2023-10-31 11:11:00
“Mermaid tears” photographed in Tréguennec (Finistère) on January 24, 2023 ©AFP
These are images that one would not imagine in Belgium and yet, they are very real. This Monday, the French media Vakita released a major investigation denouncing the extent of plastic pollution in Écaussinnes, in Hainaut. It turns out that in the surrounding area, hundreds of thousands of microbeads are released into nature. The designated culprit: the TotalEnergies Petrochemicals Feluy factory located nearby, on the banks of the Charleroi-Brussels canal.
“They are everywhere”
This petrochemical center constitutes one of the largest plastic pellet factories in Europe. Each year, production would reach astronomical levels of around 1.2 million tonnes. The problem is that part of this mass manages to escape, the controls being insufficient to prevent this. Result: these microbeads, known by the nickname “mermaid tears”, end up in the earth, in fields and in rivers.
Vakita journalist William Thorp realized this perfectly when he went there. All he has to do is bend towards the ground, take a little soil, and the balls appear in clusters. “In the space of a minute, we already have hundreds in the sieve. I didn’t think I would see so many to be completely honest.“, he admits. Sometimes, their presence is even more obvious. “If you look at the ground they are everywhere“, explains the first alderman of Écaussinnes, Arnaud Guérard, while showing the white balls which are as if placed on the ground. “If we move aside the vegetation, we find more and more of it“.
Obviously, the councilor is worried about the impact on the environment. He notes that these “mermaid tears” will take hundreds of years to decompose. Suffice to say that by then, they will have had the opportunity to cause a lot of harm to the fauna and flora.
A persistent problem
This pollution had already been identified by RTBF last June, noting that this mainly took place during the loading of trucks by carriers. The municipality filed a complaint in 2020 but Total refuses to take sole responsibility. The company, however, defended itself in a press release, claiming to put “many measures in place“.
However, RTBF specifies that “the problem persists since balls keep escaping from the production plant“. “So far, predictions are that we will see an increase in plastic consumption and production in the European Union.“, notes Lucie Padovani, European lobby manager on the issue of aquatic waste for the Surfrider Foundation Europe. “If at present we cannot control this production and prevent these plastic granules from ending up in the environment, then imagine what this production could become in ten or twenty years if we do not impose a regulatory framework now?“.
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