The Flemish government will soon be working with the United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to exchange information about the environmental problems they are facing.
During a five-day working visit to the US, the region's Environment Minister Zuhal Demir signed a "statement of intent" with the country's EPA, which is in charge of protecting public health and the environment. This protocol means both countries will intensify their cooperation in the coming years to ensure environmental problems are reported to each other more quickly.
"Strong international cooperation and information exchange can prevent a lot of misery," Demir said. "In Flanders, we watch television programmes from this side of the pond almost every day, but over the past few decades, the policy has failed to take a look at the US."
She explained that this is especially the case in the PFAS case, relating to the pollution scandal at the Antwerp site of American company 3M, which earlier this year was found responsible for contaminating the region with the toxic chemical PFOS, one of the most produced compounds in the PFAS group of so-called "forever chemical."
Learning lessons from across the pond
Signing this protocol means Flanders is implementing an important recommendation from the PFAS research committee, which prioritised international cooperation on environmental challenges.
"In Flanders, the PFAS pollution came as a total surprise, but for Americans, the surprise came 20 years ago, after which a whole series of discoveries were made," the statement from Demir read. One city in Alabama, Decatur, is also the site of a 3M factory, one similar to the factory in Zwijndrecht, Antwerp.
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"Polluted drinking water, extensive soil contamination, fish full of chemicals and leaking contaminated sludge. They saw it all in Decatur. We could have learned so much from it," she said.
With this agreement, which explicitly focuses on tackling hydrofluorocarbons and other related chemicals, Demir said Flanders is taking the first important step towards preventing such pollution from happening again.
