Eternal pollutants in drinking water: a chemical plant in the Gard under suspicion.
With the Solvay plant in Salindres due to close in the spring of 2025, its workers are demanding a full medical check-up. Could their exposure to TFA, a perennial pollutant found in high doses in nearby waterways, be affecting their health?
The last of the smoke rising from the long, rusty chimneys of the Solvay plant in Salindres will evaporate over the next few months. But not the anger and anxiety of the 69 workers facing redundancy who were responsible for the large-scale production of TFA (trifluoroacetic acid), a product used in the pharmaceutical and pesticide industries. For more than six months they have been demanding a full medical check-up before the site is cleaned up as a ‘farewell gift’, to find out whether their exposure to this perennial pollutant has affected their health. With a down jacket on his back, Nicolas*, the company’s CGT delegate, greets people in the visitors’ car park, opposite the main building of pale green sheet metal.
“We don’t want to pollute, we want to produce, but in good health. When the TFA scandal broke last year, we asked for analyses to be carried out on our operators. Biomonitoring, in other words urine and blood tests, to find out if there was any danger to us or the people around us,” explains the thirty-year-old. The site management is not happy about this project, arguing that no laboratory is capable of carrying out such a study.
“We then called in an independent expert and his report was clear: Solvay was not in the clear as far as this product, TFA, was concerned. The operators are too exposed. The discharges expose nature. The workers are losing their jobs and now they are being told that there will be no follow-up for their health? The management is afraid that in 5 or 10 years they will be told that they have serious illnesses. And where will Solvay be then? They’ll have closed us down, so how will we manage?”
An eternal pollutant with no control standards
The problem is that TFA is classified as a persistent pollutant, but the French health authorities do not yet know how dangerous it is. Can it accumulate in the human body? Can it affect pregnancy or the risk of cancer, as some European countries claim? The Occitanie regional health authority has just launched a series of samples to be taken in January from local rivers and groundwater.
It was the environmental association Générations Futures that took the industrial chimney to task last spring by analysing, at its own expense, the rivers (the Aris, the Avène and the Gardon) and even the drinking water from the taps of two municipalities downstream from the plant. Not surprisingly, a very high concentration of this acid was found in the jugs at Moussac and Boucoiran. “In the Nordic countries and Germany, TFA is accused of being reprotoxic, i.e. dangerous for foetuses during pregnancy,” says Michel Tachon, representative of Générations Futures in the Gard.
“We found levels of 20 micrograms per litre of water. If we refer to the metabolic value of pesticides, the threshold is 200 times higher,” adds the campaigner. But the water is still legally drinkable because there are no discharge standards for TFA, which has not yet been proven to be dangerous to humans. “Ten years ago, when there were even fewer regulations, dozens of kilos of TFA were dumped into the environment every day,” says one worker. After 40 years of production, the closure of the industrial site was announced last September, a few months after an initial investigation by Le Monde.
‘Gard Eau PFAS’ deplores the ‘silence’ of local elected representatives
A spokeswoman for Solvay at the company’s headquarters in Brussels said: “We are fulfilling our obligations in terms of regular medical check-ups for our employees, for whom the health of our employees is a central concern.” For its part, the Agence Régionale de Santé Occitanie (Occitania Regional Health Agency) remains as mute as a carp in the Gardon, confining itself to its most recent sampling, the results of which are not expected until 2026. TFA has never been taken into account. According to Christophe Rivenq, president of the Communauté de Communes d’Alès, Salindres is “the victim of an intolerable smear campaign. Salindres water fully complies with current standards.”
Béatrice Ladrange, a retired engineer and member of the opposition in Alès, is trying to get some concrete answers from her group ‘Gard eau PFAS’. A retired engineer, the sharp-eyed 60-year-old says she is confronted by the ‘silence’ of local elected representatives. “Now that the government is tackling persistent pollutants and scientists are publishing reports, they can no longer maintain this position. But no public meeting has been organised, and the residents regret this. We’re in a bit of a mess, just like with the asbestos scandal, when we discovered the great silence in which we had been plunged, even though people had known for years that asbestos was a dangerous product and that something had to be done,” concludes the left-wing politician.
In Salindres, the chemical plant will close in a few months’ time, but the pollution will remain for many years to come. And the law ‘aimed at protecting people from the risks of perpetual pollutants’ will have the difficult task of choosing between certain industrial issues and those of public health.
