This is one of many questions to ask following last week’s exposés by the Forever Lobbying Project, a cross-border team of investigative journalists led by Le Monde, which has worked in collaboration with lobby watchdog Corporate Europe Observatory.
The Project investigated the industry lobby and spin campaign against one of the most ambitious proposals to regulate harmful chemicals the EU has ever seen, namely the universal PFAS restriction to tackle ‘forever chemicals’.
PFAS are a class of 10,000 man-made chemicals whose key characteristic of ‘persistence’ has led to the contamination of tens of thousands of sites across Europe and beyond, with huge health and environmental consequences.
Corporate Europe Observatory’s report exposed the influencing tactics at play at the EU level: the intensive lobbying; the mobilisation of wider industrial users of PFAS to create echo chambers to amplify their agenda; deploying lobby consultancies and law firms; undermining viable replacement chemicals; promoting industry-funded science; and promoting weaker, voluntary schemes to distract from a more comprehensive ban.
Particularly prolific has been Chemours (a spin-off business from DuPont, a company which knew about the health harms of PFAS decades ago), which has had more high-level meetings with the European Commission on PFAS than anyone else. Alongside its trade association Plastics Europe and other PFAS producers, they have been aggressively defending fluoropolymer ‘forever chemicals’ via a well-funded campaign using misleading statements and hyperbole.
When industry lobbying succeeds, one of the few routes left to civil society to hold companies to account is through the courts, where ClientEarth lawyers know Chemours all too well. A few years ago, it was this same company that was taking EU authorities to court for labelling a group of PFAS as ‘substances of very high concern’. Chemours took issue with this label, despite the wealth of scientific evidence showing the health and environmental harms. ClientEarth intervened in this case and Chemours was ultimately defeated – after several years and an appeal.
Meanwhile the main chemicals industry trade association in Europe, CEFIC, together with its own members have been urging decision-makers to tackle some smaller uses first, which could mean an indefinite delay to tackling the industrial uses of PFAS which are the bigger source of exposure to PFAS.
These chemical lobbies are not all the same, but whatever the differences between them, we can see how the industry lobby operation is delivering results. The European Commission will shortly announce the details of the so-called Chemicals Industry Package, having already committed itself, almost wholesale, to the pre-election demands of the chemicals and other intensive energy industrial sectors as articulated in the so-called Antwerp Declaration. These are warning signs of the corporate capture of the regulatory process.
It is so reminiscent of past lobby battles when the tobacco industry denied the health impacts of cigarettes, and fought tooth and nail against measures to reduce smoking. Or when Big Oil told us there was no link between fossil fuels and the climate crisis. The chemicals industry, known for its tendency to cry wolf every time regulation threatens its profits, fits comfortably within this corporate playbook. That’s especially true given the links between fossil fuels and chemicals – chemicals are made from fossil fuels. These industries are interconnected and Big Oil is heavily invested in chemicals.
The reality is that we have a huge toxic pollution crisis that we cannot afford to tackle, even if we had the technology to do so at scale. The only real solution is to stop producing PFAS, except for uses which are absolutely critical for society.
If nothing changes industry will continue to pump out 4.4 million more tonnes of PFAS into the environment over the next 30 years, with ongoing pollution for our bodies, water, food, and air. And we have directly-affected communities in PFAS hotspots who have to contend more directly with the health consequences of this pollution, not to mention the emotional distress, for example, of mothers who may have inadvertently given their babies extra doses of PFAS via their breast milk.
We cannot allow industry to continue to get away with it. Just as toxic pollution has invaded our bodies and our environment, corporate lobbying has infiltrated our body politic. Both need to be ended.
There are rules in the EU that aim to limit undue influence of lobbying over policy-making, including as part of the EU Transparency Register, but these have been shown to be inadequate. We need new rules that explicitly restrict industry lobbying so misinformation can be effectively challenged, alongside sanctions for when lobbying goes too far. We need a firewall approach to protect public interest decision-making from private interest lobbying. And most of all, we need a universal ban on PFAS in Europe.
Let’s not look back in 20 years time, swamped by forever pollution, and see the EU’s PFAS restriction as an entirely missed opportunity to turn off the tap.
