2023-06-05 06:55:10
Tom Pré is a father ” angry “. Her son is 2 years old. At the age of 1 year, he had to undergo a total ablation of a testicle after a tumor diagnosis. Tom Pré lives in Saint-Laurent-d’Agny, a small town in the Rhône near the “valley of chemistry”, south of Lyon, the area of France most polluted with PFAS (per- and polyfluoroalkylated substances).
Since he learned, a few months earlier, that the water in his town was contaminated by these ultra-toxic and ultra-persistent chemical compounds in the environment, he cannot help but make the link with his little boy’s illness: “We are not certain, but we know that exposure to PFAS increases the risk of developing testicular cancer tenfold. »
Tom Pré is not the only one angry. Thirty-seven residents of the chemical valley (including sixteen children) and ten associations and unions have decided to take legal action to put an end to this pollution. They filed an environmental criminal summary appeal with the Lyon court on May 25, learned The world, appeal against the chemical group Arkema, the source of significant releases of PFAS in the Rhône.
“More than 350,000 people concerned”
“We are choosing an emergency procedure in order to put an end to PFAS discharges into the Rhône by Arkema as quickly as possible and to measure the extent of the contamination by new samples, and this at the polluter’s expense”, indicates Camille Panisset, the secretary general of the Lyon branch of the association Our affair with all, at the initiative of the procedure. The NGO, at the origin of a first appeal a year ago, believes that these are “more than 350,000 people who would be affected by this health and environmental scandal”.
The “scandal” broke out in May 2022 when a survey broadcast on the program “Envoyé Spécial”, on France 2, detected high levels of “eternal pollutants” in the air, the soil (the stadium in the town of Pierre-Bénite), or even breast milk (young mothers are now among the complainants), around Arkema, which has been rejecting large quantities of PFAS in the Rhône for decades.
It is the commotion around Pierre-Bénite, where the Arkema factory and that of Daikin, also a producer of PFAS, are located. The Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes regional health agency (ARS) is looking for PFAS… And finds them everywhere.
Fifteen kilometers downstream, the water treatment plants of Grigny and Ternay, which serve 208,000 households, are affected. Concentrations regularly exceed the regulatory value (0.1 microgram – μg – per litre) in the drinking water of several towns south of Lyon such as Saint-Symphorien-d’Ozon or Saint-Laurent-d’Agny, where the family of Tom Pre.
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