Toxic Waste Stored In An Abandoned Mine In France Highlights A Global Problem

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Since the dawn of time, figuring out what to do with human and industrial waste has been a problem. The most common solution has been to bury it underground. Another popular choice is throwing it into the ocean. For millennia, “Out of sight, out of mind,” has been the guiding principle. Got nuclear waste that will stay radioactive for thousands of years? Store it inside Yucca Mountain or inside barrels encased in concrete that get dumped into the deepest parts of the ocean. That way it becomes someone else’s problem. Case closed.

The town of Wittlesheim in the Alsace region of France is confronted today with a waste problem — a long term issue caused by short term thinking. Alsace is in the northeast corner of France, an area that was once part of Germany. In fact, it is closer to Stuttgart than it is to Paris. For many years, people in and around Wittlesheim worked in the potash mine, which at one time employed more than 12,000 people. Potash is rich in potassium, which makes it an excellent fertilizer for fruits and vegetables. But eventually, the supply of potash underground dwindled and the mine closed in the early 1990s.

One of those miners is Jean-Pierre Hecht, who started mining when he was 20 years old, following in the footsteps of his father and grandfather. He has fond memories of his time in the mines. He told The Guardian’s Phoebe Weston he enjoyed the camaraderie and the physical nature of the work. “Everyone worked in the mine,” said Hecht. Mining companies created towns, roads, churches, canteens and health services for their workers. Schools and sports clubs were provided for children. The company subsidized holidays by the sea or in the mountains. “What was good was that everyone was the same. There was no jealousy, everyone knew each other.”

A Solution In Search Of A Problem

The Stocamine mine still remains, 500 meters (1600 feet) below the surface of the earth. In all, there are more than 125 kilometers (78 miles) of road down there that lead to the various vaults that once contained potash. All that empty space, begging to be put to use, was a solution in search of a problem. In 1997, a plan was hatched to bury toxic waste in the abandoned mine. The impetus was to provide work for some of the unemployed miners.

The community was assured the plan was safe. It was to be just a temporary stop before a permanent solution was found. “We hoped that by storing the waste underground, we would find a solution to treat this waste and be able to recycle it in one way or another thanks to advances in technology. But work on this never saw the light of day,” Hecht said. Flyers distributed at the time described the project as “a mine to serve the environment.”

But as so often happens, the plan to solve the toxic waste problem never materialized, and so the waste sits. That’s a problem, because between the mine and the surface of the earth is the Alsace aquifer, which feeds into the Upper Rhine aquifer that supplies drinking water to millions of people in France, Switzerland, and Germany. Some of the contaminates stored at the bottom of the mine include heavy metals such as mercury and arsenic. Cyanide is also part of the mix. These toxins have been linked to mass die-offs in wildlife. If they were to escape the mine, they could have severe and long lasting effects on ecosystems throughout central Europe.

Toxic Waste In Abandoned Mines

We think of mines as geologically stable, but they are not. The ground above them can shift or the glaciers they were buried in can melt. In Wittlesheim, the land is sinking by about 2 cm (0.8 inch) a year, due in part to hotter temperatures above ground. As the Earth warms, the soil becomes drier and shrinks, a process known as subsidence.

Around the world, there are many cases of former salt and potash mines collapsing once they become flooded, something scientists think could happen to Stocamine within a few hundred years. The French government is now the owner of the site and has a plan to pump hundreds of tons of concrete into the mine to stabilize it and make it impervious to water penetration.

Dozens of hydrologists, geochemists and geologists have been asked to weigh in on the Stocamine problem. One of them is Marcos Buser, a Swiss geologist who is a specialist on toxic and nuclear waste. He began researching solutions for the waste stored beneath the town of Wittlesheim fifteen years ago. From the very beginning, his opinion has never varied. He told The Guardian it is urgent to remove the toxic waste as soon as possible. Of course, if it is sealed in concrete, that will not be feasible.

“It’s best to do it now and not to leave these things to future generations,” Buser said, citing the history of hazardous waste in landfills as one of multiple failures. Containment measures often only last a few decades, and are expensive to remediate later. The cost of removing the waste in the Stocamine mine is estimated to be about €60 million — a rounding error in France’s budget. But if some of the toxins leach into the aquifer above, the damage could soar into the trillions. In general, it usually costs less to fix problems now rather than waiting years or decades.

In an effort to force the government to remove the waste now and abandon the plan to fill the mine with concrete, Alsace Nature, an environmental advocacy organization, petitioned the European Court of Human Rights to follow the advice of Buser and other experts. It told the court that leaving the waste where it was poses a significant risk to public health. On 17 June, 2025 the court ruled the waste could stay, saying deterioration of the galleries had already made removal dangerous. In other words, things are already worse than anyone imagined and so it is time to implement the least worst solution.

Fundamental Change Needed

Stocamine is more than just a technical issue; it is a moral one as well, Buser says. “We have to fundamentally change the way we deal with waste. We cannot dispose of dangerous waste in the environment — it will come back.” He added that we have to work towards a circular economy, not entomb mountains of waste. “We are just leaving this burden for our dependents.”

In other words, we have to reverse thousands of years of human thinking in which profits from commercial activities are Priority One and being good stewards of the Earth is Number 857. Before they were exterminated by white European colonizers, the Indigenous people of North America created a culture that was far more respectful of the Earth, but their ideas mostly died with them. Today, humans still use the Earth as a communal toilet and vilify any who protest as treehuggers, progressives, liberals, or (gasp!) DEMOCRATS, who all suffer from a woke mind virus.

If we do not dramatically alter that mindset, the vast majority of species who inhabit the Earth today will die off, and all because humans decided to put their own self interest ahead of the needs of the planet that sustains them. What is happening in Alsace today is happening in a million similar ways everywhere around the world every day.

It is happening in plain sight, but we refuse to see it because the consequences are simply too inconvenient. We have sown the seeds of our own destruction and are hoping for crop failure. This will not end well for humans, who are always too busy to notice they are drowning in the sea of waste they themselves have created.