in Antwerp, the utopia of soil depollution in the face of PFAS

“Welcome to ‘ground zero’, as they say here”smiles Thomas Goorden bitterly. A few kilometers from Antwerp, in Belgium, the environmental activist points out the factory of the American group 3M, wedged between the highway and the River Escaut. Its chimneys have been spewing PFAS for almost forty years. These ultra-persistent molecules accumulate in the environment. They are nicknamed “eternal pollutants”.

“The ground under this factory is polluted tens of meters deep“, says Thomas Goorden. In 2021, it was he who discovered the pollution and alerted the Belgian public authorities. The following year, the Flemish state ripped off 571 million euros from the American industrial giant. Part of it must be allocated to soil depollution In Europe, the depollution of PFAS represents an exorbitant cost: 100 billion euros per year, as revealed by the Forever Lobbying Project, a collective of 29 European media of which “Complément d’investigation” is a partner But do there really be techniques that are 100% reliable and applicable on a large scale?

In the port of Antwerp, the Flemish authorities tried the experiment. The small town of Zwijndrecht is one of the most PFAS-polluted places on the planet. Here, contamination rates are so high that it is not recommended to blow on the earth, let children play outside in dry weather or have a picnic. To clean up the area, on all unpaved plots, we will plane the ground 30 or 70 centimeters and replace it with soil from elsewhere. “Most people will lose their gardens, their vegetable gardens because of the chemical pollution from this factory, it’s terrible “, worries Thomas Goorden. The operation could take almost 10 years, “and it will never be perfect“.

It is to a small factory, located only a few kilometers from the 3M site, that the soil contaminated with PFAS is entrusted. On the site of the Belgian company DEME, for around 75 euros per tonne, the soil is put through the washing machine. In a quasi-apocalyptic cacophony, mountains of land navigate through a tangle of conveyor belts before landing in a sort of giant centrifuge. “The water flow is very powerful there “, explains Philippe Goossens, director of the site. “This produces an intense friction effect between the grains and all the contamination, around each of them, will go away.“.

Aware of the health issue and driven by booming demand, the group has invested millions of euros to refine its technique. At the end of the mechanical rails which transport the cleaned earth, 10% of contaminated residue remains. “Condensed”they will be sent to specialized landfill centers. To completely destroy PFAS, they would have to be incinerated at temperatures between 1,050 and 1,100 degrees, as detailed by the National Institute of Industrial Environment and Hazards, and in addition to being energy-intensive, “it costs too much”recognizes the site director.

As for the regenerated soils, they will never return to the gardens of Antwerp. In reality, all that remains is sand, completely devitalized, free of any organic matter. It will be used to make concrete. “By doing this we are helping nature, as sand is a limited resource“insists Philippe Goossens.

“Washing the floor” is therefore a “promising technology“, estimates the European Environment Agency, on its website. However, “its viability strongly depends on the composition of the soil. Although PFAS can be removed from granular soils by washing, they cannot be removed from more cohesive soil types (e.g. clays)“.

Before leaving the factory for a second life, “every pile of soil we have here is sent to an independent laboratory who will check if each grain of soil is truly clean“, assures Philippe Goossen. By clean, we should not mean “completely free of PFAS“, more “with a level of eternal pollutants below the standard in force“. In Flanders, to be able to be reused, the soil must contain less than one microgram of PFAS; the depollution company therefore does not seek to go below this threshold. The technique is also applied only for so-called historical molecules, but not for “new generation” molecules or their degradation products, such as TFA. “You have to be realistic“, warns Philippe Goossens, “limit values ​​must take into account the toxicity thresholds for the population, but also the economic costs for society as a whole“.

For activist Thomas Goorden, completely depolluting the planet is therefore a utopia. “This will never happen, it’s totally absurd.” he admits, fatalistic. “The only thing to do is to stop the production, the emission of PFAS and to tackle the decontamination of the most critical points. After that, all we have to do is go home and learn to live with. ”

An observation shared by the scientists who helped us evaluate the decontamination of Europe. “Addressing PFAS in the environment without effective source control is like trying to drain a bathtub with the faucet on.” explains Ali Ling, for whom the scale of the costs underlines the need to regulate the use of eternal pollutants. “Once we have limited emissions from the use of PFAS, it will make sense to think more about pollution control“, concludes the activist.

Find the issue of “Additional investigation” devoted to eternal pollutants, Thursday January 16, at 11 p.m., on franceinfo and france.tv.

The Forever Lobbying Project, coordinated by Le Monde, involved 46 journalists and 29 media partners from 16 different countries, in partnership with the Arena for Journalism in Europe, and in collaboration with the Corporate Europe Observatory. Based on more than 14,000 previously unpublished documents regarding “forever pollutants” also known as PFAS, The work included the filing of 184 access to information requests, 66 of which were shared with the Corporate Europe Observatory team. Supported by an expert group of 18 international academics and lawyers, the project received financial support from the Pulitzer Center, the Broad Reach Foundation, Journalismfund Europe and IJ4EU.