The following speech was written for the exhibition opening in the EU Parliament in Brussels by CRIN Climate Adviser and founder of Climate Justice for Rosa, Benjamin Van Bunderen Robberechts:
When I was growing up, I was taught a lot about safety.
Wear a helmet.
Look both ways.
Make sure you’re visible in traffic.
I was taught, above all else, how to be careful. And that made sense. Those were visible dangers. Risks you could point to, explain, and avoid. It showed that the adults in my life wanted to protect me.
But what strikes me now is not what we protected children from.
It is what was ignored.
Unsafe toys were taken off shelves, but the air I breathed, the water I drank, and the blood running through my veins were never part of the same conversation.
I was taught how to be careful. But the world I inherited was not made safe.
That is the contradiction at the heart of ‘Born Polluted’.
Today, children are born carrying hundreds of industrial chemicals in their bodies. PFAS. Heavy metals. Substances designed in laboratories, entering the bloodstream before a child has taken their first breath.
This is not an accident.
It is the result of political decisions that prioritised industry over children.
We regulate the paint on a wooden train.
We regulate the size of a marble so a child does not choke.
But we do not regulate the chemical burden accumulating in an unborn child with the same urgency.
If the EU is serious about the ‘best interests of the child’, protection cannot stop at the toy box.
Children are not just growing up in a polluted world. They are entering it already polluted. And let’s be honest about what that means.
It means profit has been placed above children’s health.
We are told to be resilient.
My generation has been told to adapt to floods.
To adapt to heatwaves.
To adapt to loss.
I have seen environmental failure stop being a technical debate and start being a funeral.
As if that isn’t enough, children are being told to adapt to chemical exposure.
Stop telling my generation to be resilient. Resilience is what you demand of people when you have chosen NOT to fix the system that is harming them.
Again and again, responsibility is shifted downward. Onto individuals. Onto families. Onto children.
‘Make better choices.’
‘Buy organic.’
‘Be careful.’
But you cannot lifestyle your way out of poisoned groundwater.
You cannot adapt your way out of a contaminated food chain.
No amount of resilience compensates for systemic refusal to lead.
If the harm is systemic, the protection must be systemic.
Children are not just ‘future citizens’ – they have rights today. And rights are not recommendations. They are legal obligations.
If children do not get to opt out of exposure, policymakers do not get to opt out of responsibility.
Yes, we have the science.
We have the evidence.
We have the stories. They are in this room.
What we need now is political courage.
Do not ‘simplify’ our health away. Revise REACH to protect the most vulnerable, not the most profitable.
If you regulate PFAS, regulate them fully. Not gradually. Not partially.
If you export toxic waste, understand that you are exporting harm to children whose rights matter just as much as ours.
Because this is not abstract.
A child’s first cells should not carry the signature of industrial lobbying.
Being ‘born polluted’ is a political choice.
And decisions made in this building do not stay in this building.
They travel.
They accumulate.
They enter bloodstreams.
Art like Stefano Schirato’s makes the invisible impossible to ignore.
My message today is not about guilt. It is about mandate.
We taught children how to be careful. But the world they inherited was not made safe.
The question for the European Parliament is no longer: ‘What can we do?’
You know what to do.
The question is, will you?