The contamination was exposed last year in the battle over what to do with all that dirt.
If there were ever a place not to dig a tunnel, it would be here. This section of Antwerp is home to Europe’s largest cluster of chemical factories. The most challenging part: a tunnel that will run under the Scheldt River and pop out close to 3M on the left bank. It’s been 20 years in the making, dogged all along the way by opposition.
The project, known locally as the Oosterweel, is an attempt to unclog the snarl of trucks around the Port of Antwerp in one of the most densely populated corners of Europe. To complete the construction, the state-owned highway company, Lantis, needs to dig up almost 14 million cubic meters (494.4 million cubic feet) of soil, roughly enough to fill the Great Pyramid of Giza five times over. It’s possible the contamination wouldn’t have come to light if the government hadn’t pushed ahead with a €4.5 billion ($4.8 billion) project to build a network of roads, tunnels, and parks to finish a ring road around Antwerp. All the PFAS chemicals produced by 3M and other companies are considered forever chemicals. PFOS is one of thousands of types of PFAS-perfluoroalkyl and polyfluoroalkyl substances. “And I’m not sure how they will compensate us if we are living in a mud pit.”ģM is at the center of a major political scandal in Belgium, where the company produced PFOS from 1976 to 2002. “I’m not sure how they will deal with some of our trees which are more than 100 years old,” she says. Now she waits for 3M to begin undoing the damage-not to her family, because that’s done, but to the land. “I feel a bit guilty now that I didn’t put more pressure on authorities to do something 10 years ago,” says D’Hollander. Other health problems associated with high PFOS levels include high cholesterol, diabetes, hormone and immune disorders, and even diminished vaccine efficacy. She and her mother both have malfunctioning thyroids, a condition now associated with PFOS, and doctors have told them that at some point the drugs they take for the condition will stop working. D’Hollander’s own level had come down to about 100, which she attributes to not eating eggs and to breastfeeding, a theory backed up by studies showing mothers pass on high amounts of the chemical through their milk. Last year she found out her 65-year-old mother had 1,100 micrograms of PFOS per liter of blood-a concentration more typically found in industrial wastewater. Photographer: Sabine Rovers for Bloomberg Businessweek Wendy D’Hollander lives in the contamination red zone.
“I thought it was just those eggs really near the factory,” she says. Knowledge of the health risks associated with forever chemicals was still evolving, and she didn’t know the extent of the contamination. Her family has lived on that plot of land since the late 1800s, so she never seriously contemplated moving. D’Hollander is now 40 and has three children. In 2012 she wrote to the mayor of Zwijndrecht, warning him that local eggs posed a serious problem. She immediately tried to limit her exposure by avoiding locally produced eggs-she thought that might be the key contamination route, because the chemical binds to proteins. She had about 300 micrograms of it per liter in her blood, more than 60 times the level recommended as safe today by the European Union.Īt the time, she was pregnant with her second child. PFOS-perfluorooctanesulfonic acid-is referred to as a forever chemical, because it accumulates in soil, rivers, and drinking water and is almost impossible to get rid of. The setting, in the suburb of Zwijndrecht, is bucolic and lovely, save for the 3M plant across a highway.ĭuring her research, she discovered that eggs from birds close to the plant had some of the highest concentrations ever reported of PFOS, an ingredient in fabric coatings and firefighting foams. in biology and living with her parents and daughter in the farmhouse. More than 4,500 other families face a similar fate, with varying depths of soil to be carted away to a still undetermined location.ĭ’Hollander knew something was wrong a decade ago. Belgian officials have ordered 3M to draw up a plan by July 1 to scrape off as much as 5 feet of soil on D’Hollander’s 2.5 acres.
The soil around Wendy D’Hollander’s Belgian farmhouse is so saturated with the chemical PFOS, produced in Antwerp by 3M Co., that she’s in what’s called the red zone.
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