3M, an unprecedented environmental scandal in Belgium
Direction Zwijndrecht, just outside Antwerp, Belgium. For 50 years, the land of this village was highly contaminated by the American giant 3M. PFAS were discovered during gigantic works to connect the two banks of the river and complete the "ring", a kind of ring road of the city. A major scandal in the country, of which Thomas Goorden, environmental consultant, is one of the whistleblowers. "It's a bit like an oil spill, but it spans 50 years," he quips, adding that "the government was fully aware of PFAS pollution. But it only became a real problem for them when they realized they had to dig a tunnel right in the middle of the area."
The whistleblower takes us to meet Eduard, retired, who works in his vegetable garden that day. He and his wife are among those whose blood was drawn to test for PFAS. "The levels found in our blood are extremely high and we don't know what consequences this will have later. My children don't want to eat vegetables anymore, no more eggs and I don't cook anymore," laments the pensioner. He does not believe in any clean-up. "They may say they repair the damage, but they clean the floor, but they don't listen to us," he concludes with a clenched jaw. The chemical company has committed €571 million in July 2022 for the remediation of the site.
A European survey
The European Chemicals Agency lists at least 10,000 "perennial pollutants". Their particularity lies in the chain of carbon and fluorine atoms that PFAS contain, an almost indestructible chemical bond. For industry, they are ideal substances, resistant to water and heat. They are therefore omnipresent in our daily lives: non-stick pans, food packaging, fire-fighting foams, raincoats and even toilet paper. Yet it is this resistance that makes PFAS so dangerous to health and the environment. Once the chemicals are released into nature, by the factories that produce or use them, they seep into soil, water and do not decompose naturally.
Major PFAS producers, such as Chemours, 3M or Solvay, ensure that they do everything possible to limit releases into the environment. If left unchecked, nearly 4.5 million tonnes of PFAS will end up in the environment over the next 30 years. Where and in what quantities? A group of journalists from 17 media outlets in 13 countries wanted to find out. Thanks to their titanic work, the "Forever Pollution Project", an unprecedented map of contamination, proven and suspected, has been developed. Stéphane Horel is an investigative journalist at the newspaper Le Monde, very active in the collective. "The result is quite spectacular, in the sense that there are very few places (on the map, editor's note) that are spared by this pollution," says the journalist, still shocked by the discoveries. The figures speak for themselves: 17,000 contamination sites detected, 21,000 more suspected. "We know perfectly well that it is largely underestimated," she says, while pointing to "hotspots", places where rates exceed 100 ng per liter or kilo. There is of course the 3M site in Belgium. "In these areas, there should be a fairly urgent intervention by the public authorities," says the journalist, who recalls that no regulation limits this pollution.
>> Read also: Haro on PFAS, these "eternal pollutants" and omnipresent
PFAS, these endocrine disruptors
What effect can these substances have on health? Francesca Mancini, epidemiologist at INSERM, devotes her research to it. It recruited 100,000 women between the ages of 40 and 65 in 1990 and continues to monitor them. As we know, PFAS are dangerous for health, 80 to 90% of a person's exposure is through food but also through water. "PFAS are considered endocrine disruptors, which means that they impact and disrupt the activity of hormones in the body," says the researcher. "The strongest evidence we currently have is the relationship between PFAS exposure and the immune response, especially in children to vaccines." The more a child is exposed to PFAS, the less effective the protection associated with a vaccine will be.
Other studies also show a potential relationship between PFAS exposure and certain cancers, including hormone-dependent cancers – testicular cancer and breast cancer. Over the years, European researchers, who are chasing industry, have succeeded in banning several types of PFAS such as PFOS or PFOAs. "The ultimate goal of our research is to help generate scientific evidence strong enough to convince policymakers to take action and to extend the ban to several molecules that are part of the same family," concludes Francesca Mancini.
How to decontaminate water?
In Belgium, near Antwerp, a common road construction site is directly impacted by the pollution created by 3M in half a century. For the work, the construction company must pump into the water table. Usually, this water would then be released into the conventional network. But here, it must imperatively be treated beforehand. Colas Environnement is managing this new type of project. The water is sent to large tanks and then passed through activated carbon filters, a material identified as capable of retaining PFAS. These filters will capture organic pollutants, including PFAS. Spent coal and the pollutants it contains are sent for destruction and incineration. However, this is not a sustainable solution in the long term. "Activated carbon will capture pollutants, but it will not destroy them," explains Arnault Perrault, director of Colas Environnement. The water that continues to seep back into the aquifer will in turn be contaminated by the soil that is full of PFAS. "If we wanted to do a depollution project, we would have to be able to treat pollutants directly at the source, directly in the basement," says Arnault Perrault. Unfortunately, the techniques currently available do not work on PFAS since they are aptly named eternal pollutants."
The immense work of remediation of the earth
To find sustainable solutions, Colas Environnement has formed a partnership with researchers from the BRGM (Bureau de recherches géologiques et minières) based in Orléans. Objective: to find products aggressive enough to destroy PFAS. In order to develop this innovation, the researchers are conducting tests in a tank filled with earth, where pollutants are injected, in this case fire-fighting foams that contain PFAS. "We will first try to extract the PFAS with a kind of gel," explains Julie Lions, project manager. "Then we do a chemical treatment directly in the subsoil capable of destroying the PFAS that would remain after the first treatment."
The gel extracts 95% of the PFAS that are present in the matrix. Other methods, thermal, involve heating the ground to more than 1000 ° C to destroy pollutants or physical methods, where we will seek to break the PFAS by different physical effects. The price of clean-up will be key. "Towards the end of the investigation, I told myself that we had to try to put a figure on the cost of this contamination in Europe," recalls Stéphane Horel, the journalist of Le Monde. "And then I stopped counting when I reached several hundred billion euros because I understood that it was priceless. No one is able today to say how much it would cost to free the environment of this substance." The companies directly responsible are preparing to spend billions of euros to try to repair the irreparable.
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