They are in your frying pan, your waterproof jacket, your lipstick, your home, and in your blood. Per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) are a group of nearly 15,000 synthetic chemicals that have been quietly accumulating in our bodies and ecosystems since the 1940s. They are called ‘forever chemicals’ for a reason: they do not break down, only accumulate, spread, and endure for decades, even centuries. Despite mounting evidence linking them to cancer, infertility, immune disruption and environmental contamination, and scientists agreeing that the planetary boundary of PFAS chemical pollution has been exceeded, EU law has struggled to keep pace. We are now at a point of a crisis, where law has proven unable to prevent the continued use and spread of PFAS across Europe.
The Regulatory Puzzle: Why is it so Hard to Fix?
If the science is clear, why has the law taken so long to respond effectively? The honest answer is that PFAS, on one hand, present a storm of scientific and regulatory difficulty. On the other hand, they are entangled with economic interests tied to a multi-billion-chemical industry, and political constraints that shape the pace and scope of regulatory action.
Focusing on the legal dimension, the current state of scientific knowledge on PFAS toxicity is limited to a small group of the vast PFAS family. As a result, regulation is required to operate under conditions of significant uncertainty, which has historically been exploited as a reason to permit continued PFAS production and use, pending further evidence of health and environmental harm.
Another problem is that traditional chemical assessment and regulation addresses substances one at a time. This means that, for example, banning one of the most known PFAS, PFOA (famously used in non-stick coatings in cookware) simply prompted the industry to switch to GenX – another PFAS which turns out to have remarkably similar hazardous properties. This practice is called ‘regrettable substitution’. By the time regulators catch up to one chemical, another is already in the supply chain. PFAS are also deep-rooted in the economy. Several critical industries that include semiconductors, medical devices, and renewable energy infrastructure currently have (or claim to) no suitable alternatives for certain applications.
Then there is the problem of causation. PFAS contamination tends to be diffuse, multi-source, and decades old. Consider an area served by an airport that uses PFAS firefighting foams, an agricultural land treated with PFAS pesticides, and a PFAS sealants factory a few kilometres away. When a community discovers PFAS in its drinking water — as happened in Ronneby, Sweden, where military airbase contamination pushed PFAS blood levels in local residents to some of the highest ever recorded — it is difficult to establish who is legally responsible, and for which harm in particular. Chemicals do not come with labels and the companies that manufactured them frequently underwent mergers, restructurings, rebranding. And where PFAS are found everywhere, as they increasingly are, there may be multiple plausible polluters within a single contaminated area.
These challenges raise a fundamental question: can EU law, in its current form, meaningfully address the potentially unprecedented scale of PFAS use and harm?
Beyond Reactive Regulation: A Systemic Framework for PFAS
Addressing PFAS effectively requires intervention at every stage of their lifecycle, and not simply reacting once contamination has already occurred. Think of it as three interlocking layers.
The first is precaution. The European Union’s (EU) REACH Regulation provides the primary legal vehicle for restricting hazardous chemicals, and in 2023 four EU Member States and Norway submitted the most ambitious restriction proposal in REACH’s history: a universal ban of PFAS. It is currently under evaluation. The proposal allows for time-limited exemptions where a use is genuinely “essential” for health, safety, or a critical societal function and where no suitable alternative exists. This is a concept borrowed from the Montreal Protocol, the ozone international treaty that successfully phased out chlorofluorocarbons over the last decades.
The second layer is design under circular economy principles. The EU’s new Ecodesign for Sustainable Products Regulation aspires to make ‘eco-design’ (integrating environmental sustainability into a product’s characteristics and processes throughout its entire life cycle, from raw material to disposal) the norm by gradually setting new requirements to ensure that products are designed to be more durable, reusable, repairable, and recyclable. Thus, it also reflects a broader shift in regulatory philosophy, which now emphasises preventive measures through design rather than merely regulating emissions or waste at the end of a product’s life. The Regulation also introduces the Digital Product Passport concept: a data record attached to every product tracking its chemical composition and source in the supply chain, which can create a powerful incentive to eliminate PFAS before they ever enter the market.
In 2020, the EU published the ‘Chemicals Strategy for Sustainability’ and its vision of a toxic-free society, promoting innovation for ‘Safe and Sustainable by Design’ chemicals and materials to shift the burden from clean-up after the fact to corporate responsibility at the drawing board. What remains is to convert these mere ‘ESG ambitions’ into enforceable legal obligations, where they can actually constrain industrial practice rather than merely describe it.
The third layer is accountability. The adoption of the EU Directives on Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence (CSDDD) and Reporting (CSRD) raises the question of whether preventive due diligence duties can strengthen upstream corporate accountability for PFAS across supply chains. However, their true effectiveness will depend on how rigorously complex environmental harms, such as those posed by PFAS, are translated into concrete corporate obligations and enforceable standards. The Polluter Pays Principle, enshrined in EU Treaty law, holds that those who cause environmental damage must bear the cost. In practice, PFAS litigation is beginning to make this a reality. The Supreme Court of Sweden ruled in 2023 that highly elevated PFAS blood concentrations of citizens in the Ronneby region constituted a present bodily alteration and thus a compensable personal injury. In northeast Italy, the 2025 Miteni criminal trial resulted in convictions of the management team of an industrial polluter for environmental damage affecting 350,000 people. In Belgium, a €571 million remediation fund was established following PFAS contamination of the Antwerp region. My hope is that these cases are not just isolated incidents, but signal the beginning of a reckoning.
Can We Catch Up to the PFAS Toxic Wave?
PFAS are not a problem that can be solved by banning one chemical at a time, cleaning up one contaminated site at a time, or litigating one corporate scandal at a time. PFAS are a systemic failure of regulatory and policy fore- and oversight and of corporate accountability that demands a systemic response. The legal tools, in large part, exist. What has been missing is the political and institutional will to deploy them together across the full arc from substitution and prevention to production, and then from pollution to actual accountability.
PFAS have persisted because we let them. The question now is whether the law will prove equally enduring and effective in response.
