Tap water contamination: Is your French region highlighted in new report?
Dordogne was the worst-affected department in the ‘major health scandal’, the analysis said
The tap water was found to be contaminated by the PVC pipes transporting it
Alena Matrosova/Shutterstock
Hundreds of thousands of water pipes in France are contaminated with a substance considered to cause cancer, a new report has found.
A new study by doctoral student Gaspard Lemaire, broadcast on France 2 on January 16, said that as many as 340,000 km of pipes across France were contaminated with a substance classified as carcinogenic: vinyl chloride monomer (VCM).
Mr Lemaire is a doctoral student at the Chaire Earth at the Centre Jean-Bodin at the University of Angers. He presented the new study, calling its findings a “major health scandal”.
Pipe contamination
The contamination comes from PVC pipes installed in the 1970s and 1980s. Mr Lemaire found that PVC from that era contains residues of vinyl chloride monomer (VCM), and that the pipes are contaminating the water they carry.
VCM is a colourless and odourless gaseous substance, which has been recognised as carcinogenic by the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC).
“When running water is piped through contaminated pipes, it tends to be loaded with VCM,” said Mr Lemaire. The effect is worse in hot weather and in homes at the end of the chain, “which are usually located in small rural communities”, he said.
The French Health Ministry has found that a total of 140,000 km of pipes are affected, while public water service operators put the figure at 340,000 km, from a total network of almost 900,000 km.
In 2020, a report published by the Direction générale de la santé (DGS) said that the “compliance rate was close to 97%”, meaning that 3% of pipes are non-compliant.
This means that “a large number of French people are clearly exposed to VCM”, said Mr Lemaire.
Long-time risk
Official bodies have been warning of the risks of VCM for years; in 1978, a directive limited the time that workers could handle this substance; while in 1987, the IARC classified it as a human carcinogen.
In 1999, the World Health Organization published a report that concluded that workers who had been exposed to VCM had five times’ more risk than average of contracting rare forms of liver cancer.
A year earlier, in 1998, a European directive on the quality of water intended for human consumption set the permitted water exposure limit to 0.5 micrograms of VCM per litre.
Yet, these requirements only became part of French law in 2003, five years later, said Mr Lemaire. It took until 2012 (nine years later) for the French Health Ministry to ask regional health agencies les Agences régionales de Santé (ARS) to monitor the quality of tap water, and the levels of VCMs.
In 2020, more than “120,000 analyses” had been undertaken, said Mr Lemaire.
Which departments are worst affected?
The departments most affected, according to Mr Lemaire’s research, are:
Mr Lemaire was able to obtain data for nine regions. These were:
He found a total of 6,410 instances of non-compliance, with some instances of VCM concentration of up to 1,400 times more than the legal threshold.
Tap water contamination
The new report comes after tap water in France has already been highlighted as a potential source of problematic pesticides and other contamination.
Read also: Chemical anomalies found in French tap water in study
Read more: 12 million people in France have drunk pesticide-contaminated water
A report from 2022 suggested that up to 12 million people nationwide had drunk tap water containing pesticide levels above the acceptable quality threshold, while a 2024 study found that that more than two in five samples of tap water were contaminated with ‘forever chemicals’ (PFAS) which could have a negative effect on public health.
