For 3 years, they investigated the manufacture of phosphate fertilizers. A work that took them to Senegal, France, Spain, Tunisia and Flanders. But the starting point is in Wallonia: in Engis, in the Liège region. It is there, on the Hardémont hill, that Prayon, world leader in phosphate chemistry, accumulated between 1950 and 1985 millions of tons of phosphogypsum, waste containing heavy metals and radioactive elements from the production of phosphoric acid and phosphate fertilizers. A real hill that did not exist before the 1950s and which was still completely white in 1980. Today, vegetation has covered this open-air dump. Thus burying the memory of a pollution that nevertheless remains very real.
“Even Prayon was not able to tell us how many tons of phosphogypsum were deposited at this location,” says journalist Laurence Grun. Worse, the company says it does not know what happened to the quantities of waste produced before 1950, since production began in… 1890.
It must be said that while Flanders has an inventory of such landfills, this is not the case in Wallonia, explains the magazine Tchak. As for monitoring, it is not much better. Only the Nuclear Control Agency (AFCN) monitors the radioactivity emitted, explains the magazine. But no one is concerned about other risks of chemical pollution (cadmium, arsenic, lead, etc.). In theory, it is the Department of the Environment and Water of the Walloon Region that should take care of it, explains the magazine. “However, there, no one has heard of this landfill. On the municipal side, the information is just as non-existent.”
Today, Prayon still generates millions of tons of phosphogypsum in Engis. While some of it is used in cement works, the most polluted fraction is stored in the Engihoul forest. A new landfill that already contains 5 million tons of waste. All without any soil protection system. Result? Between 2020 and 2022, several exceedances of standards for groundwater were observed. What kind of pollution? Here too, Prayon did not want to answer the two journalists. “It’s difficult to have a dialogue with them,” says Laurence Grun. “Their answers always revolve around the jobs generated by their industry. But without really asking about those destroyed. Because whether in Senegal or in the Liège region, these are polluted lands that can never be used in alternative agriculture, for example.”
“Phosphate fertilizers. Memory in the skin.” An investigation to read in the Tchak magazine fall 2024 published this Friday. As part of this publication, the magazine is launching a crowdfunding campaign whose objective is to produce a webdoc that will serve as an international showcase for this investigation.
