In the Basque Country, stoppage of a building site on a pile of waste

This real estate project was built on the site of a former landfill in this town located between Bayonne and Biarritz. The images of countless litter of all kinds, a few meters from a stream, notably posted on Twitter by journalist Hugo Clément, have been widely relayed on social networks.

Alerted, the mayor of Anglet Claude Olive (LR) decided to interrupt the construction site on Wednesday, by making a report to the state services.

"There will be no resumption of the site until this waste has been evacuated, as it had been agreed to do from the start. Their job today is to clean up the area", indicates this Thursday the town hall of Anglet.

The project, baptized "Erreka", ("the stream" in the Basque language), is a construction site of Carrefour Property, the Carrefour group's land subsidiary and project owner, with Eiffage as project manager.

Contacted by AFP, Eiffage said "understand the emotion aroused" by these videos, "which show the content of this particular site", but "filmed before the planned waste sorting and disposal operations".

Carrefour Property ensures that sifting operations, "to extract the most important household waste", have been carried out since the opening of the site and that the excavated materials visible in the images have been "by earth movements recent".

However, the company undertakes to sort the land concerned and to evacuate the waste to appropriate landfills.

It also guarantees that the feasibility studies, diagnoses and studies carried out upstream "have made it possible to confirm the absence of health risk" and "to initiate treatment on site".

"The obligation to preserve agricultural or natural land to meet housing needs leads, and will lead more and more, to the reuse, in compliance with regulations, of sites already transformed and artificialized by human activity as in the present case. “, also underlines Eiffage.

The stream at the edge of the plot will be protected by "additional precautionary measures" such as the installation of a fence to prevent the fall of rubbish, adds the client.