A worrying report has just been published on the state of the Seine. An omnipresent but unmonitored pollutant has been detected in quantity in its waters.
The French state wants to make the Seine swimmable for the Olympic Games. 1.5 billion euros were invested in this project, including four sanitation works created specifically to achieve this objective. To assess the “swimability” of the Seine, monitoring is carried out on two families of bacteria: Escherichia coli and enterococcus.
Nevertheless, a report published on Monday May 27 by the associations of the European Action Network against Pesticides, including Générations Futures, demonstrates another form of pollution that goes under the radar. Water samples were taken from twenty-three rivers and six groundwater tables in different European countries before being analyzed by the Water Technology Center in Karlsruhe.
This report describes “widespread contamination” of waterways in Europe by trifluoroacetic acid (TFA). It comes from the degradation of PFAS, chemical compounds persisting in the environment, nicknamed “eternal pollutants”, particularly used in agriculture and industry and serving as a starting product for the production of certain pesticides.
After analysis, TFA was detected in all water samples, but in different concentrations. In 79% of cases, the presence of the acid exceeds the limit value of 500 nanograms per liter proposed by the European directive on drinking water for all PFAS. The TFA levels recorded range from 370 ng/l to 3,300 ng/l. The study estimates that this finding represents “the largest known large-scale contamination of water by a human-made chemical.”
The Seine is one of the rivers with a particularly high concentration of TFA: it comes in second place with 2900 ng/l, after the Elbe in Germany. It is not the only river affected in France: the Aisne river comes in fourth (2400 ng/l), followed just behind by the Oise river (1900 ng/l), then the Somme, in seventh position (1500 ng/l).
The quantity found in the Seine is quite worrying, as assured by Pascal De Giudici, independent expert in environmental health for West France : “Compared to health standards, this is worrying. It is basic pollution, we will have to live with it.” However, he qualified on the “bathability” of the river. “On the other hand, swimming in the Seine does not expose you to these pollutants. A priori, they do not penetrate through the skin, but on the other hand, if you swallow a little water, it contributes to general exposure. But no need to panic for the Olympics Once again, if you look for them, you find them,” he said.
The European Pesticide Action Network calls for urgent action in the face of these contaminations and the lack of regulation on TFA, which is currently classified as “not relevant” by the European authorities and is therefore not regulated. More research would also be necessary because little information on its toxicity for the environment and the danger it could represent for humans is currently available.