Blue gold had made the fortune of this small town in the Vosges. Today, while the Nestlé group, owner of Vittel, Contrexéville and Hépar, is accused of exhausting the resource, groundwater is also threatened with pollution by illegal dumping…
Near Vittel, the small town in the Vosges famous all over the world for its mineral water, in the middle of the forest, “Trees grew in plastic.” Bernard Schmitt and Jean-François Fleck, co-founders of the Eau 88 collective, accompanied by their lawyer, led the journalists of “Envoyé Spécial” to the foot of what today looks like a wooded hill. We are on the land of Nestlé Waters, the factory which produces up to one and a half billion bottles of Vittel and Contrexéville water per year.
The wooded hill actually covers a pile of corpses of yellowed, broken or torn plastic bottles. The branches and roots are intertwined, the ground is also littered with the remains of these old containers “made of very friable PVC”, bearing the “V” of the acronym of Vittel, which can be dated “the end of the 60s”, explains Bernard Schmitt.
“Industrial failures” emptied by whole trucks into a pit
Local residents discovered this immense illegal dump in 2014. A complaint was filed against the multinational for harm to the environment and public health. In response, the Nestlé company recalled that it was at the time a minority shareholder in the Vittel brand, with 31% of the shares (the group took control in 1991 of the hitherto family company, its land and its drilling).
At the foot of the trees, thick plates of melted plastic: these are the industrial failures of those years, which arrived by the truckload. “For perhaps twenty years or so, explains Bernard Schmitt, the trucks emptied them into the pit, and they were set on fire – which was catastrophic.”
This single landfill contains 42,000 m3 of plastic
By digging there, the collective uncovered “a gigantic pit” about a hundred meters long, about fifteen meters high, and about thirty meters wide. According to Regional Directorate for the Environment, Planning and Housing (DREAL), this landfill alone contains 42,000 cubic meters of plastic. Because there are three others in the sector… Nestlé ended up recognizing the existence of the four sites in 2017. The group ensures that an external company was mandated to clean them up… but has not indicated any date.
All this plastic, however, threatens the water table, because rainwater, by infiltrating, “takes with it plastic particles and other potentially present pollutants”, alert Jean-François Fleck. And this near the Hépar drillings, explains Bernard Schmitt, “so that means that by doing that, they themselves knew that they were possibly contaminating their drilling.” Nestlé claims to have water from nearby boreholes regularly analyzed by an external laboratory. Still according to the group, no contamination was detected.
Excerpt from “Vittel: drink, eliminate… the tablecloth!”, a report to see in “Eau rescue!”, La Spéciale d’Envoyé dedicated to water, September 14, 2023.
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