PFAS also featured in The Forever Lobbying Project, a collaboration involving 29 media partners across 16 countries and coordinated by Le Monde.
A team of 46 journalists and 18 experts investigated how industry sought to weaken and delay EU legislation intended to restrict PFAS.
The project calculated that cleaning up PFAS contamination could cost Europe more than €2 trillion over the next two decades.
Reporters tested industry claims against scientific evidence and obtained 14,000 previously unpublished documents through freedom of information requests across 16 countries, creating the largest public archive of its kind.
The jury said the project’s strength lay in going beyond contamination itself to examine the financial and political interests behind it.
Maryna Rakhlei, a senior programme officer at the German Marshall Fund of the United States, highlighted a further theme in the reporting: that the industry’s business model was not only about producing hazardous materials but also about working to prevent or delay regulation.
“What impressed me was that the journalists did not stop at exposing the lobbying,” Rakhlei said. “They asked whether the arguments being used to influence European policy were actually true, and built a rigorous way of testing them with scientists and other experts.
“That is journalism doing more than revealing what happens behind closed doors: it gives the public the evidence to judge whose interests are shaping decisions that affect all of us.”
Jury members also pointed to the scale of the collaboration and the pressure involved in investigating powerful financial interests while facing threats and intimidation.
They described the project as an example of journalism carrying out its public-interest role by exposing conflicts between commercial interests and those of ordinary people.