Hello everyone and welcome back to Money Power Health.

This week, we are discussing so called “forever chemicals” or PFAS, a group of more than 10,000 man-made chemicals used in a wide range of industrial applications and consumer products. Of core interest to public health, they are resistant to degradation, meaning they persist in the environment, contaminating water and soil, and ending up in our food chain and bodies, accumulating in people, animals and plants. The rate and spread at which this is happening, combined with the health effects of such chemicals, some of which can affect reproduction and foetal development or cause cancer, has led to a range of new regulatory proposals to eliminate or reduce their use around the world. However, such developments face strong and coordinated lobbying efforts by the manufacturers of these chemicals. To discuss this issue, I am joined by Vicky Cann from Corporate Europe Observatory and co-author of their Chemical Reaction report which documented extensive lobbying in collaboration with a global group of journalists and media outlets. We’ll discuss how industry lobbying is shaping the fate of PFAS regulation in Europe, what this means for public health and the environment, and why the Commission’s receptiveness to corporate influence raises urgent questions about how we protect democratic decision-making from commercial capture. I hope you enjoy the conversation. 

You can find a recent article by Vicky Cann alongside Hélène Duguy from ClientEArth on forever chemicals in the EU here: https://corporateeurope.org/en/2025/05/forever-chemicals-are-everywhere-so-why-isnt-eu-banning-them-all

The full report she discusses in the podcast is here: https://corporateeurope.org/en/chemical-reaction and news coverage of it is here: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2025/jan/14/industry-using-tobacco-playbook-to-fend-off-forever-chemicals-regulation

Information on the forever lobbying project she references is here: https://foreverpollution.eu/lobbying/

Links to the core FOI documents (now deposited in the Industry Documents Library: https://www.industrydocuments.ucsf.edu/chemical/collections/forever-pollution-project/

You can sign up to the Corporate Europe Observatory newsletter here: https://corporateeurope.org/en/newsletter