PFAS Claims Are Moving Down the Supply Chain. What Should Bottle Buyers Ask For?

A US water utility is suing two packaging manufacturers over alleged PFAS contamination. For buyers, the lesson is not the lawsuit — it is the paperwork you will be asked for next year.

A Maine water utility has sued Huhtamaki and Sappi over alleged PFAS contamination. Whatever the outcome, the case confirms a shift that buyers have been feeling for two years: PFAS stopped being a legal question and became a purchasing question.

In practice it arrives as an email from your customer — a retailer, a brand owner, sometimes your own importer — asking for a PFAS declaration before the next order ships. In the EU, the restriction proposal covers far more than food packaging. In the US, state laws are arriving one at a time, so the answer that satisfied a buyer in Ohio may not satisfy one in Minnesota.

Here is where most suppliers answer badly. “We do not add PFAS” is a statement about intent, not about the article. A usable answer has two parts: a declaration from the resin supplier covering the grade actually used, and a test on the finished article — usually total organic fluorine — if the customer requires evidence rather than a statement.

Three questions worth putting in writing to any bottle supplier:

1. Can you send the PFAS statement from the resin supplier for the exact grade you will run?

2. Has the finished bottle been tested, and by which method?

3. Will you attach that declaration to the purchase order, so it travels with the shipment?

A supplier who can answer all three in one email is worth keeping. One who answers only the first is telling you where the risk sits.

Our own position is deliberately narrow: we hold ISO 9001:2015, a RoHS verification and an EU 10/2011 migration test on PE grades. PFAS-specific testing we quote per project, because it is a laboratory cost, not something we can assert. If your customer needs a document we do not have, we say so before the order — that is cheaper for both of us than a rejected container.