ALEXANDRIA – Two warnings to Solvay, stop production (for now) of the cC604. The provincial measure issued on Friday afternoon, after the first about-turn on the ban on dumping in the Bormida river.
The Institution’s intervention
Just over 48 hours after the decision to lift the ban on discharges into the Bormida riverthe Province has issued two measures notifying them to the Belgian multinational which concern both land and waste.
Solvay – according to what is stated in the documents – must immediately suspend the production and use of cC6O4 throughout the plant and comply with the requirements set out in the authorisation.
Within 30 days you will have to send a survey timetable aimed at detecting the presence of cC6O4; transmit a plan of interventions and checks extended to all areas of the plant involved in the production and use of cC6O4 aimed at identifying any problems present in the various departments involved. The Province also wants to know how the company intends to act to remedy the situation.
This program must be approved by the provincial body, which will decide, however, after having acquired the opinions and technical contributions of the ARPA, the Municipality and the ASL.
When will production of the PFAS in question be restarted?
The production of cC6O4, according to this provision, can be started again only after the implementation of all the interventions that the bodies will validate.
But the Province also recalls the Consortium for the treatment of effluents Chemical hub (therefore of the company) in compliance with the requirements established by the Hague. The warning, writes the Province, concerns exceeding the limit value for P4 discharge for cC6O4.
More simply, the integrated environmental authorization was granted to Solvay on the condition that the plant had no losses. And this imposition also applies to the subsequent authorization to increase the production of c6O4 issued in 2021.
‘Urgent investigation’
Finally, the Province writes that problems of both a plant and management nature were identified given that Arpa, in a report dated 6 June, claimed that the situation would suggest a spatial distribution of the contaminants that was not entirely consistent with the sole critical issues found on the reactor E (reported by the company which had shut it down as a precaution after detecting anomalous quantities of cC6O4 in the groundwater).
But Arpa would also have highlighted the presence of high concentrations of other Pfas (Pfoa and ADV): “Such concentrations – we read in the documents – cannot reasonably be correlated to the event of reactor E, are a symptom of a situation that requires urgent further investigation”.
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