The forever pollution project

February 2023 | foreverpollution.eu

The forever pollution project is an in-depth cross-border investigation made by 13 European media outlets about PFAS, a persistant chemical pollution that is present virtually everywhere in Europe with little to no public attention so far.

The team worked for months on gathering existing data on measured PFAS contamination levels, and on sites which are certainly contaminated, but where no measure was available. The result was a list of 100+ datasets with PFAS contamination values and suspected sites, my task was to unify their format to be able to have a single list of the contamination sites, which was then put on a map.

This project was continued by the CNRS, see PFAS Data Hub.

For this project I was awarded the Louise Weiss price for European Journalism, together with Stephane Horel, Rapahelle Aubert, Gary Dagorn and Thomas Steffen.

The forever lobbying project

January 2025 | foreverpollution.eu/lobbying

For over a year, the Forever Lobbying Project investigated an ongoing orchestrated lobbying and disinformation campaign by the PFAS industry and its allies, with the aims of watering down an EU proposal to ban “forever chemicals” and shifting the burden of environmental pollution onto society.

Over the course of the investigation, the Forever Lobbying Project gathered a total of 14,331 documents on PFAS (per- and polyfluoroalkylated substances), constituting the world’s largest collection to date on “forever chemicals”. I was in charge of the tools we used to research these documents, and to find a solution to publish them together with our findings. The documents are published in two US-based databases, the Industry Documents Library at the University of California, San Francisco (home of the famous “Tobacco Papers”) and Toxic Docs (Columbia University, New York, and City University of New York).