On April 15, 2025, two events unfolded in the Netherlands that, taken together, reveal the contradictions at the heart of contemporary PFAS governance.

That morning, Dutch public health authorities warned residents not to eat eggs from their own backyard chickens after testing confirmed PFAS concentrations above medically safe thresholds. On the same day, Dutch police raided the Chemours chemical plant in Dordrecht as part of an ongoing criminal investigation into whether the company knowingly emitted harmful “forever chemicals,” endangering public health and the environment.

One response acknowledged PFAS as a serious environmental and public health hazard rooted in industrial production. The other shifted responsibility for managing exposure onto residents themselves; effectively telling people that the health consequences of decades of pollution were now theirs to manage. These two actions, taken by the same government on the same day, offer a snapshot of a broader global pattern: the increased recognition of PFAS as dangerous while consequences are governed through individual responsibility rather than structural prevention.

As the clothing Patagonia recently put it in its 2025 Progress Report after more than a decade trying to figure out to maintain waterproof materials without the chemical: “‘PFAS’ is shorthand for a really big family of chemical compounds that include PFCs and are frequently called ‘forever chemicals’ because they don’t break down for years (and years) and instead build up in our bodies. They could just as easily be called ‘everywhere chemicals’ because they’re so pervasive now that it’s virtually impossible to claim an item is ‘PFAS-free.’”  Even if no more PFAS were released starting tomorrow, their persistence means that environment, humans, and other organisms would still be exposed to PFAS for generations.

That framing captures the paradox at the center of PFAS regulation: they are chemicals so persistent and widespread that individuals are told to manage exposure, even as PFAS continues to be emitted.

From environmental health to environmental crime

In our recent commentary in Environmental Health, we argue that understanding PFAS pollution requires more than toxicology and epidemiology alone. A criminological lens, particularly one attentive to state-corporate crime, helps explain how such extensive contamination occurred, why it persisted for decades, and why responsibility continues to be displaced onto affected communities.

The health impacts of PFAS exposure are now well documented. The U.S. National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine link PFAS to immune suppression, endocrine disruption, fertility and developmental harms, and kidney and testicular cancers. The economic costs are equally staggering: recent estimates suggest that remediating PFAS contamination across Europe alone could cost tens of trillions of euros over coming decades.

Yet these harms were not unforeseeable. Internal industry documents show that major chemical manufacturers understood PFAS toxicity long before regulators or the public were informed. In a 1984 internal DuPont meeting, company officials acknowledged that “total elimination” of PFOA was required from a legal and medical perspective – before concluding that exposure reduction should proceed only “in a way that does not hurt economically.”

This pattern of early knowledge, delayed disclosure, and strategic minimization of regulatory consequences, echoes earlier public health disasters involving asbestos, tobacco, and lead. Criminology provides a vocabulary for naming these dynamics not merely as regulatory failure, but as forms of corporate environmental crime facilitated by the state.

Knowledge asymmetries and selective ignorance

One reason PFAS pollution persisted for so long is the profound asymmetry of knowledge between industry and regulators. Chemical companies conducted internal toxicological studies, monitored worker exposures, and tracked environmental emissions, while governments relied heavily on industry-provided data when issuing permits.

In the United States, scholars have shown how regulatory frameworks allowed companies to maintain information monopolies, producing “selective ignorance” within agencies responsible for protecting public health. Similar dynamics played out in the Netherlands, where authorities licensing the Dordrecht facility depended on DuPont for information about substances that were chemically novel and poorly understood at the time.

Government archives reveal that economic ministries actively intervened on DuPont’s behalf when environmental requirements threatened expansion plans, prioritizing employment and industrial growth over precaution. These dynamics mirror patterns documented by UN Special Rapporteurs, who have criticized both U.S. and European governments for permitting PFAS production and transport despite clear evidence of harm.

From a criminological perspective, this alignment of corporate and state interests helps explain why PFAS emissions were permitted, even when they exceeded what would later be recognized as safe, and why enforcement remained slow and fragmented.

Fragmented regulation and diffuse responsibility

PFAS governance has also been undermined by institutional fragmentation. Environmental enforcement is divided across agencies, jurisdictions, and legal frameworks, each responsible for a narrow slice of the problem. Air emissions, water discharges, soil contamination, food safety, and public health surveillance are often regulated separately, obscuring the cumulative nature of PFAS exposure.

This fragmentation is especially ill-suited to chemicals that are persistent, mobile, and bioaccumulative. PFAS released into air or water do not remain at the point of emission; they circulate through ecosystems and food systems, reappearing in drinking water, produce, dairy products, fish, and human bodies. Moreover, PFAS are widely used in industrial processes and consumer products yet there is little insight into use categories, types and volume of PFAS used.

Regulatory delays compound the problem. In the European Union, evaluating a single chemical can take seven to nine years, followed by additional years before restrictions enter into force. Regulating PFAS one compound at a time has allowed industry to substitute slightly modified molecules, a process often described as “chemical whack-a-mole,” while overall exposure continues largely unabated.

Responsibilization without prevention

Against this backdrop, health authorities lowered the safety threshold for PFAS and thereby increasingly focus on what individuals should do to reduce exposure: avoid certain foods, filter drinking water, limit contact with contaminated soil. While such guidance may be necessary in the short term, it risks normalizing a situation in which people are expected to manage the consequences of industrial pollution they did not create.

The April 15 backyard egg advisory exemplifies this shift. Rather than framing contaminated eggs as evidence of regulatory failure and ongoing industrial emissions, responsibility was placed on residents to change their behavior around this new public health hazard. Meanwhile, PFAS production continues, and governments, including the Dutch state, have declined to enact comprehensive bans on PFAS manufacturing.

Criminology helps make visible what this framing obscures: PFAS exposure is not an unfortunate byproduct of modern life, but the outcome of decisions made by powerful actors operating within permissive regulatory environments. Naming these dynamics as state-facilitated environmental corporate crime does not imply that every exposure event violates existing law. It highlights how “lawful but awful” practices can generate profound social harm while evading accountability.

Why this perspective matters

A key point in the Environmental Health commentary is not that litigation “solves” PFAS, but that legal action can function as an accountability accelerator: changing incentives, forcing disclosure, and establishing precedents for remediation responsibilities.

Reframing PFAS pollution through a criminological lens has practical implications. Courts have already begun to recognize historic PFAS emissions as unlawful, even when companies operated under permits, as seen in recent Dutch rulings against DuPont and Chemours. Similar dynamics are unfolding in the United States through large-scale settlements and ongoing litigation following the work of attorneys such as Robert Bilott.

Legal action can shift incentives, expose hidden knowledge, and support stronger regulation. It can also validate the experiences of affected communities, who are too often treated as collateral damage rather than victims.

The contradiction revealed in the April 15, 2025 governmental actions is not unique to the Netherlands. It reflects a global pattern in which states oscillate between acknowledging environmental harm and managing its fallout through individual responsibility. Resolving that contradiction requires confronting not only the chemistry of PFAS, but the political and economic structures that allowed “forever chemicals” to become everywhere chemicals in the first place.