In 2018, when The Devil We Know premiered at Sundance, it pulled back the curtain on something the chemical industry had long hoped would remain out of public view. The documentary exposed how DuPont knowingly contaminated water supplies in West Virginia with PFOA, a so-called "forever chemical," for decades, while internal memos documented awareness of the health risks. A year later, Dark Waters brought that story to a wider audience, dramatizing the legal battle that finally forced accountability. Those films mattered because they made an invisible problem visible. They also triggered something else that deserves recognition: real regulatory action.
Since then, the United States and the European Union have moved decisively on PFAS. The EPA has established enforceable drinking-water limits for PFOA and PFOS, designated them as hazardous substances under Superfund law, and pushed forward cleanup and accountability mechanisms. Manufacturers have phased PFAS out of food packaging. The Department of Defense is eliminating PFAS-based firefighting foam by 2025. Across the Atlantic, the EU is advancing a comprehensive restriction under REACH covering more than 10,000 PFAS substances. Progress is real, and it should be acknowledged.
But the story does not end there. PFAS are used in thousands of applications across modern life, from aerospace and electronics to agriculture and food processing. And while developed nations debate how best to phase them out responsibly, a very different reality persists elsewhere, particularly in Latin America, one of the world's most important food-producing regions.
Brazil is the world's fourth-largest agricultural producer. Argentina, Chile, Mexico, Peru, and Colombia are major exporters of beef, fruit, vegetables, coffee, and seafood. These countries help feed hundreds of millions of people in Europe, the United States, and Asia. Yet many of them lack meaningful PFAS-specific regulation beyond minimal obligations under the Stockholm Convention. There are limited analytical capabilities, patchy research coverage, and no equivalent to the EPA's drinking-water standards or the EU's REACH framework. Most PFAS substances remain effectively unregulated.
That regulatory gap matters because chemical contamination does not respect borders. PFAS enter wastewater, accumulate in biosolids used as fertilizer, leach into soil and groundwater, and are absorbed by crops and livestock. FDA testing has already found PFAS in over half of the seafood samples examined. An international study of food packaging from 17 countries, including Mexico and Argentina, found that 54% of samples contained PFAS or indicators of PFAS presence, with "compostable" and "biodegradable" products among the worst offenders. Contamination follows the food, not the flag.
I am not an activist looking in from the outside. I am a scientist looking from the inside out. As the CEO of Pixon Chemie, I operate across three continents, with facilities in China and the United States, with British quality management at its core. After more than 30 years in this industry, I know exactly how easy it is to cut corners and how hard it is to compete against those who do.
PFAS may be the most visible chemical controversy, but they are far from the only one. In Brazilian agriculture, another problem receives far less attention: heavy-metal contamination in phosphorous acid, a widely used fungicide and plant nutrient. Brazil imports virtually all of its phosphorous acid, mostly from China, which controls roughly 80 percent of the world's elemental phosphorus reserves. What most people do not realize is that there are two fundamentally different ways to make this chemical.
The cheaper method, known as the DMP route, produces phosphorous acid as a byproduct of industrial waste streams. It is typically 85–95 percent pure and can contain 120 to 300 parts per million of heavy metals such as arsenic, cadmium, lead, and mercury, along with residual methanol. The cleaner P₄ route, by contrast, directly oxidizes elemental phosphorus, producing pharmaceutical-grade phosphorous acid at 99 percent purity or higher, with heavy metals below detectable limits. The only byproduct is water.
An estimated four-fifths of phosphorous acid imported into Brazil comes from the cheaper DMP route. There is no requirement to disclose how it was made. Farmers applying these products have no way of knowing whether they are enriching their soil or quietly poisoning it for decades to come.
The European Union strictly limits heavy metals in fertilizing products, cadmium below 60 mg/kg, arsenic below 40 mg/kg, and lead below 120 mg/kg, because decades of science show these elements accumulate in soil and enter the food chain, causing cancer, neurological damage, and developmental harm. Brazil has no comparable framework for many agricultural inputs. Products that would never pass EU or US standards circulate freely, and the crops grown with them are exported back to markets that would never have allowed those inputs in the first place.
This problem is compounded by greenwashing. I routinely see companies market themselves as sustainable while making purchasing decisions based solely on cost. They do not ask how inputs are produced. They do not scrutinize certificates of analysis. They do not question why one supplier is 30 percent cheaper than another. Consumers pay a premium for ethical branding, while contaminated inputs quietly pad profit margins. The farmer's soil absorbs the damage. The consumer absorbs the risk and the harm.
At Pixon Chemie, we manufacture phosphorous acid exclusively via the P₄ route. Not because regulation forces us to, but because it is the only way to produce a genuinely food-safe product. Our arsenic levels are below one part per million. Our cadmium levels are below 0.5 ppm. Responsible manufacturing is commercially viable. What is not viable is competing against products that externalize their costs onto public health and the environment because regulation fails to distinguish between industrial waste and food-grade inputs.
This brings us back to PFAS and the broader regulatory challenge. These are high-performance chemicals. They exist because, in many applications, nothing else does the job. Blanket bans are imposed without understanding which uses are essential and which are merely convenient risks, creating serious unintended consequences in aerospace, medical devices, semiconductors, and renewable energy infrastructure. Developing alternatives takes time, investment, and technical realism.
The choice is not between inaction and reckless prohibition. It is between poorly informed regulation and smart, evidence-based governance. Effective phase-outs require clear timelines, application-by-application risk assessments, and realistic transition planning. They require legislators who understand chemistry, manufacturing, and supply chains, or who at least listen to those who do.
I have seen what happens when technical expertise is absent. In Brazil, regulators mandated acid digestion testing for chelated micronutrients, a method that destroys organic chelates and produces meaningless results. Perfectly good products were rejected, while inferior alternatives continued to circulate. This is not protection. It is a regulatory failure.
Mark Ruffalo had a leading role in the 2019 Dark Waters, and this project did more than simply educate; it prompted action in the US and EU, and that leadership matters. But without extending safety standards globally, especially to the countries that feed the world, we risk repeating the same mistakes under a different name. We can do better than choosing between paralysis and panic. But only if we put knowledge, experience, and scientific literacy back at the center of regulation.
About the Author:
Gustavo Alexander-Russo is the CEO of Pixon Chemie, a UK-based specialty chemical manufacturer serving agricultural and industrial markets worldwide. With operations across China and the United States and more than 30 years of industry experience, he advocates for science-based chemical regulation and the inclusion of technical expertise in public governance.
