Les énormes besoins en sable de l’industrie du ciment font peser une pression délétère sur les écosystèmes - https://t.co/UhkYKo3Gdd
— L'Etat de fumier. (@les_tas) June 29, 2021
The first link in this chain? Sand.…a camp of meetings and actions was held from June 19 to 21 in Saint-Colomban, in Loire-Atlantique... In this town, two sand quarries have been operated by two giants in the sector for nearly twenty years: Lafarge, with 49 hectares and GSM (from the German group HeidelbergCement), with 65 hectares. Together, these companies extract no less than 750,000 tonnes of sand per year. But here it is: they are reaching the end of their operating possibilities, and wish to expand, from 2022."GSM and Lafarge? They are sand predators," says Jean-Claude Mercier, founder of the citizen collective Graine de Celle-Saint-Avant 37, owner of agricultural land in the town and a former engineer. The areas on which the new quarry would be established combine forest and wetlands. "It's a place that I call "the green lung"", sighs the founder of the collective.
And what of "the risk of pollution of the water tables in which the residents' drinking water circulates"?
GSM will be required to leave a layer of one meter of sand, at least. "This is not enough", fears the head of the collective. "And who's going to check that they don't go below one meter?" This minimal layer acts "like a coffee filter: you see what happens if you forget to put the filter in your machine ..." he sums up.
At Straitgate Farm, Aggregate Industries is not even proposing to leave "one meter of sand, at least", but is instead proposing to quarry all the way down to the maximum water table, removing all of the unsaturated zone – in effect forgetting to put the filter in the machine.
