Laurene Allen was awarded the 2025 Goldman Environmental Prize on April 28, 2025, in recognition of her extraordinary grassroots efforts to expose and combat PFAS contamination in her hometown of Merrimack, New Hampshire. Her work brought “forever chemicals” into public focus and led to significant regulatory and corporate change, culminating in the closure of the local offending plant and the advancement of new protections for public health from chemical pollution.
Allen’s advocacy journey began in 2016, when state officials revealed that Merrimack’s drinking water contained dangerous levels of PFAS, chemicals linked to cancer, immune dysfunction, and reproductive harm. The source was traced to the Saint-Gobain Performance Plastics facility operating nearby. A social worker by training, Allen immersed herself in scientific literature on PFAS, organizing monthly local meetings and launching the Merrimack Citizens for Clean Water. She mobilized community members, gathering health data and pressing officials for broader testing and accountability. Her group went door to door, conducted a community health survey, and uncovered elevated illness rates that stirred public concern and media scrutiny. Initially dismissed and even branded a “crazy lady” by critics, Allen persevered in her efforts to translate grassroots organizing into tangible action.
By 2018, Allen’s group had secured a consent decree requiring bottled water and filtration systems for about 1,000 homes. However, follow-up investigations revealed the decree gravely underestimated the contamination’s scope. EPA testing detected dozens of PFAS compounds emitting from smokestacks and contaminating not just Merrimack’s public wells but also private wells in neighboring towns. Allen’s group maintained pressure through protests, public comments, and lobbying at regulatory hearings. She successfully helped elect local water commissioners who prioritized PFAS remediation and pursued well filtration across the public water system. At the state capital in Concord, she testified before hearings, supported creation of a PFAS commission, and advocated for tighter statewide limits on PFAS in drinking water.
Read Also: https://democratdigest.com/grassroots-environmental-activists-secure-major-policy-victories-in-2025/
These combined efforts eventually forced Saint-Gobain to announce the closure of its Merrimack plant in August 2023, with operations ceasing in May 2024. The facility had been responsible for more than two decades of contamination through air, soil, and water. Allen’s sustained activism made continuation untenable, transforming community outrage into structural change and corporate accountability.
Allen’s campaign also helped spark broader policy impacts. New Hampshire became a leader in state-level PFAS regulations, tightening limits for drinking water and increasing scrutiny of contaminated sites. Her advocacy played a role in national momentum, contributing to federal recognition of PFAS as a public health threat and support for new regulatory standards. In many ways, Allen’s campaign represented how local activism can shape national policy landscapes, amplifying the voices of affected communities to reform environmental health protections.
The Goldman Environmental Prize, often dubbed the “green Nobel,” was founded in 1989 to honor grassroots environmental heroes from six inhabited continental regions. In its history of 36 years, it has recognized 233 activists whose courage and determination have driven meaningful change. The 2025 awards, announced at a ceremony in San Francisco during Earth Week, included winners from the United States, Peru, Tunisia, Albania, Mongolia, and the Canary Islands. Allen was named the North American winner, celebrated alongside other individuals whose work ranged from rights-of-nature court decisions in Peru to illegal waste trafficking campaigns in Tunisia. In Allen’s case, her work pressured a major polluter to exit and shaped regulatory reforms that extended beyond her town.
Allen described her mission succinctly: to “stop the source and regulate upstream.” She maintained community engagement over nearly a decade, balancing her activism with work as a social worker. She collaborated with scientists and academics at Dartmouth College and Boston University to validate community survey data. Despite a state agency renewing Saint-Gobain’s air permit in 2023, her relentless organizing helped ensure public scrutiny remained intense. Her local victories extended influence: some of her group’s leaders became elected state representatives and water commissioners, helping to sustain momentum for PFAS legislation and remediation.
Allen’s work underscores how a determined individual can galvanize ordinary people into shaping major environmental health protections. By focusing first on community impact and then expanding to statewide and national levels, her activism exemplifies the power of local organizing in confronting industrial pollution, generating data, engaging legal and scientific frameworks, and holding both corporations and regulators to account.
Her efforts also highlight broader trends in environmental activism: the rise of community-based health research, the role of citizen-led legal pressure, and the increasing link between grassroots organizing and policy innovation. Allen’s leadership reminds us that meaningful environmental health safeguards can emerge not only from top-down mandates, but from well-organized civic engagement rooted in direct experience of contamination and health risk.
As the Merrimack plant shutdown and tighter PFAS regulations took shape, Allen’s impact became a case study in effective local advocacy. Thousands of affected families gained access to safe drinking water, and her model inspired other communities facing similar challenges. The award of the Goldman Environmental Prize to Allen reinforces that local action—driven by lived experience and community mobilization—can resonate at the highest levels of environmental governance and health policy.
In honoring Laurene Allen, the Goldman Environmental Prize celebrates not just one person’s persistence but the broader potential of citizen-led organizing to safeguard public health and press for chemical accountability. Her story illustrates that even in the face of dismissals and corporate resistance, determined local voices can change laws, close polluting operations, and rewrite the terms of environmental protection.
