What was that all about? Not chemically, of course: About 700 hectares of arable land—65 hectares cultivated by an average German farm—have been rendered unusable in Mittelbaden due to contamination with per- and polyfluorinated alkyl substances, and these PFAS or “eternity chemicals” also burden the water; that is how it is now and will stay and will not go away.
Legally, too, an initial ruling is only a stage. But with its initial ruling, the Baden-Baden district court on Monday determined: Yes, it is proven that the compost producer with the nice name Umweltpartner Vogel is the cause of contamination across large parts of Mittelbaden, Germany’s currently largest environmental scandal. The pollutants are affecting the groundwater of several municipalities.
Rastatt, with 50,000 inhabitants, is the largest of them. The local utilities, according to the court, have a claim for damages from Vogel, who presents himself as ecologically minded. The amount remains to be negotiated. It concerns the costs of the remediation measures, which means: for the Bühl-based company, that will probably be the end.
That is easy to calculate: Initially only around 6.5 million euros were in play, because that was the investment sum of the municipal utilities at the time the lawsuit was filed in 2019. In the meantime, however, Rastatt’s entire water supply has been equipped with activated carbon filtration plants and a replacement of a waterworks has occurred, costing 27 million euros.
Garden-Enthusiastic Region
Vogel AG, 18 employees, €100,000 in share capital, belongs to Franz Vogel, who unfortunately does not return ’s calls. The company has fixed assets worth about €2.5 million. While its composts and humus products sell well in this garden-enthusiastic region with sandy soils, according to the company reports this cannot be enough.
So Vogel will have to put every last cent into the judicial processing of the affair. In the end he could go bankrupt, and Rastatt’s municipal utilities could still raise the price of drinking water.
As the origin of the PFAS is regarded as paper sludge, a waste product of paper production from recycled paper. It is said to have been unlawfully mixed into the compost starting in 2005: In that year a new regulation came into force prohibiting the disposal of paper sludge in landfills. The paper industry along the Murg thus needed new solutions for its special waste. Vogel supposedly delivered it from the sludge and unlawfully mixed it into the substrate. This was determined by the Stuttgart Government Presidency in 2008 and the practice was prohibited.
The composting operator had not challenged this notice at the time. Since then it has been regarded as true, and it was still true in 2012 when the PFAS were discovered in Rastatt’s water. Practically: that meant there was already a culprit on hand.
Vogel now claims to have mixed only permissible white paper fiber remnants into the compost, i.e., harmless cellulose. And the Federal Certification Association for Compost (BGK) confirms this in response to : Vogel’s products were, during the relevant period, tested at least four times a year by external laboratories. “Only admissible inputs were used” for the compost bearing quality marks, summarizes the BGK the results.
This text first appeared in the wochen, our weekly newspaper from the left!
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Also in the PFAS investigation that the association had introduced in 2007, Vogel’s operation remained inconspicuous. He just has to prove now where else the toxin could have come from at the time—and why the fields of his customers nearby are contaminated, while those next to them are not.
