Following environmental checks carried out by ARPA Piemonte which certified the failure to comply with PFAS emissions into the environment, in recent hours the Province of Alessandria has forwarded to Solvay (today Syensqo, the only plant in Italy that still produces these dangerous substances) two warnings ordering the chemical plant to respect the legal limits allowed for the discharges of these substances. The province also forced the plant to stop production for 30 days.
«After years of silence and pollution, public bodies are finally adopting an initial measure to protect the environment and human health from the production of PFAS by Solvay», comments Giuseppe Ungherese, head of the Greenpeace Italia Pollution campaign. «We hope that this is only the first of a series of initiatives by the relevant bodies to impose on the company the limit of zero discharges into air, water and land».
According to Greenpeace Italia, in an area already heavily sacrificed to the logic of profit to the detriment of the community, the bodies responsible must implement further measures to ensure that not a single nanogram of PFAS is released into the environment and that action is taken in the shortest possible time , to reclamation operations. It’s time for the authorities to decide to definitively take sides to protect local communities rather than polluters.
In recent weeks the company has been at the center of particularly serious releases of PFAS (foams in the Bormida river) and the results of investigations by ARPA Piemonte have highlighted high levels of pollution in both water and land. Some journalistic reconstructions have identified the Alexandrian site as the most polluted by PFAS in all of Europe. In 2007 the company had already been identified as the main source of PFAS in the Po River basin and recent investigations conducted by Greenpeace Italia have highlighted how the molecules produced solely in the Alessandria site (cC6O4) have been found in the drinking water of several very distant municipalities from the chemical hub: not only in the city of Turin, but also in numerous municipalities in the Susa Valley and some in the Province of Sondrio in Lombardy.
To protect the environment and people’s health, the United States and several European countries have already adopted limits on the use of PFAS, replacing them with safer alternatives already available. Greenpeace Italia calls on Italian institutions to follow suit with a national law that bans the use and production of these dangerous substances.
