Forever Chemicals, Forever Lawyers:

A Brief History of Knowing and Not Saying

Let’s start with the bit that should ruin everyone’s day. In 1950, a 3M study found that the chemical family now known as PFAS could build up in human blood. By the 1960s, animal studies conducted by 3M and DuPont revealed that PFAS chemicals could pose health risks. That’s not a typo. Nineteen-sixty-something. Before the moon landing, before colour television was standard, before most of us reading this were a glint in our parents’ eye, two of the largest chemical companies on Earth already knew there was a problem and decided, with admirable corporate consistency, to say absolutely nothing about it.

I want to be fair here, because fairness is a virtue I claim to have and rarely practise. The companies kept the studies secret from their employees and the public for decades. “Decades” is doing a lot of quiet work in that sentence. It’s the sort of word that sounds tidy in a press release and feels like a life sentence if you happen to be one of the people drinking the water.

This is where the story should, by rights, stay confined to a niche corner of environmental journalism, filed somewhere between microplastics and the slow horror of soil depletion. Except PFAS don’t behave like a niche problem. They behave like glitter at a children’s party… they get everywhere, they don’t go away, and nobody admits to being the one who brought them.

The Greatest Hits Album Nobody Asked For

If you want the genuinely unsettling version of this story, skip the marketing copy and go straight to the internal memos, because chemical companies, it turns out, write better horror than most novelists. A 1961 report by DuPont’s chief technologist found enlarged livers in rats exposed to C8, the chemical used in Teflon. By 1970, a DuPont-funded laboratory had found the same chemical to be highly toxic when inhaled and moderately toxic when ingested, which is the sort of finding you’d hope might prompt a company to, say, stop making frying pans out of it. It did not.

Then it gets worse, because of course it does. In 1980, DuPont and 3M learned that two of eight pregnant employees working in C8 manufacturing had given birth to children with birth defects. The company’s response was not to investigate, warn, or wince. The following year, an internal memo simply stated that the company knew of no evidence of birth defects caused by the chemical. Which is one way to handle bad news… write a memo that contradicts what you were just told and hope nobody reads both documents in the same afternoon.

By 1991, DuPont was telling the public, in a press release responding to reports of groundwater contamination near one of its plants, that the chemical had no known toxic effects at all. A year earlier, the company had reassured its own staff that the substance had a lower toxicity, comparable to table salt. Table salt. I’d love to know which focus group came up with that comparison, and whether they were paid in the same currency as their confidence.

None of this stayed buried by accident. A peer-reviewed analysis of the internal documents, published in 2023 by researchers who’d clearly read a few too many tobacco-industry case studies and recognised the choreography, put it plainly: the chemical industry took a page out of the tobacco playbook when it discovered and suppressed knowledge of the harms caused by PFAS exposure. Some of the documents were marked confidential, and in at least one case an executive wrote, explicitly, that they wanted the memo destroyed. Nothing reassures the public quite like discovering a company’s paper trail includes a request for its own shredding.

The Receipts, Should Anyone Care to Read Them

The reckoning, when it finally arrived, arrived in the entirely modern language of settlement figures, which is to say it arrived priced rather than apologised for. In 2024, 3M agreed to pay up to $12.5 billion to support PFAS remediation for public water utilities detecting the chemicals at any level, with DuPont agreeing to a further $1.185 billion under a similar arrangement. Thirteen billion dollars, give or take, which sounds like contrition until you remember it’s also, conveniently, the cost of doing business when the alternative is admitting fault in open court.

And the business kept finding new places to need settling. In May 2025, 3M agreed to pay up to $450 million to New Jersey to resolve PFAS contamination claims tied to a manufacturing site, payable over twenty-five years. Twenty-five years is an interesting choice of repayment schedule for a chemical that, by design, never breaks down. DuPont, Chemours, and Corteva, for their part, initially declined to settle with New Jersey and went to trial instead, before eventually agreeing, in August 2025, to pay $875 million over the same contamination, spread across the same generous twenty-five-year window. Meanwhile the city of Fort Worth filed its own suit in March 2025, and by June 2026 there were over fifteen thousand lawsuits sitting in the federal firefighting foam litigation alone. At some point “litigation” stops being the right word and starts sounding more like a subscription service.

3M, to its credit, has also been busily exiting the PFAS manufacturing business entirely while these payments roll out, which is either a genuine reckoning or the world’s most expensive way of saying “we’ll stop now, but only after the bill’s been negotiated.” I leave the reader to assign motive. I have my suspicions, and they are not generous.

Europe Arrives, Fashionably Fourteen Years Late

While America was busy litigating its way through the 2020s, Europe was doing the very European thing of drafting a directive, adopting it, giving everyone several years to prepare, and then finally switching it on. As of 12 January 2026, EU member states are now legally required to monitor PFAS levels in drinking water in a harmonised way and report exceedances to the Commission, under limits of 0.1 micrograms per litre for a defined list of twenty PFAS compounds, and 0.5 micrograms per litre for total PFAS including everything else. The directive itself was adopted back in 2020, and member states were supposed to have it written into national law by January 2023… which means the EU gave itself six years between deciding forever chemicals were a problem and actually checking for them. “Forever” chemicals, indeed; bureaucracy has its own kind of half-life.

Spain, where I am lucky enough to be typing this from a cave with appalling Wi-Fi and excellent silence, is not a bystander in this story. Germany, Italy, France, and Spain are projected to account for roughly two-thirds of all European spending on PFAS drinking water treatment through 2036, out of a continent-wide total expected to reach €3.6 billion. That’s not a typo either. Spain is one of the four countries footing most of the bill for a contamination problem it didn’t create, manufactured by companies headquartered somewhere else entirely, for chemicals it never asked to have in its groundwater. There’s a word for that arrangement, and it isn’t “justice.”

Zoom out further and the figures get properly absurd. The European Commission itself estimates that if current pollution levels continue unchecked until 2050, the cost to society will reach €440 billion, with treating the polluted water alone costing more than €1 trillion. Tackling the releases at source instead, the Commission notes, would save €110 billion… which is the sort of arithmetic that should end every boardroom argument about cost, and somehow never does.

The Loophole Olympics

Here’s where the satire writes itself, because the regulators handed it over gift-wrapped. The EU has spent two years drafting a continent-wide restriction on PFAS as a class of chemical, rather than playing whack-a-mole with individual compounds. In August 2025, the dossier-submitting authorities published a revised version of that restriction proposal, and in the process the number of proposed exemptions grew from twenty-six to seventy-four.

Read that again. The list of permitted carve-outs nearly tripled in a single revision, in the same document that’s supposed to be the crackdown. The new exemptions covered fluoropolymers used in semiconductor manufacturing, certain medical devices, and renewable energy components, on the grounds that those particular forever chemicals are, allegedly, somewhat less catastrophically forever than the others. It’s the regulatory equivalent of a smoking ban that exempts cigarettes shaped like vegetables.

I don’t doubt some of those exemptions have genuine technical justification. Semiconductors are hard. Medical devices are harder. But “genuine technical justification” has been the opening line of every industry submission to every chemical regulator since the Mad Men era, and it has an extraordinary track record of expanding to cover whatever the industry needed covered that particular year. As of March 2026, the European Chemicals Agency has declared its support for the broad restriction in principle, while proposing numerous targeted derogations to give companies time to find alternatives, and the final opinion isn’t expected until later in the year. We are, four years after the directive was adopted, still at the “give it a bit more time” stage. Forever chemicals; forever consultations.

What This Is Actually About

It would be easy, and lazy, to make this a story about a few bad chemicals and a couple of bad companies, tidy it up, and move on to the next outrage. But that misses the actual shape of the thing. PFOA was classified by the International Agency for Research on Cancer as a Group 1 human carcinogen in 2023, with sufficient evidence linking it to kidney and testicular cancer, and the chemicals have been associated, across a growing body of research, with thyroid disruption, immune suppression, and effects on foetal development. None of that is contested science dressed up as alarmism. It’s the consensus that’s emerged from exactly the kind of long, slow, unglamorous research that internal company memos spent fifty years trying to make unnecessary.

What PFAS actually demonstrate, better than almost any other modern pollutant, is how a known harm survives contact with profit. Not through some grand conspiracy with a single villain twirling a moustache in a boardroom, but through the much duller, much more durable mechanism of confidential memos, friendly expert panels, twenty-five-year payment schedules, and derogation lists that grow even as the headline restriction tightens. It’s bureaucratic erosion dressed as progress, and it works precisely because no single decision in the chain looks indefensible on its own.

I grew up the son of a Royal Signals man stationed with NATO, raised on the idea that the real threats were the ones you could see coming over a border on a map. Nobody mentioned the threats that arrive in tap water, dated 1961, filed as confidential, and only read by the public sixty years after the people who wrote them already knew.