What is the hidden price of PFAS pollution? This cross-border investigation reveals that PFAS remediation across Europe could cost up to €2 trillion over a 20-year period. We exposed the real cost of the “forever chemicals” pollution on the environment, science, and politics. Here, we focus on the cost of PFAS pollution in Southern Veneto, Italy.
PFAS (per-and polyfluoroalkyl substances) are a family of over 10,000 man-made chemicals widely used in consumer products and industrial processes and equipment, from toilet paper to cable insulation in rockets. Their miracle properties, however, have fateful downsides. Their persistence in the environment makes them almost indestructible without human intervention. PFAS are also toxic, and linked to cancers, hormonal and immune disruption.
Over a year, a team of 46 journalists and 29 media partners, including Facta, investigated an ongoing massive, orchestrated lobbying and disinformation campaign led by the PFAS industry and their allied organisations to water down a proposal to ban “forever chemicals” in the EU and shift the burden of environmental pollution onto society, threatening the economic equilibrium of European nations. This is the Forever Lobbying Project.
We found that PFAS remediation across Europe could cost up to €2 trillion over a 20-year period to clean-up legacy PFAS pollution and ongoing emissions in Europe, with an annual bill of minimum €100 billion to remediate emissions, if these remain unrestricted.
Pushing the boundaries of journalistic investigation into lobbying and misinformation through an academic approach, the Forever Lobbying Project team subjected the key arguments deployed by lobbyists in the plastics sector to a stress test, showing that most of them were misleading, scaremongering and even false.
The team built on the concept of “expert-reviewed journalism”, pioneered in 2023 with the Forever Pollution Project, this time involving 18 international academics and researchers in Zürich, Stockholm, Toronto, or Rotterdam, from environmental chemistry to AI.
The journalists collected over 14,000 unpublished documents on PFAS, constituting the world’s largest collection to date on the topic. This trove of documents is now available to the public in the Industry Documents Library at the University of California, San Francisco, home of the famous “Tobacco Papers”, and in the Toxic Docs database of Columbia University, New York, and City University of New York.
Our stories are also available in Italian and can be accessed directly from each story page. The Italian version has been published in Il Bo Live magazine, edited by the University of Padova.
Credits
The cross-border investigation ‘Forever Lobbying Project’ was coordinated by Le Monde and involved 46 journalists and 29 media partners from 16 countries: RTBF (Belgium); Denik Referendum (Czech Republic); Investigative Reporting Denmark (Denmark); YLE (Finland); Le Monde and France Télévisions (France); MIT Technology Review Germany, NDR, WDR and Süddeutsche Zeitung, (Germany); Reporters United (Greece); L'Espresso, RADAR Magazine, Facta.eu, Il Bo Live and Lavialibera (Italy); Investico, De Groene Amsterdammer and Financieele Dagblad (the Netherlands); Klassekampen (Norway); Oštro (Slovenia); DATADISTA / elDiario.es (Spain); Sveriges Radio and Dagens ETC (Sweden); SRF (Switzerland); The Black Sea (Turkey); Watershed Investigations / The Guardian (UK), with a publishing partnership with Arena for Journalism in Europe, and in collaboration with lobby watchdog Corporate Europe Observatory.
The investigation is based on over 14,000 previously unpublished documents on “forever chemicals” PFAS. The work included filing 184 freedom of information requests, 66 of which were shared to the team by Corporate Europe Observatory.
The investigation expanded on the ‘expert-reviewed’ journalism experiment pioneered in 2023 with the Forever Pollution Project by forming an expert group of 18 international academics and lawyers.
The project received financial support from the Pulitzer Center, the Broad Reach Foundation, Journalismfund Europe, and IJ4EU. Website: https://foreverpollution.eu.
