This is our garden.
My father is cultivating some stuff like tomatoes,
pumpkins, a lot of potatoes.
And this is all polluted, heavily polluted.
How does it make me feel being a neighbor of 3M company?
I don't like them being my neighbors, but they are.
I use stuff of 3M, which I don't want to,
but it's just like that.
I have no other option.
They're everywhere.
My entire family
is highly affected
by that stupid chemical.
You may not realize it,
but almost everyone has some level of PFAS
in their bloodstream because these products are everywhere
in our everyday environment.
PFAS is the umbrella term
for thousands of different kinds of chemicals.
They're known as "forever chemicals."
They are man-made chemicals used in thousands
of different kinds of products.
They are miraculous chemicals.
You can't find a better coating, for instance,
to make your jacket waterproof.
They've made our lives convenient in many ways.
From the foods you eat, to the sofa you sit on,
to the rain jacket you put on when you go outside.
But the problem is they don't degrade in the environment,
and they're almost impossible to get rid of.
They accumulate in soil,
rivers, drinking water and in the bloodstream
of people who are exposed to them.
And now, PFAS chemicals are associated with a range
of health problems: hormone and immune disorders,
thyroid malfunctions, but as well,
high cholesterol and diabetes, kidney problems
and even a diminished vaccine efficacy.
3M maintains that these chemicals are not harmful
to human health in the levels detected in the environment.
But of course, that really depends
on where you're talking about.
In some areas,
particularly around the factories that they have,
the levels detected in the environment are incredibly high.
3M is a global corporation, a conglomerate,
that makes a wide range of products.
Everything from its flagship product,
Scotchgard, to protect fabric and your sofa.
It makes Post-it notes.
It makes N95 masks. But it also makes everyday products
that are not branded.
3M has billions in sales and factories
in different parts of the world.
3M's factory is located on the banks of the river Scheldt
in the city of Antwerp.
It is part of Europe's biggest chemical cluster.
A highway separates that chemical cluster
from what is a suburban farming community.
3M began operating in Belgium in the 1970s
and started making PFOS there in 1976.
Now it stopped making PFOS there in 2002,
but in those intervening years,
it contaminated the surrounding area.
Those people living just behind the 3M factory were exposed
to the PFOS emissions from that plant,
including from the air and the soil and the water.
And it's had a really devastating impact,
both on the people who live and work there.
I live, let's say,
500 meters away from
the chemical plant of the 3M company.
I live here with my family: three children, my husband,
my parents just across the door,
my brother across the street,
and that's me.
So, we live here for
five generations long.
Then, they tell me just like two years ago,
maybe it's better that your children don't play outside
and that you clean your house two times a week
in a really proper way.
Because we know that we produce a chemical
and it's in your house, it's in your garden,
and it's not good for children.
I don't want to expose my children to those chemicals.
Everybody was like, move, move.
And I was like, why?
I already exposed them in a huge amount
just by holding them, just by being pregnant,
just by feeding them.
I exposed them as a mom.
So, I breastfed my daughter for at least a year,
six months to a year.
And I was happy, it was fine, everything was fine.
And suddenly, she becomes 4 years old
and not everything was fine any longer.
She has a problem.
According to outside world,
she's slightly disabled.
Why?
Because she had a shortness of oxygen in her brain
and some things are not working that well anymore.
Maybe the problem is caused by that chemical company.
Maybe not.
Is she dying?
No.
Will she get cancer?
Who knows?
I don't know.
I don't know how bad it is, you know?
And nobody knows. Nobody.
Even 3M, they say they don't know.
But I gave her a huge, huge, huge amount
of that kind of chemical because I thought,
yeah, it's good to breastfeed, why not?
It's easy, nice, easy, it's nature, you know.
It's just, like, yeah, what you're supposed to do as a mom.
I didn't do anything wrong.
So, we eliminate PFAS
through loss of blood or in the urine.
But one of the biggest ways of eliminating PFAS
is through pregnancy and breastfeeding,
which is incredibly worrisome.
That means that children have some of the highest exposures
because mothers pass PFAS from their bloodstream
onto their fetuses.
And children are incredibly vulnerable to contamination
because their organs are still developing,
their biochemistries are still evolving.
Some scientists described this to me
as a ticking time bomb for future generations.
This contamination might never have come to light
if not for a plan to build a multi-billion-euro tunnel
and highway project that was due to pop out right next
to 3M's factory in Antwerp.
The plan required the digging up of tons of soil
and river silt and being moved
to different parts of Belgium.
The decision to move all this soil to other parts
of Flanders led activists to start scrutinizing
what's in the soil.
And two activists came across some documents
that they requested from the state highway company
and from Flemish regulators and discovered
that the soil being dug up near the 3M factory
was heavily contaminated with PFOS.
In the middle of this environmental report
on the sanitation report for 3M,
I find what's pretty much a photocopy
of groundwater measurements from 2000s.
And my first reflex is, like, oh,
there's a problem with the decimal comma or point.
You know, I was thinking, oh, you know, they misplaced it,
so it's like a thousand times too much, or it must be.
But it wasn't, it was like, you know,
250,000 micrograms per liter, I think.
Just so staggeringly high.
I'd never seen numbers like that,
even in, you know, these international reports.
And that was loose in the groundwater underneath 3M.
If we go by the current data and the knowledge
from the European Food Safety Administration,
they get to, like, a norm around 4 nanograms per liter
for drinking water.
Now, what we saw there was something that was
in the order of a couple hundred million times that.
That's what we're talking about.
Now this caused a chain of events
that caused a huge political scandal.
What came out was that the state-owned highway company
had done a secret deal with 3M
that would enable them to deposit the most contaminated
and polluted soil onto 3M's factory site
to build what they called a security wall on a site
that previously didn't need any kind of security wall.
And the catch was that they could move contaminated soil
as long as it served a function.
And if you look at the permit for it,
there's no indication that's actually storage
for polluted soil.
It's just not in there.
So this roundabout actually contains
really heavily polluted PFAS soil.
So technically, it's an illegal waste dump.
But because it's already in here,
they're basically saying, oh, you know, it's a done deal.
We're not going to bother, you know,
getting it out, if it's even possible.
So, this is a whole problem, you know, in this area
with the tunnel construction company,
is they're trying to create situations
where it's impossible to rectify.
There was a public outcry.
Activists then crowdfunded to start testing
the bloodstream of certain residents
who lived near the factory for PFOS.
And when those results came out in August 2021,
it caused mayhem because many of those people
that they tested, and just at random,
had incredibly high levels of PFOS in their bloodstream.
In one case, a woman in her 60s had levels
that were comparable to industrial wastewater.
So 3M has been churning out varieties
of PFAS chemicals since the 1950s.
But it began doing studies in the '70s
that made them realize that these chemicals
were highly toxic,
including two studies in the late 1970s on monkeys,
which were disclosed as part of a lawsuit in 2018.
It was being sued for harming the health of residents
of Minnesota who lived near 3M's headquarters.
They found high levels of PFAS in drinking water,
particularly those people who had wells on their property.
And they noted higher rates of cancer
and leukemia in residents that live nearby.
In 2018, 3M agreed to settle a lawsuit
brought by the state of Minnesota by paying $850 million
without admitting any wrongdoing.
In 2000, 3M announced it would stop producing
longer-chain PFAS as a precautionary measure,
saying the chemicals were safe.
But they announced that they would be replacing them
with shorter-chain equivalents that they said were safer.
Those are now believed to be potentially equally dangerous
to the environment and to human health
because they're highly mobile and they spread
in the environment more easily.
They try to project a, you know,
societal, corporate responsible view.
But in the end, they've known since the '80s
how toxic this product was.
I think it's really disappointing
that 3M reached this agreement to pay $580 million
to the Flemish government,
but so many of the residents are left in limbo,
worried about their health, worried about their kids,
worried about their house prices,
worried about their surrounding environment.
And very little has been done.
Now they say, don't play outside,
don't eat your vegetables.
I'm like, hmm, it's your child.
How I can tell my child, like,
please don't walk with your bare feet.
Don't touch the soil because it's polluted.
It's impossible.
And now I have to say, don't touch that apple.
Don't touch, don't do, it's poison.
And then they're like, hmm, is it a fairy?
No, it's not a fairy. It's real life.
We cannot eat those apples.
It's poison.
Don't touch.