Cleaning up PFAS could cost Switzerland up to 26 billion over the next twenty years – rts.ch

Per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) can be dangerous to our health and are very difficult to escape.

To clean water or land of these almost indestructible chemicals, expensive sanitation is necessary. An investigation by SRF Investigativ and Kassensturz has determined for the first time how much it could cost to clean up heavily polluted sites and provide drinking water.

Costs that vary greatly depending on the calculations

SRF calculated these figures in collaboration with media companies from 15 European countries, as part of the project Forever Pollution. The journalists based themselves on different data for each European country, for example data concerning the quantities of drinking water, wastewater or landfills. With the help of two scientists from the United States and Norway, the following costs were calculated for Switzerland:

• Low estimate: one billion francs over a period of 20 years, or 52 million francs per year. This figure is based on an optimistic scenario: absence of any new PFAS pollution, depollution limited to priority sites – heavily polluted soils, landfills and drinking water – and to pollutants currently regulated – ignoring new substances used since the beginning of the years 2000. For the entire EU, the costs would amount to 95 billion euros.

• High estimate: 26 billion francs over 20 years, or 1.3 billion per year. In this scenario considered more realistic, PFAS are not immediately banned and therefore continue to spread in the environment. Furthermore, the remediation of heavily polluted sites is carried out more thoroughly, also focusing on more complex PFAS. In this eventuality, the bill for the entire EU rises to 2,000 billion euros over 20 years.

For comparison, in Switzerland, several thousand industrial sites, landfills and shooting installations must be cleaned of toxic substances over the coming decades and the cost of this work is estimated at five billion francs by the Confederation. .

What the numbers include and what they don’t include

Thanks to new technologies, remediating sites polluted by PFAS could be less expensive than estimated, experts note. For example, a start-up based in Schlieren (ZH) has developed a process that could be more economical.

Conversely, the authors of the study note that their calculations are conservative estimates. The figures given do not take into account the cleaning of all soils, but only heavily polluted sites. In addition, certain costs are still difficult to assess, particularly with regard to concrete contamination, as the data is still too partial.

Finally, many external costs, excluding sanitation, are not taken into account. We can cite, among other things, the impact of eternal pollutants on human and animal health or the possible compensation paid to producers if meat or milk had too high levels of PFAS and could not be sold.

Cantons examining polluted sites

Questioned by SRF, the Federal Office for the Environment (FOEN) acknowledged, at this stage, that it was not able to reliably assess possible future clean-up costs. So far, cleaning up eternal pollutants in Switzerland has already cost between 50 and 100 million francs, estimates the FOEN, including five million francs for PFAS analyzes alone.

Final costs will largely depend on the extent of the need for sanitation. Examinations are underway in the cantons. Following parliamentary interventions, limit values ​​for PFAS in soil or waste are also being developed at national level. The severity of these standards will also influence the bill.

And in the end, who will pay? The polluter pays principle applies, but the owners of polluted land are also required to pay. Often, the State – cantons and Confederation – are required to bear a large part of the costs. This is particularly the case if the original polluter cannot be identified, no longer exists or cannot be prosecuted.

>> Read also: What are the places most polluted by TFA, from the PFAS family, in Switzerland? et Geneva wants to establish a complete cantonal register of eternal PFAS pollutants

PFAS Ban Project

When it comes to regulating chemicals, Switzerland often applies European Union directives. For several years, the latter has been developing a project to ban PFAS. But the Forever Project investigation describes a campaign by industrialists, described as “harassment of public authorities by an armada of lobbyists”, to “water down, even kill” this project.

The contours of the new regulations to govern the use of eternal pollutants, which the European Commission intends to put on the table at the end of 2025, remain very vague. According to a European source, the EU would like bans on “common consumer products”, with exceptions for essential products “in the medical field for example”.

In February 2023, four Member States (Germany, Denmark, Netherlands, Sweden) and Norway put forward a proposal aimed at banning the production, use, import and placing on the market of some 10,000 components perfluorinated (PFC) and polyfluoroalkyl (PFAS) chemicals in both the EU and the European Economic Area.

Original article: Maj-Britt Horlacher and Felicitas Flohr, SRF

Adaptation in French: Didier Kottelat, with the agencies