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PFAS are forever chemicals found in many everyday items, including Teflon which can be found in non-stick stoves. These “perennial pollutants” are carcinogenic and contaminate the air, drinking water and human organisms around the world. An investigation between Europe and the US highlights the scale of this disaster and the emergency for collective European action against this global threat. 

It is the PFAS that prevent computers from catching fire when they are running. They form a water film capable of resisting fire in fire-fighting foams. The same ones we find in the ultra-resistant packaging of our food. No continent, no group of humans escapes them. In the US, 20 years ago, the courts forced PFAS-producing industries to pay for damage caused by their products. The lawyer who defends these industrialists promises them a scandal worse than tobacco and asbestos combined. But in Europe, civil society and public authorities are only now becoming aware of how big the problem actually is. In France, in response to the scale of the scandal, an ambitious law has just been passed in record time: it provides for a ban on certain PFAS and introduces the polluter pays principle for future industrial discharges of PFAS. But will this tax be enough to clean up the drinking water and soil that have already been contaminated for decades? Yet, according to researchers, every human on the planet has PFAS running through their veins without knowing or being aware of the threat it poses. There are solutions that we need to implement so that we can continue drinking water from the tap or just breathe the air that is around us. The ambition of this film is both to give an idea of the global scale of this disaster, and to say that it is time for Europeans to oppose it together, rather than each country acting on its own.