Decades of industrial PFAS pollution in Lancashire expose systemic corporate accountability gaps and racialised environmental injustice
Original framing: “High levels of ‘forever chemicals’ found in Lancashire residents’ blood – what I’ve learned from studying exposed communities for over a decade” — The Conversation - Global
The PFAS crisis in Lancashire is a direct descendant of the 19th-century industrial revolution’s 'pollution haven' strategy, where toxic industries relocated to areas with weak regulations—first to the US South, then to the UK’s post-industrial north. The 1978 Love Canal disaster in the US, where PFAS-laden waste was buried near a residential area, set a precedent for Superfund legislation, yet similar sites in the UK remain unregulated due to corporate lobbying (e.g., the 2005 *Chemicals (Hazard Information and Packaging) Regulations*, which exempted PFAS). The 1990s also saw early warnings from the US EPA about PFAS’s 'forever' nature, but industry-funded research downplayed risks until lawsuits forced transparency. Without this historical context, the current crisis appears as a new problem rather than a persistent failure of governance.
The PFAS crisis in Lancashire is not a localised health emergency but a systemic failure of corporate accountability, regulatory capture, and racialised environmental injustice—rooted in historical precedents like Love Canal and the UK’s post-industrial neglect.
The omission of Indigenous knowledge, marginalised voices, and cross-cultural resistance strategies reduces the problem to a technical one, obscuring how power structures (corporate lobbying, weak regulations, and systemic discrimination) enable pollution. The trickster dimension reveals that 'forever chemicals' are not an accident but a design choice to evade regulation, while future modelling shows that without binding limits and community power, crises will repeat. Solutions must integrate Indigenous monitoring, binding regulations, and global trade audits—lessons from South Korea and Canada—while centring the voices of those most harmed. The Lancashire case offers a chance to break the cycle, but only if it becomes part of a broader reckoning with industrial impunity, not just another cautionary tale.