“Water, not fleas.” It is under this slogan that gathered, Saturday, April 1, between 500 and 800 demonstrators, who came to oppose the project to extend the semiconductor factory of the STMicroelectronics group in Crolles (Isère). Wanting to be peaceful and “joyful”, the procession paraded around the site with a watchword: to denounce “the monopolization of resources” and in particular of water, necessary for the rinsing of the silicon plates, by the site de Crolles and by the entire semiconductor industry.
It is here, in the heart of the Grésivaudan valley, between Grenoble and Chambéry, that the largest French site for the manufacture of electronic chips is currently being built. In the summer of 2022, Emmanuel Macron made the trip to announce this investment of 5.7 billion euros, carried by the Franco-Italian group STMicroelectronics and by the American group Global Foundries. Alongside the Head of State, Bruno Le Maire, Minister of the Economy, hailed “the largest industrial investment in recent decades outside of nuclear power and a big step for our industrial sovereignty”. By strengthening the production capacity of semiconductors on French soil, the Crolles plant is part of the “Chips Act” supported by the European Commission, with the aim of reducing the EU’s dependence on -visit Asia on this strategic production, creating along the way 1000 jobs in the territory.
A few months after this announcement and as work began on the Crolles site, the opposition began to structure itself in the Grenoble region. Created last autumn and declaring today “about twenty active members”, the citizen collective Stop Micro points to “the colossal needs” of the STMicroelectronics group and the Soitec company, also based in Crolles and specializing in the manufacture of semiconductor materials. “Our demonstration is part of the context of the struggles for water which, from Sainte-Soline to Grenoble, concern everyone. At the end of a particularly dry winter and while Isère is still on drought alert, we wanted to refocus the debate on water consumption by industries,” explains a member of the collective.
“What alerts us are the volumes in absolute value: the quantity of water that leaves each year for the Crolles factories is comparable to that which is consumed over the same period at the scale of the city of Grenoble (which has 160,000 inhabitants, Ed)”, explains Sébastien Triqueneaux, research engineer at the CNRS, who participated as a citizen in the demonstration and who is part of the group Scientifiques en rébellion. “Today there is enough water to meet all needs, but who can guarantee that this will be the case in the future?”
President of the Community of Communes of Grésivaudan, and regional councilor of the Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes region, Henri Baile, for his part, relies on this availability of water in the valley: “If these industries are established here, it is because of the purity and abundance of water. The opponents give the feeling that we would feed the industrialists to the detriment of the populations, this is totally false. In an attempt to “objectivize” the situation, the community of municipalities launched a study last fall to find out precisely the quantity and quality of groundwater in the territory. “Industrialists are also aware of their responsibility on the issue,” adds Henri Baile, who today expects “a return to reason” from the demonstrators opposed to the project.
