Months of painstaking work. That’s what it took Le Monde and its 17 Forever Pollution Project partners to draw up, for the first time in Europe, the Eternal Pollution Map, which reveals the extent of contamination with pervasive substances. – and polyfluoroalkyl (PFAS), a family of dangerous compounds that do not break down in the environment and will accompany humanity for hundreds, even thousands of years.
Anxious to operate with rigor, we have adapted the methodologies developed by renowned scientists and specialists. They guided us, sometimes step by step, to carry out this journalistic investigation of an unprecedented nature that combines science, cartography, history, economics and politics. At the end of this experience of “peer-reviewed journalism”, on the model of peer-reviewed scientific work, our own methodology will later be returned in the form of a scientific article in a peer-reviewed journal.
Our map brings together two types of data on the contamination of European territory by PFAS, whether detected or presumed. On the one hand, places where samples taken by scientists or authorities have measured concentrations of these chemical compounds in water, soil or living organisms – the contamination detected. On the other hand, the sites where the activities performed most likely used PFAS – the suspected contamination.
To draw up an inventory of the contamination detected in Europe, we have compiled 100 databases bringing together samples taken from the environment in 23 European countries by teams of researchers or by public authorities. An unprecedented compilation work, which establishes the existence of at least 17,000 contaminated sites, where the level of PFAS exceeds 10 ng/l, including more than 2,100 “hotspots”, where it exceeds 100 ng/l , a level considered dangerous for health according to the experts we interviewed.
Twenty producers in Europe
In Scotland or France, we had to extract this information from the authorities by resorting to procedures for requesting access to public documents. The European Commission distinguished itself by its refusal to provide us with data from a pilot study on PFAS in groundwater in eleven countries, on the grounds that “the collection and analysis of the data were entrusted to a service provider External”, a consulting firm. We only know, from the redacted report made public, that PFAS have been detected at sometimes very high levels in all these countries. Within the European Union (EU), the Aarhus Convention nevertheless guarantees public access to information on the environment.
The more than 17,000 points on our map only give a very underestimated image of the extent of the real contamination in Europe, since the collection efforts vary greatly depending on the region.
We started by locating PFAS production sites. In the absence of an official list, we have excluded the directories of lobbying organizations in the sector, the annual reports of firms, product portfolios, or even product safety data sheets. The Swiss group Archroma, for example, does not hide synthesizing PFAS, of course. But where exactly, since he has several factories in Europe? At the end of our virtual journey in footnotes and the 3D reliefs of Google Maps, we have identified and located twenty producers of PFAS in Europe.
At the heart of our investigation, an even more impressive figure. We have located nearly 21,500 suspected contaminated sites across Europe. “Suspected” because their industrial activity, presently or in the past, is documented as both a user and emitter of PFAS. It was a team of researchers from the PFAS Project Lab (Boston) with their colleagues from the PFAS Sites and Community Resources Map that established the criteria for this presumption in a methodology intended to map pollution in the United States.
“Our primary goal was to bridge the disconnect between known contamination and actual contamination locations in the environment,” explain Alissa Cordner (Whitman College, Walla Walla) and Phil Brown (Northeastern University, Boston), who coordinated these works. Informed by the best available scientific data, the team has thus identified three types of activities that reliable documents designate as sources of contamination: sites for the storage and release of fire-fighting foam, waste treatment sites and certain activities. industrial.
Far be it from them to “name and shame” and to stigmatize companies or actors in particular. “Our model, they continue, does not say that a suspected contamination site is actually contaminated with PFAS. But it “allows public officials to know where to target their interventions by identifying sites that are most likely contaminated.”
Available online, their interactive map of the United States, which served as a model for our Europe-wide map, displays 1,750 “known contamination” sites and over 57,400 “suspected contamination” sites.
Difficult localization
Main obstacle to the establishment of a European map: the lack of databases bringing together the geolocation coordinates of economic activities in the EU. Thus, in the first category of sites suspected of being contaminated by fire-fighting foam, 978 large and medium-capacity commercial airports, active or inactive, were located thanks to an aviation enthusiast site.
The defense authorities being reluctant to cooperate, we had to identify 642 military bases one by one from multiple open sources. In Flanders (Belgium) and Sweden, the authorities have inventoried all the incidents related to the use of these foams, and there are no less than 11,000 additional points on our map. In addition, there are a thousand firefighting training centers in these countries and in Norway. Missing from our map are the 50,000 municipal fire stations in Europe.
Second category: Waste treatment and disposal sites and highest throughput wastewater treatment plants (4,769), all located using several datasets made available by the European Environment Agency (EEA).
The third category proved to be a real headache. In the United States, researchers have compiled a list of 38 “presumed contaminating” industrial activities. If we were able to easily find correspondences between the American and European systems of classification of economic activities, their localization required considerable efforts for only a partial result, the EU not having geolocation data for companies.
“Necessary and Scary”
By crossing this list with the non-exhaustive list of the European Pollutant Release and Transfer Register (E-PRTR) of the EEA, we finally managed to locate nearly 3,000 factories. In the lead, a thousand paper mills which alone release between 31 and 76 tonnes of PFAS into the environment every day, according to the European Commission. This is followed by the manufacture and treatment of metals (812 sites), the manufacture of basic plastic materials (221), oil refineries (213), the finishing of textiles (126) and then again chemical plants and the treatment of leather. .
In addition, there are more than 230 plants that we have identified, mostly randomly through our research, as users of PFAS. As impressive as they are, our numbers are largely underestimated. Our menu nevertheless remains an unprecedented resource, perfectible, available to all.
“It’s a result both necessary and frightening,” whispers Phil Brown, stunned by this vision of Europe riddled with dots. “Something similar was missing for Europe,” adds Martin Scheringer, researcher in environmental chemistry at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich.
