The forensics of the plastic industry disinformation campaign to defend PFAS

By Jose Miguel Calatayud (freelancer), Stéphane Horel (Le Monde), Sarah Pilz (freelancer), and Daniel Värjö (Sveriges Radio), and edited by Craig Shaw (The Black Sea) and ⁨Himanshu Ojha⁩ (The Black Sea), 14 January 2025.

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The Forever Lobbying Project stress tested the key lobbying arguments deployed by the plastics actors to water down a historical EU proposal to ban “forever chemicals”. Misleading, fearmongering, exaggerated or potentially dishonest: our investigation shows most arguments are straight out of the corporate disinformation playbook.

Every drop of blood in every living thing in the 21st century is contaminated with residues of chemicals that were once part of a waterproof jacket or a sofa cushion.

For seven decades, the Earth has been poisoned by PFAS manufactured by just a handful of companies. Per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, or PFAS, are extremely persistent chemicals, which means they don’t break down but remain for centuries in the environment, contaminating water and soil, sea foam and trees, otters and unborn children, sowing cancers and immune and hormone disruption in humans.

Experts agree that these “Forever chemicals” have created the worst pollution crisis of all time. But PFAS manufacturers, PFAS users, and lobbying organisations are fighting hard to convince decision makers to let them continue with their “chemical business as usual”.

In February 2023, five European countries – Denmark, Germany, the Netherlands, Norway, and Sweden – proposed a PFAS “universal restriction” (known as uPFAS) under the EU chemical regulation, REACH (Registration, Evaluation, Authorisation and Restriction of Chemicals). The ban would include the entire PFAS chemical “universe”, a family of over 10,000 chemicals, with some “derogation” until alternatives can be found.

Hundreds of industry lobbyists defending the interests of about fifteen sectors have flooded the EU’s institutions and those of the five countries with an unprecedented number of comments and arguments, lobbying decision makers across Europe with the aim of undermining, and perhaps killing, the proposal.

The Forever Lobbying Project discovered that most arguments they have presented in the public decision-making process are misleading, fearmongering, exaggerated, or potentially dishonest.

 

 

For months, the team investigated the key lobbying claims put forward by plastic manufacturers and other users in the PFAS industry in their bid to obtain a derogation for an entire category of PFAS, known as fluoropolymers. A lucrative type of “high performance” plastic, such as the famous Teflon, fluoropolymers are used in a myriad of applications, from non-stick cookware and outdoor clothing to gaskets in chemical plants and cable insulation in aeroplanes.

In an innovative investigative effort, the journalists collaborated with Gary Fooks, a researcher in corporate harm and the “commercial determinants of health” at the University of Bristol, in the UK, to examine the arguments with an academic fine-tooth comb.

We selected 1,178 lobbying arguments from our 8,189 document collection in order to stress test them. Over half of these documents were gathered through Freedom of Information requests (FOIs) in 16 European countries. Others were shared with the team by Corporate European Observatory, a Brussels-based watchdog organisation, which filed 66 FOI requests to EU institutions. An additional 3,393 documents appear in submissions to the European Chemicals Agency (ECHA) during the public consultation on uPFAS between March and September 2023.

Our investigation exposes a massive, orchestrated lobbying and disinformation campaign that has the ears of leading decision makers in Europe, such as the president of the EU Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, and figures in the German regional and federal governments. It shows that the plastics industry resorts to influence tactics typical of the corporate world, used throughout the decades to defend tobacco, fossil fuels, and other chemicals and pesticides, like Monsanto’s glyphosate. The public debate on PFAS has now been polluted by these “Merchants of Doubt”.

 

 

 

 

Plastic lobby propagates scientific disinformation

Plastic lobbyists like to place science high up in their position papers and official submissions to the authorities. Our stress test shows, however, that none of their seven dominant arguments is supported by the current science: four are false, two are misleading, and their key argument is potentially dishonest.

 

 

The fluoropolymer industry, led by their business association, Plastics Europe, and its dedicated task force, the Fluoropolymer Product Group (FPG), hammered the point that fluoropolymers should be exempted because they are too large to penetrate cells and cause harm. In the lobbying documents we analysed, they referred 997 times to two scientific articles whose authors are industry employees or consultants to claim that fluoropolymers are “Polymers of Low Concern (PLC) according to criteria established by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD)”.

But the “PLC criteria” simply do not exist. In a statement to the Forever Lobbying Project, the OECD confirmed that “no agreed-upon set of criteria at the OECD level was finalised” and that “the OECD has not conducted an assessment of fluoropolymers” (read OECD’s full statement in the methodology and reference section of the website).

 

 

The lobbyists also defend fluoropolymers by crying, “Not all PFAS!”. This is true. Not all PFAS are the same in terms of properties, behaviour, and toxicity. They do, however, all “share one common structural feature that makes them highly problematic”: persistence. Leading scientists in the field explain that “because the possible effects cannot be predicted with sufficient reliability and remain incompletely known or entirely unknown, high persistence alone should be used as a sufficient indicator that serves as a proxy for adverse effects”, and is therefore also a “sufficient basis for regulation”. Martin Scheringer, an environmental chemist at ETH Zurich in Switzerland said: “high persistence makes the duration and the level of exposure to PFAS higher and, thereby, directly increases the likelihood of toxic effects”.

On the environmental side of its scientific claims, the fluoropolymer sector argues that PFAS emissions can be reduced to almost zero at both ends of the life cycle: the emissions from their facilities at the production stage and the waste management stage. It is the basis for the plea for only minor changes to existing regulations and for self-regulation, a classic tactic to nip regulation in the bud.

In September 2023, after decades of “dirty” production, as shown in the 2019 movie ‘Dark Waters’, fluoropolymer manufacturers drew a “voluntary commitment” to address concerns about PFAS emissions into the environment during the manufacturing process. Joost Dalmijn, a researcher in environmental chemistry at Stockholm University in Sweden, explained that while some companies in Europe were forced to reduce their emissions in the past few years, “the rigour of regulation and enforcement can vary depending on a company’s location”. Emissions might have decreased, but they haven’t been eliminated. In addition, Dalmijn and his colleagues have collected evidence that many PFAS “may be formed, used, and emitted at multiple stages of the fluoropolymer production process.”

 

 

To address that very issue, some companies contend that they have developed “clean” processes with non-PFAS ingredients, replacing the problematic PFAS used in their manufacturing processes. “Fluoropolymer manufacturing itself remains carbon-fluorine chemistry and will likely involve PFAS formation at one or more stages”, Dalmijn said. Besides, such processes can lead to increased formation of PFAS by-products, as one manufacturer has pointed out.

The second critical environmental question is how to get rid of PFAS. To date, the only way to destroy large quantities of PFAS waste is to burn it at very high temperatures, a costly and energy-intensive process. Based on an experimental study – commissioned and paid for by the industry – the fluoropolymer manufacturers and users claim that PFAS can be destroyed routinely in household waste incinerators at around 860°C, conveniently supporting the industry’s ideal scenario of changing nothing – since it relies on existing infrastructures with no special logistics or significant expenditures.

“Shaky grounds”, according to Dorte Herzke, a senior scientist at the Norwegian Institute for Air Research, who co-authored a 2021 collective report on fluoropolymers published by the European Environment Agency. Highly critical of how the experiment was carried out, Herze explained that the industry-commissioned researchers cut up parts of fluoropolymer into tiny pieces and burned them in a wood fire. They added no other household waste, plastics or material that could potentially interact with the PFAS. “The study does not reflect real-life conditions”, she said.

According to current science, to eliminate PFAS, “the temperature you have to reach in order to be on the safe side is 1,050–1,100°C”. Competent experts say that no existing incineration technologies can guarantee the complete destruction of PFAS.

 

 

 

Exploiting ignorance on alternatives to PFAS

“There is no alternative” is the mantra of the plastics industry and its allies, who are lobbying for a derogation for fluoropolymers, or longer transition periods for specific uses.
The argument is repeated throughout lobbying documents in various forms and is part of an “economic scaremongering” tactic that often proves effective with decision makers and serves to frame the policy debate.

Fluoropolymer actors and their allies argue:

That the durability and resistance of fluoropolymers provide so many benefits to society as a whole that they are “irreplaceable” (Assogomma, Italy’s rubber manufacturers’ federation).

That there are no available alternatives to PFAS in medical devices, pharmaceuticals, batteries for electric vehicles, semiconductors, etc.

That the restriction will be a disaster for sectors like medical implants, where “products must meet specified performance and where failure is not an option”, in the words of the US PFAS manufacturer Chemours.

That existing alternatives are not viable or perform much worse, which brings about the risk of “regrettable substitution” (German medical technology association, Spectaris). A bold argument to put forward for companies that have dodged regulatory initiatives for two decades by replacing PFAS identified as toxic… with others that turned out to be just as hazardous – which is the actual definition of “regrettable substitution”.

That the PFAS restriction would threaten Europe’s strategic autonomy (chemical company BASF, Germany) and, above all, that fluoropolymers are essential for the implementation of major European policies such as the Green (Hydrogen Europe) and Digital transitions (asserted for example by Hydrogen Europe and the Dutch semiconductor company ASML, respectively).

These are all arguments to which the European Commission is highly sensitive. President of the EU Commission Ursula von der Leyen summarised this point herself in a letter from April 2024: “PFAS are currently needed for critical applications for the green and digital transitions and for the EU’s strategic autonomy, e.g. in semiconductors, electrolysers, fuel cells, batteries and in components for many sectors, including defence, aerospace and medicine.”

 

 

What is the evidence behind these claims? Our investigation found them difficult to verify. When the European Chemicals Agency (ECHA) launched the public consultation on the proposed restriction in March 2023, companies and trade associations were specifically asked to provide relevant and detailed information to back the claims about the lack of available alternatives. Many did not follow the instructions.

The shortcoming has significantly complicated the work of the five “dossier submitter” countries, whose task is to continually update the restriction project’s “background document” with new information. “During the consultation, we did not receive many studies in the sense of research reports”, said Frauke Averbeck, of the German Federal Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, BAuA. “Some of them were statements. Pure statements without evidence are difficult because they are not comprehensible to us.”

Our stress test of the claim that “there is no alternative” found there is an ever-growing number of potential alternatives.

We collected 525 statements made by industry actors that fall under the “there is no alternative” category. Only 134 included enough information to identify a precise application. To help us stress test those statements, we contacted Ian Cousins and Romain Figuière, both at Stockholm University. In the Alternative Assessment Database, developed by the researchers as part of the EU-funded project ZeroPM, there are potential alternatives for nearly two-thirds of those 134 cases.

Neither Cousins and Figuière nor our team of journalists could go further in the analysis. The responsibility to test potential alternatives for efficiency, viability, and scalability lies entirely with the companies. But we found that, in many cases, the companies failed to support their “no alternative” claims in their submissions to ECHA.

 

 

“We are aware that alternatives are not yet available in all areas and that great efforts must be made in some cases to switch to alternatives,” said Frauke Averbeck at BAuA. “This is also taken into account in the dossier.” Food contact materials in food and feed production, for example, are already granted a delay of five years, in addition to the default 18-month transition period. Same with medical devices, which have an extended transition period of 12 years, ensuring sophisticated equipment like vascular grafts and surgical mesh won’t disappear overnight, nor will they be hastily replaced by less performing, PFAS-free versions.

Many messages conveyed to the dossier submitters are, at best, based on a lack of awareness or detailed information. At worst, it would seem that industry actors are exploiting the relative ignorance of policy actors.

“Some companies are invested in finding alternatives, but I don’t understand why some actors don’t want to make the effort to invest”, said Romain Figuière. “It seems they spend the money to slow down the process instead of spending [it] on investing in finding alternatives.”

Historical documents uncovered during our investigation reveal that in 2000, the US Fluoropolymer Manufacturers Group was citing the same “critical applications” as current lobbying efforts to justify delaying PFAS regulations: aerospace, automobiles, semiconductors, medical devices, etc.

“This was 25 years ago”, said Dolores Romano, policy manager for chemicals at the NGO European Environmental Bureau. “Add another 10 years before the restriction comes into force. Then 12 years of transition for the most complex applications. Manufacturers have had half a century to adapt”.

 

Scaremongering with economic impacts

 

 

The plastics industry argues that the socio-economic consequences of the proposed PFAS restriction will be apocalyptic: Job losses, investment freezes, supply chain disruptions, closure of product lines and plants, relocation, and severe impact on international trade and competitiveness.

Any restriction will have significant economic impacts. Sectors that are most likely to be affected, like the fluoropolymer industry, will potentially face delays in investment decisions. In its lobbying documents, the Fluoropolymer Product Group argues that the consequences will be far-reaching, leading to the “loss of entire branches of industry” and “significant impacts” on the European economy and society.

“Industry claims about costs are consistent with what is termed ‘policy dystopia’”, explained corporate harm researcher Gary Fooks, and is part of a “meta-narrative, a grand narrative which asserts that a proposed policy will lead to widely dispersed, indiscriminate, and significant adverse social and economic consequences, which, on balance, undermine rather than promote public welfare.”

Fooks points out that when the EU’s chemical regulation, REACH, was proposed in the mid 2000s, the chemical industry trade association CEFIC (European Chemical Industry Council), estimated the economic damage at between €20 and €30 billion, much more than the European Commission’s figure for direct costs, €2.3billion over an 11-year period. In 2018, the actual costs for registration under REACH for these 11 years was €3 billion – slightly above the commission’s calculations but ten times lower than the industry’s.

After submitting Plastics Europe’s headline numbers to our stress test, the results were far less exact than they might first appear. By the industry’s own admission, the key values in their estimations are based on a “number of assumptions” and, “in some cases, limited data”, which do not strictly “represent potential economic impacts”. Plastics Europe even struggled to provide a consistent number of jobs directly associated with fluoropolymer manufacturing today (<5,000) – arguably the easiest figure to accurately calculate.

Plastics Europe’s figures also rely on some “questionable assumptions” about the potential for alternatives, which ultimately underpin the sector’s economic projections, noted Fooks. One “fascinating but easily missed tactic” is the manufacture of uncertainty, making a confusing distinction between potential alternatives and suitable alternatives.

The organisation highlights the example of the food contact materials and packaging sector, which – according to their own figures – has a current market value of €1.1 trillion. Here, Plastics Europe predicts a sector-wide negative impact. But elsewhere, it admits that the alternatives are unsuitable not because they are ineffective or unusable, but because “the most likely alternatives are less durable and would need replacement more often.” In other words, the alternatives would impose additional business costs… on them.

Plastics Europe might also have a basic methodological problem, noted Fooks. Estimating a proposed regulation’s impact on the whole economy is notoriously complex. Ideally, the task should involve a “dynamic” model, which seeks to explore how a regulation changes economic activity by measuring costs and benefits to specific firms and sectors, something Plastics Europe seems to overlook. In other words, is economic activity being transformed or shifted elsewhere rather than being extinguished?

We asked the current chair of Plastics Europe’s Fluoropolymer Product Group a series of questions on their economic modelling and invited him to share any underlying data. He declined to be interviewed and instead directed us to “useful sources to get a full understanding on the issue.” These sources, it turns out, are the same documents from which we drew questions. “The information provided”, he suggested, “should be sufficient to answer your questions”.

 

 

And what about the positive economic effects of the PFAS universal restriction?

Eliminating PFAS emissions into the environment means less exposure for humans, leading to lower levels of illness, fewer deaths, and many other, indirect, benefits. Plastics Europe completely ignores the positives for humanity and the planet. In 2019, a landmark report on the “Cost of Inaction” by the Nordic Council of Ministers, Norden, evaluated the costs for health systems in Europe at between €52 and €84 billion a year.

“The PFAS problem is not just about this or that type of frying pan or outdoor jacket”, said Martin Scheringer. “It is a serious public health issue affecting millions of people all over Europe and causing enormous costs to society.”

Read here the detailed stress test methodology.