“The bill would rise to 2,000 billion euros over twenty years”: the dizzying cost of eliminating the “eternal pollutants” present in Europe

More than 14,000 documents dedicated to per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS), which were studied by 46 journalists scattered across 16 countries, from Monde (France) to the Express (Italy), via The Black sea (Türkiye) or the Guardian (United Kingdom). Or a survey carried out on the scale of a continent, Europe, whose conclusions reveal the worst: cleaning European waters and soils of these “eternal pollutants” would cost between 95 billion euros over twenty years, under the conditions the most favorable, and 2,000 billion euros, for a more realistic projection.

“This estimate, already impressive, does not include either the impact of PFAS on our health systems, nor a myriad of negative externalities too difficult to quantify,” announces the World. For more than a year, this media consortium, accompanied by the Corporate Europe observatory (an observatory of European lobbies) and several university researchers (Gary Fooks, Ali Ling and Hans Peter Arp), set out to determine how to clean “at least 23,000 polluted sites” across Europe.

Hundreds, even thousands of years

Non-stick, water-repellent and stain-resistant, Pfas are present in a number of sectors, from automobiles to textiles, including kitchen utensils, ready-to-wear, pharmaceutical products and pesticides. Problem: Pfas are almost indestructible – they can resist for hundreds, even thousands of years. In addition, they accumulate in the air, soil, rivers, and even contaminate the human body. Traces of this “eternal pollutant” have been found on a global scale, even in the rain that fell on Tibet “during the monsoon season”.

And this, while the Tibetan plateau “is one of the largest isolated regions in the world, with its low temperatures and pristine environment, and is called the third pole”, behind the Arctic and Antarctica, recalls a study published by the journal Chimiosphere, in 2021. However, in the event of exposure over a long period, they can have effects on fertility or promote certain cancers, according to initial studies.

“It is preferable to clean or confine the soil as quickly as possible, before Pfas spread throughout all water resources”warns Hans Peter Arp, coordinator of the European ZeroPM research project. The city of Utrecht, in the Netherlands, is a sad example. Pfas were scattered in the ground near a former barracks, then contaminated a groundwater table. “The authorities will devote ten years and 22 million euros to depolluting soil and groundwater to prevent the plume of pollutants from reaching drinking water wells,” calculate the authors of the investigation.

Half of the European Union’s annual budget

To quantify the costs of the clean-up, the media grouped within the Forever lobbying project relied on “the rare scientific and economic information available” as well as “local data collected from pioneers of depollution”.

The lower range – 4.8 billion euros per year – corresponds to “an unrealistic scenario” with “ultra-optimistic” hypotheses. To achieve this, it would be necessary to prevent any new PFAS pollution “from tomorrow”, to initiate depollution limited to priority sites and to pollutants currently regulated – ignoring new substances used since the beginning of the 2000s. “Each of the scenarios of our assessment is based on series of conservative choices, which allows us to affirm that the costs are most certainly underestimated,” details the investigation.

If the pollution continues and if we carry out extensive cleaning, “the bill would rise to 2,000 billion euros over twenty years”. Or 100 billion euros per year, estimates the Forever lobbying project… which represents half of the annual budget of the European Union. And again, this budget could only be effective when Pfas are subject to “a generalized restriction, from which their concentrations would begin to drop if we actively treat them”, announces Hans Peter Arp.

Decontamination poses, for its part, “an immense technological and logistical challenge”. Certain advanced water filtration techniques are therefore very demanding in terms of water and energy. Conventional incinerators are currently not powerful enough and cannot destroy the Pfas present in household waste. Given the colossal amounts required, “restricting Pfas emissions to stop increasing the bill is necessary”concludes the World.

These estimates still need to be achievable. Because, as the Forever lobbying project survey reminds us, the slightest initiative is threatened “by an intense campaign of lobbying and disinformation orchestrated by… polluters”. Polluters who have so far paid almost nothing to compensate for the ongoing environmental destruction.