” It’s disgusting. » Jessica Dautruche, from the “I love my forest” collective, protests. At the entrance to Rédange, a commune in Moselle located on the Luxembourg and Belgian border, 250 tonnes of waste have been polluting the soil for four years, the result of extensive trafficking from Belgium, for which ten defendants are on trial, starting Monday, in Lille, in the North.
Daniel Cimarelli, mayor of Rédange, remembers: “it was entire trucks of 35 tonnes which were dumped”, in October 2019, on private land in his municipality. Since then, the pile of debris, both household and industrial, has deteriorated, smells bad in summer and, according to local residents, flows into ponds below. It sits on a former steelworks site.
“It’s not easy to know who is responsible”
“We have been trying to challenge everyone for four years, but unfortunately the responses we have received are quite thin,” laments Jessica Dautruche. During the investigation which resulted in the referral of ten people to the Specialized Interregional Jurisdiction (Jirs) of Lille, investigators uncovered an organized system of collection, transport and dumping of Belgian waste in the east and north of France.
“Everyone passes the buck and it is not easy to know who is responsible,” adds Daniel Cimarelli, even if, according to the texts, it is “up to the Belgian company” responsible for these illegal deposits “to come and get them “. Other sites have since been cleaned up.
In this first Jirs case relating to waste trafficking, a scam against French reprocessing centers was brought to light. “The suspects took on the appearance of waste managers presenting all the proper authorizations to collect, process and deposit waste in dedicated places,” summarizes Olivier Hurault, lawyer for the Longwy agglomeration community, where according to “extremely dangerous” waste was dumped on him.
Organized gang scams
“Under this guise, once they had collected the waste and had been paid, they deposited it on community or private land and got rid of it like that, no more and no less.”
The investigation also established that a single organization had been at the origin of these illegal dumps. She is suspected of having first made deposits in reprocessing centers in France, some of which filed complaints for fraud: false documents, commercial identity theft, unpaid invoices, etc. The damage is estimated at more than 1 .5 million euros, for nearly 10,000 tonnes of waste.
Europe is struggling
One of the main defendants, Johnny Demeter, claims to be a waste trader and broker. Justice suspects him of having organized these transports, without the obligatory authorizations, between 2018 and 2021. Interviewed by France 2 in 2020, he said he himself was the victim of another intermediary. According to a document consulted by AFP, “this penetration of organized crime in the field of waste is also facilitated by the fact that European public authorities are struggling to find solutions that meet the ecological challenges”, while these countries “ produce more waste than they can reprocess.
Customs control operations are increasing. “For us, this fight is a priority,” Mathieu Boffy, Lorraine-North divisional customs chief, told AFP. It is “an issue of public safety and the fight against air and soil pollution. We must be extremely vigilant.”