When we look at the cliff north of Le Havre, we see a car wreck, bits of concrete and pieces of plastic mixed with the earth. The former Dollemard coastal landfill, on a kilometer of frontage, has served as a legal dump since the 1960s for construction companies. The legacy of another era, judge Arnaud Freret, local activist of Surf Rider, an NGO which acts for the protection of the seas and oceans: “At the time, there was no real notion of environmental protection and suddenly, throwing off the cliff was to make the waste disappear.They were no longer in our view, so they no longer existed. It was quite common.”
It is therefore no coincidence that the Secretary of State for Biodiversity, Bérangère Abbas, chose the city of Le Havre to present a national plan to combat coastal landfills that flow into the sea on Friday 18 February. The Dollemard landfill was closed in 2000 but still contains 400,000 tonnes of waste which is increasingly going into the sea, since global warming is increasing coastal erosion.
Faced with this pollution, the local authorities first chose to bail out, to empty the site. They asked an integration association to pick up by hand the waste on the beach that escapes from this landfill and several surrounding cliffs. Gwen Coupri in charge of the natural space project at the Aquacaux association, which works to preserve the environment on the Alabaster Coast: “We are going to pick up around thirty tonnes of waste on these nine kilometers of beach, with a lot of scrap metal, a lot of pieces of wood too, rubber and overall, five to six tonnes of plastic.”
The file became political in 2018, pushed by Surf Rider. The depollution of this landfill has become a campaign commitment of Edouard Philippe, the mayor of Le Havre and former Prime Minister. But it is an extraordinary site, explains Antonin Gimard, municipal councilor responsible for nature: “There are constraints in relation to the erosion of the coast. There are security constraints for the companies that will be there. There are access constraints. We are on the edges of cliffs to which we cannot not easily accessible. There are constraints in relation to the waste and the volume that isl represents in relation to their sorting.”
“We bring together in this place a sum of multiple constraints that will require a somewhat innovative project because it is not a problem that is very well known.”
Antonin Gimard, municipal councilor at the town hall of Le Havreat franceinfo
The bill was estimated at nearly 15 million euros. Impact studies have been launched. A test site has even been set up to deliver intervention scenarios by April. The trip of Bérangère Abbas should make it possible to specify the amount of support that the State intends to provide. It follows an announcement by Emmanuel Macron at the Ocean Summit last week in Brest.
Thirty million euros have been released to support the treatment of the first three seaside landfills. But in total there are 55 coastal landfills that the government intends to clean up thanks to a national resorption plan which will be spread over ten years.