state court cleanup suit in Litchfield.

1
Newstimes. Kimberly-Clark Lawsuit PFAS CT New Milford
2
Hartford Business Journal. CT Resident Sues Kimberly-Clark Over PFAS Contamination From New Milford Landfill
3
PFAS Project. Kimberly-Clark Files to Dismiss New Milford Residents Claims of PFAS Exposure
4
Class Action.org. DePaul et al. v. Kimberly-Clark Corporation, Complaint
5
ALM. Memorandum of Decision, DePaul et al. v. Kimberly-Clark Corporation
6
Silver Golub & Teitell. Silver Golub Teitell Files New Lawsuit Against Kimberly-Clark Over PFAS Contamination From New Milford Facility
7
Insurance Journal. Kimberly-Clark Responds to PFAS Contamination Lawsuit
8
Violation Tracker. Kimberly-Clark Violation Tracker