Collections
Over the course of a year-long investigation, the Forever Lobbying Project gathered more than 14,000 documents related to PFAS (per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances), a class of synthetic chemicals widely used in industrial and consumer products.
The collection comprises:
4,796 documents obtained via 184 freedom of information (FOI) requests to access public documents, 118 of which were submitted by the project's journalists to the public administrations of 16 European countries, and 66 by Corporate Europe Observatory, a watchdog organization that monitors lobbying activity in Brussels, to the European institutions.
3,393 public attachments submitted to the European Chemicals Agency (ECHA) during the public consultation on the PFAS "universal restriction" proposal between March and September 2023. In total, ECHA received 5,642 contributions representing more than 100,000 pages, some of which, filed as confidential, were not made public.
5,302 documents contained in the Administrative Record "AR-226" from the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). This docket, opened in 2003 by the EPA to gather data on perfluorooctanoic acid (PFOA), fluorinated telomers, and other PFAS from the manufacturing companies, was until now only available offline, upon request.
724 documents published by the Office of the Attorney General of the State of Minnesota, as part of a lawsuit filed in December 2010 by the State of Minnesota against the 3M company in Hennepin County District Court (case 27-CV-10-28862) seeking payment for damages caused to natural and ecological resources by 3M's disposal of PFAS.
