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Since the end of 2019, the plain of Pierrelaye-Bessancourt (Val-d’Oise), soiled during decades by the spreading of waste water from Paris, is transformed in order to eventually become a vast forest. More than a million trees are to be planted there. #TheyHaveTheSolution
It is the revenge of the plain of Pierrelaye-Bessancourt. For decades, its 1300 hectares, located in the Val-d’Oise thirty kilometers northwest of Paris, were polluted by the spreading of sewage from the capital, then invaded by wild dumps. But, since 2019, the Île-de-France region has decided to clean up the area and create a new green lung here. Thus, every day, hundreds of young trees are planted there to eventually form a huge forest.
A long-term and above all very expensive project, more than 84 million euros.
“We first have to acquire the land, compensate the rights holders who deserve it, carry out the preliminary work for the plantations, then the plantations themselves, and all that represents a fairly high cost indeed.“, explains Bernard Tailly, the president of the Union of development of the plain of Pierrelaye-Bessancourt, created by the region.
A bill paid in part by the former polluter, the Syndicate for the sanitation of the Parisian agglomeration.
In thirty years, the new forest of Pierrelaye and its dozens of different species should make it possible to complete the green belt of western Ile-de-France between the forests of Saint-Germain-en-Laye and Montmorency. Plantings, for their part, must continue for another six to eight years before covering the entire area.