ChemCafé

It’s been a while since last post… I’ve been quite busy for several reasons, such as trying to get some of my research published, taking part at the annual meeting of the Swiss Chemical Society and, last but not least, spending three weeks doing military service – Switzerland still has mandatory military service for male citizens. I am not going into politics here, but for once this military period was not as useless and uninteresting as usual. Indeed, with a bunch of fellow chemists, I spent three weeks into the Spiez Laboratory, the Swiss NBC (Nuclear, Biological, Chemical) defense institute. Besides lab work involving the detection of forbidden chemical warfare agents in various samples, we also visited an ugly, former chemical storage place dating from the late 70s and early 80s, which causes lots of trouble nowadays, and which is the subject of this post.

If you drive on the highway between Bern and Zurich, you will see at some point (in Kölliken) a huge metallic, white structure somewhat looking like one of these artificial ski resorts which have been flourishing here and there around the world. However what this gigantic cage contains is not snow, but roughly 550 000 tons (!) of waste, mostly toxic chemicals, stored here completely unlabeled, unclassified and without any kind of precaution. Among others, drums with production residues from the chemical industry, electroplating sludges, phosphoric waste, oil contaminated soil, or bag containing unsorted loose waste were delivered to the landfill. In 1985, foul smells and strangely-colored dusts lead to the dump to be closed – at that time, this meant the waste was covered by around 10 meters earth… It was then observed that underground water was becoming polluted, threatening the drinking water. The authorities finally decided the site had to be decontaminated and the waste properly treated.

An impressive draining system was build to prevent water flowing under the contaminated area from polluting further ground water. Then the huge building (of a total surface equivalent to that of ten football pitches) covering the whole area was built, and kept under slightly reduced pressure such as to prevent any escape of dust, gas or odors. The access to the main building is severely restricted, and one can enter only fully equipped with airtight suit and oxygen supply. There, samples are prelevated from rust covered tanks to try and identify what had been buried 25 years ago. The waste are then separated and sent for proper treatment. This goes not without any risk, since in summer 2008 a violent fire suddenly broke out, due to fortuitous contact between magnesium and air moisture…

A view of the inside of the main building.

This is shown in this impressive video recorded by safety cameras (in Swiss-German, but the images really show how ruined the place is, and what are the working conditions. Another video (in French) can be found here telling about the landfill.

If everything goes as planned, the waste evacuation should last until 2012, and the area should ‘look like before’ in 2015. The cost of the whole operation will likely reach 1 billion swiss francs (ca. 965 millions US$) – a good sum just to repare mistakes from the past. The good news is that is was acknowledged at some point that these mistakes were putting populations and environment at risk, and appropriate arrangements were made in order to fix the situation, whatever the costs were to be. There are some lessons to take home there!

For more informations

The society responsible for the decontamination of the landfill: SMDK (in German)