A tube from the Dupont company stained its grounds with a dark foam color to the American farmer Earl Tennant, next to the lake near the Ohio River, in Parkesburg. It was in the mid-1990s, and cattle were halved in a short time, because cows died sick. I suspected the water was contaminated. He started collecting tests on his own, engraved the cows on a VHS tape in the slaughterhouse… But in that poor West Virginia, who was facing the giant multinational?

There and here they asked him that in Cincinnati there was an environmental lawyer, but he was defending companies. After two hours of taking the plane, he stood before him: “If you defend them, now defend me too.” And so Robert Billot met him. Lawyers and farmers, together, began a struggle that has vibrated the beams of the chemical industry, demanding damages caused by PFAS or per-polyfluorinated compounds.

Billot, by court order, managed to obtain documentation from the company on the discharges of the Tennant land. Dupont wanted to bury the lawyer in thousands of folders, but he explored it as a topo, until he found a number of significant documents, including a letter sent to the US Environmental Protection Agency in 2000. Dupont acknowledges that he knew that PFAS produced health damage, carried out studies on its workers since 1981, and bought drinking water wells in the area to avoid their use by citizens. But he hid everything.

From the enrichment of plutonium to the production of sartenes

During World War II, when Dupont accidentally synthesized PFAS, they realized that this inert material that did not produce reaction and did not decompose was ideal for enriching and isolating plutonium. Having devoted itself to the creation of an atomic bomb within the United States Government ' s Manhattan nuclear weapons project, it launched in the post-war period its wonderful treasure, Teflon. Since then, Dupont and the 3M company have increasingly developed products for everyday use with various types of PFAS, including FDP known as C8 or perfluorooctanic acid: for sartenes, cosmetics, paints, costumes, extinction foam, microwave covers...

Initially, these PFAS US multinationals denied everything in their opposing disputes, but, faced with so much evidence and evidence, they forced thousands of people to be compensated for millions of euros. In fact, today we know that these substances can cause kidney and testicular cancer, immune problems, diseases of the reproductive system and thyroid, hypercholesterolemia and many other health consequences.
The story of Tennan and Billot is known for having been taken to books and to the big screen, the last one in Dark Waters, and recently the Spanish Datadista website has reminded us of the case in the context of international journalistic research “The Forever Pollution Project”.

17,000 contaminated sites in Europe

There is no surprise to the ARGIA reader, who we commented on in the blog Zero Zabor last February, with the news that toxic PFAS are expanding uncontrollably and that the European Commission has begun its regulation. The study involved prominent media, including the German NDR and Swiss SRF public broadcasters, as well as the British newspapers The Guardian and Le Monde of the French State. In Europe, 17,000 sites contaminated with PFAS and 21,000 potentially contaminated sites have been identified on a joint map, by consulting over a hundred databases and using a specific methodology.

On the map of Le Monde, for example, you can see more than twenty contaminated sites in Euskal Herria and dozens of suspected contaminated sites in a territory so rich in stationery and factories related to the chemical industry. High levels of PFAS have also been found on the surface of natural spaces, either in the lagoon of Pitillas, Urdaibai or Inurritza.

The media have also underlined the pressure exerted by the chemical industry lobbies to alleviate bans in Europe. Lawyers’ offices and expert groups have been working for months to influence this in the European Commission. Participants in the Forever Poluttion project have scientifically identified confidential documents addressed to the European Chemicals Agency and have highlighted attempts by multinationals such as Chemours or 3M to remove their products from these bans.

In fact, the PFAS getaway so far has been the lack of control over it: by not measuring, you cannot know what the problem is. Associations concerned about the damage caused by incinerators are well aware of this, as these hazardous chemical compounds are still outside the detection regulations for dioxins, heavy metals and other polluting molecules from waste burning. In any case, in the Basque Country, the ToxiWatch Foundation is collecting PFAS data from the Zubieta area in the eggs of mosses and chickens, as the rigor of European regulations may arrive before late.

“We have made Earth a difficult place to live,” explains Le Monde, professor of environmental chemistry at Stockholm University, Ian Cousins. “All areas are contaminated, and we are at a point where they will be so for a long time,” he added. Like the climate emergency or ozone hole, the professor warns that PFAS is a “planetary boundary.” Recently, a study published in a scientific journal reveals that chemical PFAO has been found in the rains around the world, above the amounts that the US Environmental Protection Agency considers safe, even in Tibet or in the North and South poles.

Also in the hair of Members

While most Basques have little news about ethereal pollutants, because from Madrid we have nothing but the smell of loose politics, in the French State the issue is spreading more and more. On 28 June, 14 French Members of the Green Ecology Group of the European Parliament presented the result of a study carried out at their meetings: all had PFAS footprints.

These include Occitan ecologist Nicolas Thierry, a well-known voice in the fight against eternal pollutants. “We are probably facing the biggest health scandal in recent decades,” Reporterre explains in an interview with the media. The French Government has published a report to analyse the effects of PFAS on the environment, and Thierry has said that its publication is “a small victory”. It says that governments have known the problem for twenty years, but they have done nothing.

France is about to adopt a law banning ethnic pollutants on 1 January 2025. In the European Union, although more slowly, something like this is expected to be sorted out by 2027. But lobbies are not standing. “Producers struggle not to ban all PFAS, but one by one,” Thierry explains. And there are thousands of perfluorinated substances, between 4,000 and 12,000. In the United States, this strategy has made the issue more complicated.”

Arkema poisoning the population in the “chemical valley”

Among the green MEPs who have analysed hair, they have realised that some have a great deal of pollution, especially. Charles Founier, for example, is ten times more and Marie-Charlotte Garin, a Member of Rhodano, has been captured in her hair eight of the twelve PFAS classes investigated. It is also known as the “Chemical Valley”, a territory that houses important cities. In fact, many plants in the chemical industry have been cut off on the beautiful Rhone river, including the Daikin and Arkema companies in Lyon.

Arkema's name is not strange in the Basque Country. In Alonsotegi it had a production plant and in Hernani it was made PVC or polyvinyl chloride on the shore of the Urumea, where now Kem One S.L. does the same. Created with the money of the giant oil company Total, Arkema faces a small problem in Lyon, where its inhabitants have organized themselves against their cancer activity. Reporterre has gathered the case in the report “Dans la vallée du Rhône, les polluants éternels d’Arkema empoisonnent la population” (“In the valley of Rodano, Arkema ethereal pollutants poison the population”).

“Is it normal to find cancer in every house? In my house there is cancer. The neighbor in front of him has suffered for the third time the death of his husband. The same in the house on the back...”, explains Thierry Mounibe, a former chef living in Pierre-Bénit. In this municipality of 10,000 inhabitants, which extends south of the metropolis of Lyon, Arkema has its gigantic factory. On 25 May this year, Mounibe, together with many other citizens and ten associations and trade unions, filed a criminal complaint with the Court of Lyon against Arkema to end the PFAS.

A year earlier, a study of the Vert de Rage programme of the public chain France 5 showed the extent of this pollution in Pierre-Bénit: The rate of ethereal pollutants in the municipal sports field, located next to the Arkema, is 83 times higher than that established by European standards. After the scandal broke out, the French Government’s Ministry of the Environment passed to the factory an audit that concluded that since 2011 the multinational has poured 3.5 tonnes of PFAS into two water wells, “220,000 inhabitants of the region could be affected,” says Reporterre.

The Lyon factory in Arkema has been in operation since 1957 and has long known the contamination of its PFAS. Between 2003 and 2016, he conducted studies with his workers about whether they had PFNA or perfluoronanoic acid, and the result was that in this period the impregnation rate of this contaminant increased by 450% among workers. But they haven't known anything until public television posts it.

The health authorities of the region have recommended that the neighbours of fifteen municipalities in the area of Lyon not eat eggs and chicken from their pens, nor fish caught downstream of Pierre-Bénit. But this measure is particularly affecting organic producers: “I’m angry because the state has allowed something like this to happen instead of supporting us,” explains a retired small farmer who reared chickens: “It’s scary.”

Citizens are now awaiting official tests on blood, breast milk and drinking from schools during the court complaint. If the relationship between the discharges of Arkema and its health problems is confirmed, they will start a lengthy compensation claim process, a déjà vu of what happened to Dupont in the United States. Will we have something in Basque Country?