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On top of the disruption of shifting away from the traditional summer time slot, there was a last-minute change to the schedule. The parliamentary committee investigating the scandal issued its report at the end of March and concluded that 3M is to blame for the historical PFAS contamination in the area. It accused the company of not communicating openly about the pollution, but it didn’t hold anyone in government accountable, despite ministers approving the project. In 2016, Lantis, the company in charge of the ring road project, tested the soil. In one area near 3M’s factory, it measured 1,232 micrograms of PFOS per kilogram of dry soil. Flanders has never had laws on its books limiting PFAS, but officials knew that one of the norms being used in the neighboring Netherlands was 8 micrograms per kilo of dry soil, according to minutes from a 2016 meeting on the project.
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Qatari officials hope that the infrastructure developed as part of its preparations for the World Cup will assist in boosting the country’s non-energy economy, even if it doesn’t have a firm plan for what to do with all those shiny new stadiums. Tucked between Saudi Arabia, the UAE and Iran, Qatar sits in a tumultuous region. In 2017, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Egypt and Bahrain cut off diplomatic, trade and travel ties with Qatar, accusing the country of funding terrorists — a charge Qatar denies — and being too close to Iran. The move was seen as a threat to Qatar’s sovereignty, and US diplomats played a critical role in preventing the situation from deteriorating. Relations were only restored in early 2021, also with the help of US mediation.
The contamination was exposed last year in the battle over what to do with all that dirt. The result has been a criminal probe into the company, a parliamentary commission that’s hauled ministers in for questioning, and a public outcry over the potential health risks to tens of thousands of local residents. At the end of October, the government of the Flanders region ordered 3M to shut down production of almost all PFAS chemicals—the first time the company had been forced by a government to stop making PFAS. The numbers of the unbanked were greater among households that included those who were working age and disabled, lower income, included a single mother, or were Black or Hispanic. Among white households for instance, 2% didn't have a bank account last year as compared to 11% and 9% of their Black and Hispanic counterparts.
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He recalls asking company executives in January 2020 if it was risky to use groundwater for agriculture. “They actually told me there is no human risk and certainly not with concentrations found in the area,” he recalls. Documents disclosed in lawsuits in the US showed that 3M knew for decades about the dangers of exposure to PFAS chemicals but didn’t inform the public. During the 1970s and ’80s, it conducted studies on its US workers that showed PFAS building up in the bloodstream. In 1977 the company determined PFOS was “more toxic than anticipated” in a study of rats and monkeys; in 1978 a monkey study had to be stopped after all the animals died within the first few days because the PFOS doses were too high.
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More than 4,500 other families face a similar fate, with varying depths of soil to be carted away to a still undetermined location. It is the second time in a handful of months that TC Energy has flagged the rising costs of Coastal GasLink. In July, the company said it expected the cost of the project spanning northern British Columbia had risen to $11.2 billion compared with an earlier estimate of $6.6 billion. "During the last recession unbanked rates did indeed go up,'' Karyen Chu, chief of the Banking Research Section at the Center for Financial Research, said during the call.
3M says it expects to restart PFAS production in Belgium later this summer. Karl Vrancken, the Flemish PFAS commissioner who has been coordinating among agencies to respond to the contamination, says Belgium remains committed to supporting a proposal by a handful of European countries for an EU ban on all PFAS chemicals. A study by two state agencies found the air around 3M was polluted with PFOS, saying it wasn’t clear if construction dust or 3M was the culprit.
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Its native population numbers only about 350,000 Qataris — the official number is never published — with the bulk of the residents made up of expats, mainly on work visas. Thanks to robust oil prices — the peg for most of Qatar’s contracts — the country is enjoying a bumper year and expected to generate a surplus worth 13% of gross domestic product, according to S&P Global Ratings. Qatar’s exorbitant wealth is mainly drawn from exports of liquefied natural gas, a super-chilled version of the fuel that the country ships to mostly Asian buyers under long-term contracts. The country shares one of the world’s largest natural gas fields with Iran, its neighbor across the Persian Gulf. The close proximity of stadiums and the transport links will allow fans to attend multiple games on a single day, they say. Most stadiums will be linked by public transit, including a new metro system and a fleet of electric buses.
Environmental activists made a final move to halt construction of the Oosterweel, saying the work would make the contamination worse and allow 3M to escape its obligation to clean up the area. In April they won again at the Council of State, Belgium’s top court, which suspended all movement of soil, saying that anything with more than 3 micrograms of PFOS per kilo still posed an unacceptable environmental risk. Environmental groups and residents won a legal challenge late last year that effectively canceled the approvals for transporting the contaminated soil to 3M’s site. “The whole thing is crazy,” says Thomas Goorden, an activist who played a key role in revealing 3M’s contamination. The Coastal GasLink pipeline is not the only major energy infrastructure project in Canada to be plagued by cost overruns this year.
A 655-page report by Arcadis, seen by Bloomberg Businessweek, stated that the contamination had spread via groundwater and possibly by air to a neighboring nature reserve and a nearby creek. In 2008, Arcadis drew up a groundwater remediation plan, but the waste management agency decided no soil sanitation was needed. The company has denied that PFOS and other PFAS chemicals cause harm to human health at the levels detected in the environment, arguing that studies have produced conflicting results. Rebecca Teeters, 3M’s senior vice president for PFAS stewardship, says the costs are likely to grow. “We’re going to take it back to the state that it was before we had to come in,” she says. Recently the government has started testing as many as 40,000 people living within a 5-kilometer radius of the factory in what could be one of the world’s biggest human studies of forever chemicals.
3M has earmarked €5 million to compensate farmers financially damaged by the contamination. In a deal the government negotiated for farmers, the company paid Doggen in May for losses in 2021 and an expected downturn in revenue this year. After more than a decade of fighting, Flemish officials were eager to go ahead with the Oosterweel.
Qatar’s population grew by close to 14% in the year ending Oct. 31, to a record 3 million people. The government hopes that an end to the World Cup frenzy will herald the dawn of a more viable knowledge and service-sector economy, but the path between a major sporting event and the next phase of economic growth remains unclear. The government has said it expects low-income workers to leave the country as construction projects dry up, but it’s not clear how many white-collar workers who were involved in preparations for the football tournament will depart as well.
All told, the tournament is still expected to deliver record revenue for organizers FIFA and top the roughly $5.4 billion that the 2018 World Cup in Russia generated for football’s governing body. About 3.6 billion watched the last World Cup and billions are set to tune in to this edition. The 2022 football World Cup gets underway Sunday, with hosts Qatar taking on Ecuador. In the 12 years since the tiny gas-rich country was awarded rights to the event, it has spent $300 billion preparing for kickoff.
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During her research, she discovered that eggs from birds close to the plant had some of the highest concentrations ever reported of PFOS, an ingredient in fabric coatings and firefighting foams. PFOS—perfluorooctanesulfonic acid—is referred to as a forever chemical, because it accumulates in soil, rivers, and drinking water and is almost impossible to get rid of. She had about 300 micrograms of it per liter in her blood, more than 60 times the level recommended as safe today by the European Union.
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