Graphic: https://pfas.co
[Part One] [Part Two]
by Ian Angus
On June 26, 2025, eleven chemical company executives were sentenced to up to 17 years in prison, for poisoning water and soil in Italy’s Veneto region. The convicted men include three executives from the Japan-based multinational Mitsubishi, which owned the Italian company that polluted an aquifer that provides water to more than 30 municipalities, home to 350,000 people.
The pollutants involved were part of large family of synthetic chemicals called PFAS—per- and polyfluorenealkyl substances—often called forever chemicals because under normal conditions they break down either extremely slowly or not at all. As a result, they accumulate in living organisms and the environment, posing serious threats to health and environmental stability.
Groundwater tests in Veneto in 2013 had found concentrations of PFAS that were up to 1000 times above recognized safety levels. The affected communities installed filters to remove the chemicals from drinking water, only to learn that vegetables and fruit grown in the area were absorbing the toxins from the soil. A 2024 study found that the chemicals caused 3,890 excess deaths in the affected area between 1985 and 2018.[1]
These were the first executives to be jailed for PFAS pollution. If justice is served, they won’t be the last.
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PFAS is the umbrella term for a vast alphabet soup of chemicals with jawbreaking scientific names—PFOS (Perfluorooctane sulfonic acid), PFOA (Perfluorooctanoic acid), PFTE (Polytetrafluoroethylene), PCFTE (Polychlorotrifluoroethylene), and many more, each with somewhat different properties. What they have in common is fluorine and carbon atoms linked in some of the tightest bonds known to science. They are extremely long-lasting and extremely slippery—nothing breaks them, they repel water and grease and resist heat. The simple versions of the molecules last virtually forever, while more complex versions eventually degrade into the simple ones.
PFAS didn’t exist at all until the 1930s, when they were accidentally created in very small amounts in a Dupont Company laboratory. As with many other synthetics, the demands of war took PFAS from lab curiosity to practical application. Producing plutonium, needed for the atomic bomb, used chemicals that were so corrosive that no container could hold them for any length of time. Millions of dollars of military research developed techniques to mass produce corrosion-proof PFAS containers. Mass production of PFAS for the Manhattan Project began during the war, in a Dupont factory in New Jersey.
This was dangerous stuff. In a 2025 interview, historian Mariah Blake, author of They Poisoned the World, outlined some of the hidden history she uncovered.
“It was clear from the beginning that these were dangerous chemicals. So, the plants where they were produced commonly had fires and explosions. Workers who worked in these plants were constantly being hospitalized with breathing problems and chemical burns. And in fact, Manhattan Project inspectors warned their supervisors that the fear of injury was causing unrest at these plants and that people in other parts of the DuPont facility had come to fear an assignment to this, to the fluorocarbon or PFAS production, as an exile to devil’s island.
“But it wasn’t just workers who were affected…. around 1943, farmers downwind of this plant in New Jersey began to complain that their peach crops were burning up, that their cows were so crippled, they couldn’t stand. They had to graze by crawling on their bellies. And in some cases, farmers were also falling ill after eating the produce that they picked.”[2]
By 1947, Manhattan Project scientists knew that the chemicals were toxic and that they accumulated in the blood of people who had contact with them—but when most records of the Manhattan Project were made public in the late 1940s, information about medical research and area pollution was not included, on the grounds that they would harm the government’s prestige and lead to lawsuits.[3]
In a deal that was supposed to prevent war profiteering, DuPont had agreed that patents on PFAS production would belong to the US government. Shortly after the war the government sold those patents to a small company called Minnesota Mining and Manufacturing, later renamed 3M—and it partnered with DuPont to develop commercial PFAS products.
The best known of those are Dupont’s Teflon, used in nonstick cookware, and 3M’s Scotchguard, a stain-repellant for clothing and furniture, but there are many more. PFAS of various kinds are used in lubricants, pesticides. raincoats, dental floss, cosmetics, food packaging, paints, ski waxes, and firefighting foams, not to mention uncounted industrial applications. No one knows how many kinds of PFAS there are—over 15,000 is a good guess—or how many products contain them.
What we do know is that the fluorine-carbon bond is so tight that although one type of PFAS may change into another, they don’t go away—every gram ever made is still in the global environment somewhere. Because they were first mass marketed in the 1950s and last so long, some scientists have suggested that their presence could be used as a marker for the beginning of the Anthropocene.[4]
“One of the reasons for the current notoriety of PFAS is the ease with which they spread through water: today they are widespread in the surface waters of lakes and rivers, have been widely detected in ocean waters from the equator to the poles, and are now spreading deep below ground, into our groundwater resources. So, one part of their legacy will be as an eternally shifting, long-lasting haze, ever more diluted within the fluid envelope that surrounds the Earth….
“Only a few materials can chemically break the super-tough carbon-fluorine bonds of the large but simple PTFE [Teflon] molecule, such as pure sodium or potassium (so reactive that they are not found by themselves in nature) and, at higher temperatures, pure magnesium and aluminium metal (both vanishingly rare in nature). This is a chemical compound, therefore, that looks set to persist within strata over geological timescales—and this time not as an invisible chemical signature that needs sophisticated chemical analysis to reveal it, but as a solid plastic-like material. Indeed, when a non-stick frying pan fossilizes, the metal itself might dissolve away over millions of years underground, but the PTFE film should persist, more or less unchanged, as a thin flexible film.”[5]
Mass-produced chemicals that can last millions of years and that travel easily in water are bound to become ubiquitous in the Earth System. As a 2025 Canadian government report says:
“Globally, PFAS can be found in virtually all environmental compartments, including air, surface and groundwater, oceans, soils, and biota, as well as in wastewater influent and effluent, landfill leachate, sewage sludge, and biosolids. The highest reported concentrations are typically in proximity to known sources of PFAS that may be released into the environment, such as contaminated sites where concentrations of PFAS may occur at levels which can pose negative human health and/or environmental effects. PFAS are also routinely reported in locations far removed from these sources. Similarly, although the highest concentrations of PFAS in organisms have been noted in proximity to known releases, their ubiquitous presence has been noted in tissue samples collected from organisms worldwide.”[6]
PFAS have been found in falling rain in Antarctica and Tibet, and in up to 98% of humans tested in multiple studies.
In factories that make or use PFAS, workers can absorb them through breath or skin. Elsewhere, exposure is most often in food or drink that contains PFAS from soil or water or packaging material.[7] The pollution most commonly originates in areas around PFAS factories; in areas near military airports where PFAS-based firefighting foam was used; in areas near landfills where PFAS from commercial and residential waste has leached into groundwater; and in areas where wastewater treatment does not include filters for removing PFAS from sewage.
A PFAS source of growing concern is the sewage sludge that is used as a fertilizer on as much as 28.3 million hectares (70 million acres) of agricultural land in the United States. The Environmental Working Group, an NGO that focuses on environmental health and agriculture, says this creates “a toxic pipeline from sludge to food.”
“Industrial discharges of PFAS, along with PFAS-laden waste from residential areas, flow into wastewater treatment plants. The wastewater treatment process separates liquids and solids, creating sewage sludge as a byproduct.
“But this process doesn’t remove PFAS, so the chemicals end up in both the solid sludge and also the treated liquid, which can contaminate drinking water supplies. And federal rules limiting pathogens and metals in sludge do not apply to PFAS.
“After the treatment process, the utility can then choose to put the sludge in a landfill, incinerate it or sell it to farmers who use it as fertilizer on their land. The sale of sludge is in some cases completed through third-party companies who are responsible for managing the sludge.
“There are no national requirements to test biosolids for the presence of PFAS or warn farmers they could be using contaminated sludge on their crops….
“Once PFAS-contaminated sludge is applied as a fertilizer, the forever chemicals can leach into food crops, and crops of animal feed, such as corn and hay. Then it can also be absorbed by animals that eat these feed crops.”[8]
No one knows how many highly contaminated areas exist. A 2023 study in Europe found 23,000 sites that are definitely PFAS hotspots and another 21,500 that are probably contaminated.[9] In the United States in 2025, the Environmental Working Group found 9,552 sites with “detectable levels of PFAS” in the U.S., but that figure is low, because many communities have not been tested.[10]
Our bodies have not evolved metabolic systems to deal with these chemicals, so the PFAS we absorb through water, food and air accumulate in our organs, particularly the liver, kidney and thyroid, faster than the body can excrete them. They can even move across the barriers that normally keeps foreign substances from passing from blood to brain and from placenta to fetus.
In 2025, a comprehensive review of the known effects of PFAS on human health found:
“PFAS exposure is associated with adverse health risks such as cancer, steroid hormone disruption, infertility, lipid and insulin dysregulation, higher cholesterol levels, liver and kidney disease, altered immunological and thyroid function, and cardiovascular effects. In infants and children, PFAS exposure can cause adverse effects on infants and premature babies and can lead to reduced growth parameters, lower visual motor skills and attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) in childhood, lower levels of antibody concentrations against mumps and rubella, reduced lung and respiratory function, along with increased levels of glucocorticoids, progestogens, and uric acid.”[11]
Only a dozen or so of the thousands of PFAS have been studied in depth, so the actual list of health problems caused by this large family of chemicals is likely much longer. And because these chemicals are found in everything from drinking water to rain to house dust to clothing, it is pretty much impossible to avoid them. As the host of a U.S. television report on PFAS said, “the world is basically soaked in the devil’s piss.”[12]
They Knew
The executives jailed in Italy were not convicted just for polluting soil and groundwater, although that should have been sufficient cause, but for doing so knowing that the chemicals were toxic to human beings.
As we’ve seen, PFAS pollution is by no means limited to a small manufacturer in rural Italy. The largest manufacturers of PFAS, the chemical giants 3M and DuPont, knew for decades that the substances are toxic. Their executives have not faced criminal charges, but series of civil lawsuits, beginning in 1999, have forced the release of previously secret documents that reveal what those companies knew, and when. In 2023 a peer-reviewed study of those documents concluded:
“The two largest manufacturers of PFAS, DuPont (makers of Teflon) and 3M (makers of Scotchguard), were aware of the hazards of PFAS long before the public health community ….
“[C]ompanies knew PFAS was “highly toxic when inhaled and moderately toxic when ingested” by 1970, forty years before the public health community. Further, the industry used several strategies that have been shown common to tobacco, pharmaceutical and other industries to influence science and regulation—most notably, suppressing unfavorable research and distorting public discourse.”[13]
That confirms what the Environmental Working Group found in industry documents that it obtained and released in 2019.
“For nearly 70 years, chemical companies like 3M and DuPont have known that the highly fluorinated chemicals called PFAS build up in our blood. They’ve known for almost that long that PFAS chemicals have a toxic effect on our organs….
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- As far back as 1950, studies conducted by 3M showed that PFAS chemicals could build up in our blood.
- By the 1960s, animal studies conducted by 3M and DuPont revealed that PFAS chemicals posed health risks.
- By the mid-1970s, 3M knew that PFAS was building up in Americans’ blood.
- In the 1980s, both 3M and DuPont linked PFAS to cancer and found elevated cancer rates among their own workers.”[14]
Despite that knowledge, the PFAS makers continued to reap profits from manufacturing and selling those chemicals, without warning anyone of the dangers. And since the facts have became public, they have spent hundreds of millions of dollars fighting legal liability in court, and on lobbying to block regulation of PFAS production.
In Europe, two of the deadliest forever chemicals—PFOA and PFOS—have been banned. Denmark, Germany, the Netherlands, Norway, and Sweden have jointly proposed a Europe-wide ban on all forms of PFAS, but a multi-million dollar lobbying campaign by the chemical industry seems to have derailed the plan: In August 2025, the Commission responsible announced that it will not make a decision until the end of 2026, and will not even consider restrictions on PFAS use in printing, sealing, machinery, explosives, military, technical textiles, broader industrial uses, and medical applications.
Similar lobbying in the United States has led to effective capitulation by the Environmental Protection Agency, which in May 2025 announced that it would give water utilities until 2031 to remove PFOA and PFOS from public water systems, and would soon eliminate restrictions on most other PFAS in drinking water. In November, it approved ten pesticide products that contain isocycloseram, a PFAS developed by Syngenta, for use in agriculture, lawn maintenance and indoor pest control. The EPA’s own documents show that it gives rise to 24 other forever chemicals, 11 of which pose known health threats in drinking water.[15]
So much for the myth of environmentally and socially responsible corporations. Abetted by the agencies that are supposed to police them, corporate poisoners are successfully defending their right to spread the devil’s piss everywhere.
To be continued.
Notes
[1] Annibale Biggeri et al., “All-cause cardiovascular disease and cancer mortality in the population of a large Italian area contaminated by perfluoroalkyl and polyfluoroalkyl substances (1980–2018),” Environmental Health, April 2024.
[2] Mariah Blake, Interviewed by Amy Goodman, Democracy Now, August 25, 2025. Transcript: https://www.democracynow.org/2025/8/8/forever_chemicals
[3] Mariah Blake, They Poisoned the World: Life and Death in the Age of Forever Chemicals, (Penguin Random House, 2025), 67.
[4] June Breneman, “Global Reach: Visiting scientist taps NRRI expertise,” news release, University of Minnesota Natural Resources Research Institute, July 6, 2023.
[5] Sarah Gabbott and Jan Zalasiewicz, Discarded: How Technofossils Will Be Our Ultimate Legacy (Oxford University Press, 2025), 183, 184.
[6] State of Per- and Polyfluoroalkyl Substances (PFAS) Report, Environment and Climate Change Canada and Health Canada, March 2025. publications.gc.ca/pub?id=9.947283&sl=0
[7] Shelia Zahm et al., “Carcinogenicity of perfluorooctanoic acid and perfluorooctanesulfonic acid,” The Lancet Oncology, January 2024.
[8] Jared Hayes, “‘Forever chemicals’ in sludge may taint nearly 70 million farmland acres,” Environmental Working Group, January 14, 2025.
[9] Forever Pollution Project, https://foreverpollution.eu/map/dataset-and-maps/.
[10] PFAS contamination in the U.S. (August 14, 2025), Environmental Working Group, https://www.ewg.org/interactive-maps/pfas_contamination/.
[11] Csilla Mišl’anová and Martina Valachovičová, “Health Impacts of Per- and Polyfluoroalkyl Substances (PFASs): A Comprehensive Review,” , April 2025.
[12] John Oliver, Last Week Tonight, HBO, October 3, 2021.
[13] Nadia Gaber, Lisa Bero, and Tracey J. Woodruff, “The Devil they Knew: Chemical Documents Analysis of Industry Influence on PFAS Science,” Annals of Global Health, June 2023.
[14] Jared Hayes and Scott Faber, “For Decades, Polluters Knew PFAS Chemicals Were Dangerous But Hid Risks From Public,” Environmental Working Group, August 28, 2019.
[15] Submission to the EPA from the Center for Food Safety, June 10, 2025. Isocycloseram meets the OECD’s definition of PFAS, which the EPA has decided is too restrictive.
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