A hulking manufacturing plant in Irmo is being accused of contaminating the lower Saluda River and drinking water supplies after dumping toxic forever chemicals into the scenic waterway and its floodplain for years.

Environmentalists sued the Shaw Industries company Tuesday, arguing that forever chemical pollution is still occurring and should be stopped by a federal court. Shaw is a major textile manufacturing plant that produces fiber and nylon for carpets at the factory on St. Andrews Road.

The Congaree Riverkeeper organization and the Southern Environmental Law Center had threatened in March to sue Shaw if it did not take action. An attorney said the law center filed the suit because Shaw had not stopped its discharges of forever chemicals from a pipe along the Saluda, as the environmental groups had asked.

Tuesday’s lawsuit said the riverkeeper had found 15 different types of forever chemicals flowing from a Shaw discharge pipe in late 2023. Among those were levels of two of the most common forever chemicals that exceeded new federal drinking water standards.

That’s important because the lower Saluda is being polluted above the West Columbia and Cayce drinking water systems, which have shown evidence of forever chemical pollution in their water, said Carl Brzorad, an attorney with the law center. Fish that people eat also are being contaminated below the Shaw Industries plant, he said.

“They are discharging PFAS directly into a drinking water source,’’ Brzorad said. “These municipalities don’t have the advanced treatment installed that you need to remove this stuff from the source water.’’

That source water originates in the lower Saluda, an 11-mile stretch of river extending from the Lake Murray dam to the confluence with the Broad near downtown Columbia. Together, the two rivers form the Congaree. The chilly lower Saluda is often considered the jewel of the three waterways because it has whitewater rapids and an active trout fishery, unusual for central South Carolina. It is a state designated Scenic River.

Shaw officials were not immediately available for comment Tuesday, but said in March that the company stopped using some PFAS treatments in carpet manufacturing five years ago. The company suggested that it was looking for forever chemicals that may have come through its plant. The company said Shaw is taking steps to address “inadvertent sources of PFAS’’ and resolve public concerns. A spokeswoman said the company had complied with all of its permits to discharge wastewater.

Shaw Industries has run the Irmo plant for 19 years, but the manufacturing facility has operated since at least the 1960s. Once operated by Honeywell, the plant on St. Andrews Road is easily visible to anyone driving through Irmo. Shaw, headquartered in Dalton, Ga., is a wholly-owned subsidiary of Berkshire Hathaway and one of the world’s largest carpet manufacturers. It has about 20,000 employees and reports $6 billion in annual sales worldwide.

Carpets manufactured by Shaw have shown high levels of PFAS, according to the lawsuit. Company plants in Georgia and Alabama have been the target of lawsuits about the problem in those states, the South Carolina suit said.

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