By Professor Gary Fooks*
In January 2025, a team of 46 journalists across 16 European countries revealed a huge lobbying campaign aimed at gutting a proposed EU-wide restriction of the chemicals. If the restriction fails, and PFAS emissions remain unrestricted, the cost of cleaning up on-going contamination will run to €2 trillion over the next 20-year years – an annual bill of €100 billion.
This post summarises the work of this journalist collaboration and discusses its links to academics working within the field. Academic involvement in the project provided the journalists with a range of methods and frameworks of analysis, which provided the public with a clear account of the scale of the problem and the strategies used by the industry to push back against effective regulation. Equally, by working with journalists, participating academics were able to reach a much larger audience across Europe and increase awareness of the costs of PFAS to public health and the environment.
PFAS
PFAS – perfluoroalkyl and polyfluoroalkyl substances – are a family of thousands of synthetic chemicals that are implicated in a growing number of illnesses and health complications – ranging from liver damage to compromised immune systems. They share a common characteristic: a carbon-fluorine bond – one of the strongest in organic chemistry. The bond makes PFAS highly persistent in the environment, earning them the nickname “forever chemicals.”
Because of this persistence, their potential for bioaccumulation, and their sheer number, restricting them as a class – as currently under consideration within the EU – is increasingly considered to be vital. The alternative – a case-by-case approach – would take too long as well as risking “regrettable substitution”. Historically, banning individual PFAS chemicals has led to their replacement with structurally similar compounds that pose similar or unknown risks. A class-based restriction, as such, reduces the likelihood of such substitutions.
Background to Investigation
Both news of the lobbying campaign and the clean-up costs – the first estimate of its kind for Europe – were the result of an inventive combination of investigative journalism and social and applied science methodologies. The approach – billed as the Forever Lobbying Project (FLP) – built on an earlier collaboration between many of the same journalists and applied scientists, which mapped PFAS contamination across Europe and made previously “unseen science” available to the public for the first time. This first investigation – which identified over 22,000 confirmed contaminated sites – was hugely influential, strengthening calls for the current class-based, EU-wide restriction.
As with many major regulatory proposals which have public health and environmental protection at their core, resistance from entrenched corporate interests quickly proved to be fierce. And it was the creeping realisation among journalists within the consortium that the plastics industry’s might defeat the restriction that kick-started the idea for a follow-on investigation, focusing on the lobbying campaign.
The Cost of Policy Failure
Two questions seemed central to making sense of the lobbying campaign for the public – what would the bill be for cleaning-up PFAS if the lobbying campaign was successful and how had the plastics industry had been able to make so much headway with European officials?
The cost estimate of €2 trillion over 20 years was overseen by an environmental engineer and environmental chemist who developed a methodology for evaluating PFAS contamination costs and advised journalists on which data to look for and actively checked datasets. The figure is large – roughly the GDP of Italy – but represents a conservative estimate of the scale of the problem.
The Lobbying Campaign
The lobbying campaign essentially rested on three simple contentions: that most PFAS were not harmful to health – and so there was no need for a broad restriction, that there were little in the way of practical alternatives to PFAS, and that a broad restriction on their manufacture and use would effectively hollow-out the European economy, killing the green transition in the process.
Clearly, if the industry were being taken increasingly seriously by EU officials, then it followed that EU policy actors were more than likely to be finding these arguments relatively persuasive. So, the consortium determined to look at them more closely and “stress-test” them. Here, approaches taken to explore the validity of industry arguments used in tobacco and food policy conflicts were adapted – and the results were telling.
Plastics Europe, for instance, made great play of the concept of “polymers of low concern” (PLC) to claim that most fluoropolymers were in fact perfectly safe – or at least highly likely to be perfectly safe.
The concept they implied encapsulated criteria developed by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), which for the casual observer gave it a measure of validity. So, we traced the origins the concept. Yes, there had been an OECD expert group which had “engaged in discussions on criteria for identifying polymers of low concern” between 1993 and 2009, but it seems there had never been enough reliable data for the OECD to commit to the idea as an institution. In the event, as the OECD informed the consortium, “no agreed-upon set of criteria at the OECD level was finalised”.
The other arguments exhibited different weaknesses, but they typically worked to the same effect – facts and observations twisted and exaggerated to present a lose-lose or “dystopian” characterisation of the EU proposals – terrible losses economic losses to the world and its wife with no appreciable health or environmental benefits.
Journalist-Academic Collaborations
Collaboration between journalists and academics involves significant compromises, including reduced sample-sizes and dispensing with robustness checks. But they represent an uncommonly effective way of reaching a large audience in a timely manner – an invaluable combination where large economic actors are seeking to shift their costs onto others and the public’s health and the environment are at risk.
Author details
Gary Fooks is a Professor of Criminology at the School for Policy Studies, University of Bristol. His research primarily focuses on corporate harm, corporate power, and business regulation, with a particular emphasis on the commercial determinants of health. Currently, his projects explore a variety of critical topics, including the stabilisation of corporate scientific knowledge, the deterrent effects of enforcement actions against large corporations, elite welfare, and the political and civil networks of financial elites.
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article here.