‘Forever Chemical’ Companies Covered Up Dangers for Decades
The water you drink has been poisoned. The same goes for the air you breathe, the soil where your vegetables grow, and the lakes where you fish. In fact, there’s likely a good amount of the poison in your body right now, making its way through your system, and the damage of which you might not see for many years.
You weren’t supposed to know about this either. And the only reason we know about it now is because of a lawyer named Robert Billot. In 1999, he began to take legal action against chemical manufacturer DuPont for the harm and destruction of communities near one of the company’s factories that produced per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, or PFAS. These are also known as “forever chemicals” due to their inability to break down quickly and naturally, and can linger around in the environment for thousands of years.
Over the course of multiple lawsuits, Billot gained access to a treasure trove of internal documents from DuPont and other chemical manufacturers such as 3M that revealed the companies were well aware of the dangers posed by their products to their workers, customers, environment, and public at large. Not only that, but there was also a concerted effort to cover up their severity of PFAS in order to hide the potential for harm their products posed to the world.