Perfluorooctanoic acid (PFOA), a raw material for all kinds of impregnations and coatings, has not been manufactured in the Gendorf Chemical Park for 20 years and has not been processed for 15 years. And yet the suspected carcinogenic substance can still be found in the district of Altötting in the soil and groundwater, in venison and fish – and in people’s blood. Only when a study of blood donations from the municipality of Emmerting became known in 2017 did the residents here in the Bavarian chemical triangle really startle. According to the latest studies, the PFOA contamination in the blood has decreased, but concern about the chemical park and hundreds of jobs has been growing in the region since the US company 3M announced that it would withdraw from the production of the entire PFAS group of substances.
Perfluorooctanoic acid, which has been banned throughout the EU since 2020, is just one of thousands of these perfluorinated and polyfluorinated alkyl substances. In the Gendorf Chemical Park, the industry has now also concentrated on other substances from this group – such as HFPO-DA. This substance, also known as “GenX” and also harmful to health, was detected in the drinking water of four municipal suppliers in the chemical triangle at the end of last year. The activated charcoal filters, which are meanwhile removing the PFOA from the drinking water across the board, are less effective against GenX.
However, they are reliable against PFOA. In any case, this is what the Altötting district office derives from a recent, broad-based blood test from last summer, the results of which it has now published. According to this, the PFOA concentration in the blood of the test persons has fallen by more than half on average within four years. Around 760 subjects took part in the investigation by the State Office for Health and Food Safety (LGL), about three quarters of the subjects of a previous study from 2018.
This corresponds to the expectations of a half-life of two to four years and confirms the assumption that drinking water was the main source of intake for PFOA, according to the district office. Although the values for 280 test persons are still above the value that is still considered harmless, according to the current state of knowledge there is no health risk.
The Dyneon plant in Gendorf is scheduled to close by the end of 2025
The blood samples were also examined by the State Office for several other PFAS, but for numerous substances from this group there is still no reliable analysis, let alone limit values. In the meantime, the 3M group, which is facing high claims for damages due to health damage caused by its PFAS production in the USA, has announced that it no longer wants to produce such substances at all in the future. In Germany, this affects the 3M subsidiary Dyneon, which took over Hoechst’s polymer division in the Gendorf chemical park at the end of the 1980s after it left Hoechst.
The Dyneon plant in Gendorf, which currently employs 680 people, is due to close by the end of 2025, although it produces a large proportion of all PFAS manufactured in Europe as a whole and these substances are still used in many different sectors from automotive to medical technology. Despite all the contaminated sites, production in Gendorf is now considered one of the cleanest in the world.
Indirectly, many more well-paid jobs are at stake as a result of the announced plant closure, because the production of the various companies in the chemical park is closely intertwined. The end of Dyneon tears a hole in this braid. According to their interest group Chemdelta Bavaria, the industrial companies in the Bavarian chemical triangle employ a total of around 20,000 people and indirectly around the same number at numerous different service providers and craft businesses.