The water war continues. This Monday, the public authorities responsible for supplying drinking water to Paris and some of the Ile-de-France residents called for a “Grenelle de l’eau” for the region, at a time when a costly factory project is being prepared, which they consider to be energy-intensive. , unecological and undemocratic.
At the heart of this battle, the project of Sedif, the leading water union in France (133 municipalities around Paris, 4 million users), to equip its factories with technologies promising “pure water”, a project involving nearly a billion euros which for the protesters is “a headlong rush in the technological whole” ignoring the issue of the preservation of the resource.
An “unsuitable” response to Île-de-France and the climate challenge
“This mega-investment project will have major consequences across the entire Ile-de-France region and the Seine-Normandy watershed,” said Dan Lert, president of Eau de Paris, during a conference. press releases alongside inter-municipalities that have or are in the process of going public, all representing more than 4 million inhabitants (a third of Ile-de-France residents).
This “response is unsuited to Ile-de-France” and the climate challenge, and will lead to “a substantial increase in the price of water for Sedif users, the explosion in energy consumption, the postponement of pollution on other actors” with the rejections linked to these treatments, listed Anne Hidalgo’s deputy, asking “the withdrawal of the project” and “a great democratic debate on water in the region, with the State” .
The fear of the “lone rider”
Noting that the networks are interconnected, these players are also concerned about their ability to continue the exchanges, if the waters were to take on too different characteristics.
For Michel Bisson, president of Grand Paris Sud (in Essonne and Seine-et-Marne), “it is not possible for a union to propose its own water quality standards”, alongside European standards.
“Defining a collective strategy”
“It’s a question of citizen trust”, he explained, calling for “a Grenelle for water in the Seine Normandy basin, with the regional prefect, to define a collective strategy in a logic of alliance of the territories to preserve the resource.
The Sedif project, chaired since 1983 by André Santini and in public service delegation entrusted to Veolia, has been the subject of a mandatory public debate since April, under the aegis of the National Commission for Public Debate (CNDP).