Industrial site near Brussels shows microplastic pollution in action

As the European Parliament works on a revision of the regulation on microplastics, EU lawmakers and NGOs travelled outside Brussels to see for themselves the scale and impact of plastic pellet pollution on site.

At the invitation of the NGOs Surfrider Foundation and The Pew Charitable Trusts, Euractiv visited the village of Écaussinnes, around 30km from Brussels, on Wednesday (21 February), together with Green MEP Saskia Bricmont and the teams of MEPs Caroline Roose, Ska Keller and Kira Peter-Hansen.

Écaussinnes, a municipality of 11,000 people, is adjacent to the largest petrochemical site in Wallonia, the Feluy industrial zone.

Of the four companies there, the main one, Total Petrochemical, is the TotalEnergies group’s largest European facility for the production of plastic pellets.

Every year, between one and 1.2 million tonnes of plastic pellets are produced at Feluy, representing around 44% of the French oil giant’s total production of this material.

A major source of pollution

Pellets are the raw material used to manufacture plastic objects. Losses of these pellets to the environment are the third biggest source of unintentional releases of microplastics. It is estimated that 184,290 tonnes of these plastic pellets are lost in Europe every year.

To fight this pollution, which is extremely difficult to treat and can be toxic to human and animal health, in October 2023, the European Commission presented a proposal for a regulation aimed at reducing the loss of pellets into the environment.

The proposed legislation aims to introduce minimum requirements for all companies involved in the processing and transport of plastic pellets.

The objective is to reduce the total amount of unintentional discharges of microplastics by 6% by 2030.

For MEP Saskia Bricmont, the need for a specific European regulation is clear.

“It’s polluting the land, the seas, our oceans, wildlife and us too, because farmland is contaminated”, she explained, before concluding that “the directive has the merit of existing, but it is largely insufficient in the sense that it will not affect all companies”.

According to Natacha Tullis, head of the Preventing Ocean Plastics project at The Pew Charitable Trusts, “We need urgent and binding action at the EU level, as well as compliance from industry, to tackle the third biggest source of microplastic pollution in the EU”.

The Feluy industrial site

The problem of plastic pellet pollution at the Feluy site in Wallonia dates back to the establishment of the petrochemical industry in the mid-1970s.

Arnaud Guérard, the local councillor responsible for the environment in Écaussinnes, took up the issue in 2020, when local residents and farmers alerted him to the presence of these translucent plastic balls in the river that runs through the village, eight kilometres downstream from the factories.

“We are faced with an industrial process that is dysfunctional and not sufficiently secure to keep all the products [plastic pellets] inside the site,” he explained.

For the councillor, any industrial company has a duty to ensure that its materials remain contained and confined to the production site, especially when they are industrial waste.

In the case of the Feluy industries, the local councillor and the NGOs denounced negligence in the transport of the pellets produced.

Loaded in bulk, in fragile, non-hermetic bags, generally used to contain sand, the plastic pellets can easily disperse in nature, and become very difficult to dispose of.

“If we lose one bag, we’ve already lost one million pellets, and once they’re in the environment, it’s virtually impossible to recover them,” warned Lucie Padovani, Surfrider Foundation policy manager.

The manufacturers have set up a blower at the exit of the factory to remove any plastic pellets that may have been scattered on the trucks.

However, pellets are still being found outside the factories.

Legal action

Visiting the area around the industrial site, we could see that the earth is encrusted with these plastic pellets, particularly around the stormwater basin.

These beads are loaded with additives to give them certain properties and therefore present a risk of contamination for the water, the animals that ingest them and, ultimately, humans.

“The manufacturers have never been able to give us an assessment of the quantity [of plastic pellets] released, which is the first reaction in the event of serious pollution,” pointed out Arnaud Guérard.

The local authority’s first reaction was to contact the companies to try and raise awareness of the pollution problem and stop the contamination.

The four companies on the Feluy site, however, “passed the buck” for their responsibility in scattering the plastic balls: Each of the manufacturers blamed the others or the transport companies that clean the trucks outside the site.

Faced with this denial, the local authorities then revised the permits to ensure a better level of prevention, in collaboration with the regional administration and the Walloon minister for the environment.

Finally, a complaint was lodged with the Belgian courts demanding that the responsibility of the industrialists and the environmental damage be recognised.

“We’re not there yet in terms of regulation,” said MEP Saskia Bricmont, adding that “today, we can see that as long as there is no framework, voluntary initiatives by companies are not enough”.

“Here in Écaussinnes, impunity prevails, with everyone passing the buck”, she concluded.

[Edited by Zoran Radosavljevic]

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