The Forever Pollution Project
The Forever Pollution Project is a collaboration of journalists and media from across Europe, unveiling the scale and character of the pollution with PFAS. The PFAS-abbreviation describes an entire family of chemicals widely used in our socities, chemicals that are linked to cancer and infertility, among a dozen other diseases. It was estimated that PFAS put a burden of between 52 and 84 billion euros on European health systems each year.
The Forever Pollution Project was initiated by Tim Luimes (Investigative Desk, Netherlands). A mapping methodology was developed by Stéphane Horel (Le Monde, France) modelled over inspiration from US scientists. The investigation was carried out by a core team with journalists from five countries from late 2021 and onwards.
In the autumn of 2022, Arena for Journalism in Europe was asked to help scale the team across Europe, raising the number of countries of publication from five to 13 for publication over the spring of 2023.
This website links to the publications carried by media across Europe.
Funding
Members of the core team obtained financial support from Journalismfund.eu and IJ4EU.
Arena for Journalism in Europe is financed via own income and a diverse group of funders.
The teams and Arena
