Burgkirchen an der Alz: Urn graves with gift items – Bavaria

From the Burgkirchen community cemetery, the view extends over the town center and the river valley to the Gendorf chemical park on the other high bank of the Alz. Perfluorooctanoic acid was produced there for decades – the substance whose excavation from the fresh graves at the cemetery now has to be temporarily stored in a large hopper made of concrete blocks until the pollutant samples have been taken and analyzed. There isn’t a lot of earth, because here in Burgkirchen in Upper Bavaria, too, the light wooden crosses from the most recent burials are mostly attached to small urn graves. But the problem is big. Virtually everyone in the area will take a tiny amount of PFOA to their grave at some point. And people don’t know what to do with it even while they’re still alive.

PFOA is considered a health hazard and, in large quantities, carcinogenic. It is one of the per- and polyfluorinated alkyl compounds (PFAS), which are often called “forever chemicals” due to their longevity. Traces of these substances have long been found all over the world, from the deep sea to Antarctica, in groundwater and in people’s blood. There is a lot to be found in the blood of the people in the Altötting district.

Corresponding sample results from local blood donations shocked many people in the region in 2017. It was already known that PFOA had accumulated in the water, in the fish in the Alz, in the wild boars in the Öttinger Forest and in the soil of half the district, but it had hardly caused any major disruption. The people here in the “Bavarian Chemical Triangle” make a living from industry – including the one in the Gendorf Chemical Park, where PFOA was manufactured from 1968 to 2003 and further processed until 2008, for coatings such as functional clothing, dishes and seals.

PFOA has been banned across the EU since 2020, but that alone won’t make the eternal chemical disappear. This has now largely been achieved in the Altötting district for drinking water, which is assumed to be the main source of intake for people. Effective filters remove PFOA from the groundwater. However, this will remain burdensome for many decades to come because the gift is also in the ground. Dealing with this poses enormous problems for the Altötting district.

The soil was previously considered contaminated in an area of ​​around 200 square kilometers, almost a third of the district. The district office has defined four different zones within which the excavated earth should remain in order not to spread the PFOA any further. But because the standardized analysis method for soil samples has changed, the office will soon have to declare much larger areas as contaminated. And all the different safety, guideline and limit values ​​are constantly changing. For a long time there was little to no regulation for PFOA, but recently they have become more and more stringent.

Meanwhile, a probe has to be pulled from every excavated earth, and it’s just a few shovels of earth from an urn grave. Until last March, a trivial limit applied, but then the Free State issued new guidelines that were stronger than those at the federal level. As a result, practically every shovel of earth in the Altötting district became waste that had to be disposed of, as did the up to 500 cubic meters of earth that were created during the construction of an average single-family home and were previously considered negligible.

Suddenly all of this could no longer be filled in the dozen or so pits in the district. There was quickly talk of a de facto construction stop for everyone. Burghausen mayor Florian Schneider (SPD) calls it “a really big obstacle to investment,” who thinks this is not just a company and a private developer, but also a municipality that wants to build roads and develop building areas.

The district office has now given the cautious all-clear, as District Administrator Erwin Schneider and the CSU General Secretary Martin Huber, as local members of the state government, have now clarified the practical effects of the new regulation. The next new regulation will reverse the change. It is therefore currently being put into writing; it has already been communicated verbally and is already being applied.

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However, samples will still be necessary, and if they reveal a really high level of contamination, the soil will still have to be taken to an approved landfill for high fees, currently mostly near Regensburg. The mayor of Burgkirchen, Johann Krichenbauer (FW), calculates that up to twenty times the normal disposal costs would be incurred, but he is now also hopeful again for the grave soil from the cemetery.

In two years, the district will open its own, highly secure landfill just for PFOA-contaminated soil. The site is still a simple gravel pit. But the planning is practically finished and the district office expects approval in about a year. Up to 300,000 cubic meters of contaminated earth will probably be used to build the landfill alone. Given the constantly changing areas and limits, it remains to be seen whether the targeted capacity of 600,000 cubic meters will last for ten or even 20 years – as does the question of who should pay for all of this. In the long term, at least 70 million euros would probably be necessary, according to the district office, Burghausen’s mayor Schneider is expecting a “three-digit million amount”.

The PFOA producer Dyneon from the Gendorf chemical park paid for the planning, which cost several hundred thousand euros. But Dyneon is only one of three legal successors to the former manufacturer Hoechst. The US Dyneon parent company 3m has announced that it will withdraw from PFAS production worldwide and also from Gendorf by the end of 2025. This will cost more than one in ten of the last 4,300 jobs in the chemical park and will also affect other companies around it. PFAS will then probably only be produced outside of Europe, which was criticized by the Bavarian state government, among others, as an “economic policy disaster”. But even if Dyneon leaves soon, the problems will not be over for a long time.