Gary Fooks is a Professor in Criminology at the University of Bristol in the UK. He has published widely on corporate harm, business political activity, and business regulation, particularly in the field of the commercial determinants of health. His current projects focus on how scientists employed by major agro-chemical companies seek to “stabilise” scientific facts, the deterrent effects of enforcement action by regulators, and the political and cultural reach of financial elites. He has served as an external expert to the World Health Organization on the Economic and Commercial Determinants of Health.

Disclosure: Gary Fooks has no conflict of interest.

Gary actively advised on methodologies and made an invaluable contribution to the stress testing of the industry’s lobbying arguments, as well as to the many discussions on the project. The team’s approach was largely inspired by the ‘policy dystopia model’, a taxonomy of the tobacco industry’s political activities, comparable to that of the chemical industry, which he contributed to developing. Gary and his students – Tamryn Nicol and Charmaine Sew – also filed freedom of information requests in the UK in relation to PFAS lobbying and clean-up costs.

Ali Ling’s career has focused on using basic science concepts from environmental chemistry and microbiology to solve engineering problems. Her research work aims to inform technical and regulatory decision-making by using systems thinking to understand the technical, economic, and social impacts of environmental engineering technologies. During nine years in consulting, Ali developed water and wastewater treatment solutions for clients across the municipal, mining, and manufacturing sectors. She also served as a subject matter expert for regulatory reports, including a report published in 2023 on the costs of removing PFAS from wastewater effluent.

Disclosure: From 2014 to 2023, Ali Ling worked as an environmental consultant for Barr Engineering Company on industrial wastewater treatment and site remediation projects, including work for regulatory agencies and companies making and using PFAS.

Ali and Hans-Peter enthusiastically took on the project’s challenge to establish a methodology for evaluating the costs of PFAS decontamination. They exchanged hundreds of emails and interacted with the ‘Forever decontamination’ team up to several times per week over several months. They patiently advised the journalists on which data to look for, actively checked the quality of datasets, and applied cost references to each type of media treatment. They also identified and debated which cost scenarios would be the most meaningful and involved their peers in data collecting, fact-checking and reviewing their processes. This evaluation would not have been possible without Ali and Hans Peter’s problem-solving oriented minds, their availability and their reliability throughout the entire project.

Hans Peter H. Arp is an environmental chemist interested in how fundamental aspects of physical chemistry can be utilized as applied tools for understanding and preventing pollution exposure. His recent projects, including ZeroPM and ARAGORN, focus on designing solutions through policy mechanisms, chemical properties, interdisciplinary collaboration, and sustainable technologies to help create a zero-pollution society. He holds a PhD from ETH Zürich (2008) and a professorship at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (since 2018). He is an Associate Editor for the journal Environmental Science: Processes and Impacts (since 2024).

Disclosure: Hans Peter Arp has no conflict of interest. Over the past three years, his research has been government-funded. His employer, the Norwegian Geotechnical Institute, is an independent research institute, which carries out research and consultancy activities in all sectors, including the design, implementation and monitoring of remediation projects for public and private clients.

Ali and Hans-Peter enthusiastically took on the project’s challenge to establish a methodology for evaluating the costs of PFAS decontamination. They exchanged hundreds of emails and interacted with the ‘Forever decontamination’ team up to several times per week over several months. They patiently advised the journalists on which data to look for, actively checked the quality of datasets, and applied cost references to each type of media treatment. They also identified and debated which cost scenarios would be the most meaningful and involved their peers in data collecting, fact-checking and reviewing their processes. This evaluation would not have been possible without Ali and Hans Peter’s problem-solving oriented minds, their availability and their reliability throughout the entire project.

Rob Bilott is a partner with the law firm Taft Stettinius & Hollister LLP, where, for decades, he has led some of the most novel and complex cases in the United States involving damage from exposure to PFAS, recovering billions of dollars for clients impacted by the chemicals. In 2017, Rob received the international Right Livelihood Award, known as the “Alternative Nobel Prize,” for his decades of work on these “forever chemicals,” which is also the subject of his book, “Exposure,” the Hollywood film, “Dark Waters,” and the documentaries, “The Devil We Know,” “Burned: Protecting the Protectors,” and “How to Poison A Planet.”

Rob examined archive industry documents uncovered by the team and provided historical background information on them.

Ian Cousins is Professor at the Department of Environmental Science at Stockholm University. Ian’s research has focused on PFAS in the last two decades. His particular expertise is in understanding the sources, uses, transport and fate, and exposure pathways of PFAS. Recent work has also focused on identifying alternatives for the many uses of PFAS and conducting alternatives assessments. He has published more than 200 peer-reviewed journal articles and 10 book chapters. Ian is Associate Editor of the American Chemical Society journal Environmental Science and Technology.

Ian patiently answered countless PFAS chemistry questions from the team, brought expertise on potential alternatives to PFAS for the stress test, and shared insight on industry tactics to abuse science. He was part of the Forever Pollution Project expert group in 2023.

Jamie DeWitt is Professor of Environmental and Molecular Toxicology and Director of the Pacific Northwest Center for Translational Environmental Health Research at Oregon State University. Her research program focuses on the effects of emerging contaminants on adaptive immune system function in experimental models.

Jamie also patiently answered a huge number of PFAS toxicology questions, reviewed archive industry documents uncovered by the team, and shared insights on interpreting findings of scientific studies and how data can be framed in ways to over- or under-emphasize specific findings.

Romain Figuière has a Master’s degree in environmental sciences, specialised in the risk assessment and management of hazardous chemicals, from AgroParisTech, the Paris Institute of Technology for Life, Food, and Environmental Sciences. In 2021, he started a PhD in the Department of Environmental Science of Stockholm University. His research focuses on strategies to manage the risk posed by the most harmful substances. Among others, he evaluated the functions and services delivered by PFAS in their different uses, and investigated whether potential suitable alternatives were available in order to determine if uses of PFAS can be phased out.

Romain brought expertise on potential alternatives to PFAS for the stress test, matching claims collected by the team with data from the ZeroPM Alternative Assessment Database of which he was a lead developer.

Philippe Grandjean is a physician and environmental epidemiologist, who specialises in the effects of environmental chemicals on human health. His studies of Faroese birth cohorts inspired the UN decision to develop the Minamata Convention on the control of mercury pollution. Current studies focus on neurobehavioral development, immune system functions, and metabolic abnormalities associated with developmental exposure to environmental chemicals, especially perfluorinated alkylates, thus providing documentation for new and lower exposure limits for these compounds. He has served for over 40 years as a full-time professor of environmental medicine at the University of Southern Denmark, and in parallel also for 20 years at Harvard School of Public Health (United States).

Philippe shared his expertise on the health effects of PFAS and regulatory limit values with regard to the protection of the population, as well as insight on industry tactics to abuse science. He also reviewed archive industry documents uncovered by the team.

Dorte Herzke has a long-standing experience in the development of analytical methods for the determination of persistent organic pollutants as POPs, PFAS, and plastic polymers. She has substantial expertise in environmental chemistry, biomonitoring and human exposure to environmental contaminants, and in particular PFAS. How contaminants in food, consumer products, air and the environment contribute to human exposure is one of her major research interests. Herzke has been coordinating national and international research projects as well as acting as a contributor to national authorities. (Photo: Helge Markusson)

Dorte stress-tested the plastic industry’s lobbying claims on PFAS waste management, particularly the incineration of fluoropolymers.

Martin Scheringer is a professor of environmental chemistry at Masaryk University in Brno, Czech Republic, and a group leader and senior scientist at ETH Zürich, Zürich, Switzerland. He has worked in the field of chemical hazard and risk assessment for 30 years and published extensively on many aspects of chemicals assessment, including the hazards and risks associated with PFAS. From 2015 to 2020, he was an Associate Editor of Environmental Science & Technology, the leading journal in the field of environmental chemistry. In addition to his scientific research, Martin has worked extensively at the science-policy interface. He has conducted many projects with the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), and he was a co-lead author of the chapter on chemicals and waste in UNEP’s 5th Global Environment Outlook (GEO-5). Martin is a founding member of the International Panel on Chemical Pollution (IPCP), which he currently chairs.

Martin, too, patiently answered numerous PFAS chemistry questions and provided expertise and insight on the stress test of the scientific lobbying arguments of the fluoropolymer industry. He was part of the Forever Pollution Project expert group in 2023.

Lauren Richter is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of Toronto, where she studies social inequality, health, and the environment. She uses interviews, ethnography, and archival methods to examine scientific controversies on the health effects of environmental chemical exposure. Her work on PFAS and the social production of ignorance has appeared in Environmental Sociology, Social Studies of Science, and Sociological Perspectives, among other journals. She is a member of the PFAS Project Lab, and previously worked at the Rhode Island School of Design, the Silent Spring Institute, and the Center on Race, Poverty & the Environment.

Lauren provided guidance and expertise on methodologies to analyse industry archive documents.

Lieselot Bisschop is a Professor at Erasmus University Rotterdam. She is a criminologist specialised in environmental, corporate and organised crime and their governance. Completed and ongoing (state-)corporate environmental crime research focuses on PFAS pollution, e-waste, planned obsolescence, wildlife trafficking, gold and timber trade, shipbreaking and coastal land loss. She has worked on various research projects on organised drug crime in the Netherlands, and the port of Rotterdam in particular, including the ongoing FORT-PORT project. She obtained her PhD at Ghent University (Belgium, 2012) and worked at Ghent University and John Jay College of Criminal Justice (US), before joining Erasmus School of Law in 2015.

Lieselot provided guidance and expertise on methodologies to analyse industry archive documents and added criminological insights to the team’s discussions.

Hugo Subtil is a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Political Science at the University of Zurich. He obtained his PhD in economics at the CERNA of the École des Mines Paris and at the CREST of the École Polytechnique. His research lies at the intersection of political economy and computational social sciences, with a particular focus on European studies. He is particularly interested in the extraction of ideologies from large textual corpora. His empirical work uses machine learning algorithms (NLP and deep learning) and data from social networks to quantify two main effects: (1) the extent to which institutional design influences social norms and behaviour and (2) how political ideologies have evolved over time.

Hugo and Juliette used AI to test whether lobbying actors defending fluoropolymers used the same arguments in their response to the 2023 public consultation based on 20 key arguments identified by the team. The results were not statistically significant and conclusive enough, so we didn’t include them in our analysis. In the interest of methodological transparency, we believe it is important to share and publish both negative and positive results.

Juliette Jahan de Lestang is a student at the École des Mines, where she specialised in Machine Learning and Public Affairs. Passionate about the intersection between technology, society and the environment, she has worked in the energy sector, focusing on the prediction of renewable energy production and the thermal renovation of buildings. She is interested in the effects of public policy on society, with a particular focus on mechanisms capable of responding effectively to climate change.

Hugo and Juliette used AI to test whether lobbying actors defending fluoropolymers used the same arguments in their response to the 2023 public consultation based on 20 key arguments identified by the team. The results were not statistically significant and conclusive enough, so we didn’t include them in our analysis. In the interest of methodological transparency, we believe it is important to share and publish both negative and positive results.