The US chemical industry likely spent over $110m during the last two election cycles deploying lobbyists to kill dozens of pieces of PFAS legislation and slow administrative regulation around “forever chemicals”, a new analysis of federal lobbying documents has found.
The industry’s onslaught was effective: only eight pieces of legislation that targeted PFAS made it through Congress, the paper prepared by the Food and Water Watch (FWW) nonprofit found.
“There’s an extreme amount of money that’s going into fighting [PFAS legislation],” said Amanda Starbuck, FWW’s research director and the lead author on the report. “It’s hard to win these fights when there’s so much funding being put in from the opposing side.”
PFAS are a class of about 14,000 compounds used to make products resist water, stains and heat. They are known as “forever chemicals” because they do not naturally break down, and they have been linked to cancer, high cholesterol, liver disease, kidney disease, fetal complications and other serious health problems.
As the dangers from PFAS have come into sharper focus over the last decade, lawmakers, the Environmental Protection Agency and other administrative agencies have come under an ever-increasing amount of pressure to rein in the chemicals use and clean up pollution. Chemical manufacturers’ spending has jumped in response, the report noted.