PFAS in the Indre: fishing banned, the bill left to residents

According to franceinfo, fishing and the consumption of fish are banned in a stretch of the Bouzanne, in the Indre department of central France. The cause: spreading of sludge from the wastewater treatment plant run by the company Balsan, carried out until 2025. The Indre prefecture (the regional state authority) confirms the presence of PFAS in these discharges.

That is what we know. The rest, the dispatch does not say: at this stage we do not know the levels measured, the area affected, the number of residents exposed, or what is happening to the soil and crops. These are the questions to put to the authorities, and quickly.

What follows is our reading, not an established fact.

Sewage sludge spread on a field is the circular economy as it is sold in the brochures: we give back to the land what we took from it. Except that sludge is not a simple fertiliser. It carries what industry has entrusted to it. Here, PFAS, the compounds known as "forever chemicals" because they barely break down. The cycle closes, but with poison inside.

This is exactly the kind of rupture Marx described in the nineteenth century. He observed that capitalism tears apart the metabolism between humans and the earth: nutrients travel from the fields to the cities, and return as waste that contaminates. He noted, ironically, that in London the best option was to pollute the Thames with the excrement of millions of inhabitants (John Bellamy Foster, Marx's ecology in historical perspective). Two centuries later, the Thames has been replaced by the Bouzanne and the excrement by industrial chemistry. The principle is the same: the cost of the waste is passed on to the environment.

And to those who live there. A fishing ban sounds minor. For a recreational angler, a resident who eats what they catch, a commune that relies on its river, it is a dead loss. Nobody signed a contract for that. The company produced, sold and treated its effluents; the community inherits the water, the unfit fish and the uncertainty. Marx's concepts, taken up by Marxists today, put it simply: accumulation demands that ever more matter circulate, and the costs are dumped onto ecosystems and onto populations who neither decided nor profited.

We will be told that spreading was, until 2025, a regulated practice. That is precisely the problem. A system in which contamination is discovered after years of spreading is a system that turns the population into a laboratory. Prevention costs the company money; clean-up, meanwhile, costs everyone.

The real question, then, is not whether we should eat less fish. It is who will pay for soil analysis, health monitoring and decontamination, and why the polluter-pays principle so often remains a principle only on paper. Questions to put to the prefecture, and to Balsan.