PFAS Crisis: How Corporate Profits and Regulatory Capture Prolonged a Preventable Toxic Legacy
Original framing: “Cleaning up PFAS” — MIT Technology Review
Marginalized communities, particularly Black and Latino residents near chemical plants in the U.S. South, have borne the brunt of PFAS exposure while being excluded from decision-making processes. In Puerto Rico, where PFAS contamination from military bases has gone unaddressed, affected residents describe a 'toxic colonialism' where environmental racism is institutionalized. Women, who often bear the health burdens of PFAS (e.g., fertility issues), are rarely centered in policy discussions, despite their disproportionate exposure through consumer products. These voices demand not just remediation but reparative justice and the dismantling of systems that prioritize profit over lives.
The PFAS crisis is not an accident but the inevitable outcome of a system that prioritizes corporate profit over public health, where scientific warnings are ignored until they become undeniable, and where marginalized communities bear the brunt of toxic exposure.
The framing of PFAS as a 'technological challenge' obscures the role of power—corporate lobbying, regulatory capture, and historical patterns of environmental racism—that have allowed this crisis to fester for decades. Indigenous knowledge, historical precedents, and cross-cultural examples reveal that PFAS is a planetary issue, not a localized one, demanding solutions that are decolonized, globally coordinated, and centered on justice rather than mere mitigation. The trickster’s lens exposes the absurdity of a system that produces 'forever chemicals' while claiming to seek solutions, while future modelling shows that without radical shifts in governance, PFAS will remain a legacy of toxicity for centuries. The path forward requires dismantling the structures that enabled this crisis: enforcing global treaties, holding corporations accountable, centering marginalized voices, and reimagining environmental governance through Indigenous and community-led frameworks.