GET IT ALL – Car Wash – affected by water restrictions?

In this time of drought and restrictions on water consumption, many people are wondering whether or not they can wash their cars.

• Can you wash your vehicle at home or at a station?

At first, in most of the departments involved, there was some vagueness with the stations still open, but washing prohibited in the home. In fact, this practice is prohibited at all times, even outside dry periods, unless you dry clean your vehicle with suitable products and wipes, as the Actu.fr site recently reminded us.

But with the lingering heat and crossed alert levels, some departments have decided to ban vehicle cleaning at car washes as well.

This is particularly the case of Deux-Sèvres, which has exceeded the last “crisis” alert level, since Wednesday, August 10, with different scenarios depending on the department’s territories, as summarized the new republic. In fact, according to the different zones, the decree of the prefecture establishes that washing is “prohibited” (implicit for all uses, editor’s note), or “prohibited, except for sanitary imperative” (emergency vehicles or livestock transport, for example), or even “prohibited, except stations equipped with high pressure or water recycling systems”.

However, in the Deux-Sèvres department, few stations have such systems, the article underlines.

• Water recycling: virtuous washing?

On a page of its official site, a well-known brand in France, Elephant Bleu, explains the principle of recycling water, associated with the use of biodegradable soaps.

“Of all the water used, 95% is recovered through a sanitation system installed below the station and then returned directly to a center specialized in the treatment of waste and sewage. The remaining 5% is linked to the evaporation process”, underlines the company. which has 460 centers in France, all equipped with this system.

For Elephant Bleu, washing at a station is also presented as an ecological gesture:

“The network washes more than 145,000 vehicles a week, or 7.7 million a year. This saves 2,800 tons of contaminants in groundwater each year”, can be read on this page.

A page that transmits a video of Mobilians (ex-CNPA, the professional union of the automotive sector in France) with the especially clear title: “not washing the car is polluting, washing it regularly is a citizen gesture”.

The opportunity also to remember that “article L 1331-10 of the Public Health Code establishes that ‘All discharge of wastewater other than domestic wastewater into the public collection network must be authorized in advance'”.

Actu.fr for its part evoked the “departmental health regulations”, exposing the individual offender to a fine of 450 euros and even “up to several thousand euros depending on the consequences on the environment”.

• What assistance in times of drought?

Total Wash, with a network of 1,000 stations in France, assured “to make the stations aware of the decrees of the prefectures”, but has not yet ruled on the number of centers closed for this reason at present.

Without drawing a direct correlation to station closures, Total Wash is still seeing a significant drop in attendance in recent weeks compared to summer 2019 (last “normal” summer before covid).

Undoubtedly a psychological effect: the drought and the calls for a rational use of water would push a part of the citizenry to give up a more or less complete cleaning of their vehicle.

In this context, you should finally understand that you should try to limit your water use as much as possible, and therefore postpone washing your “non-essential” car for as long as possible. Not necessarily evident in the holiday period or the return of rental cars may require, for example, a wash, a priori “not essential” but required by the agency or private rental company.

• Increasingly frequent controls?

Difficult especially to navigate, if the stations remain open and without particular communication addressed to customers.

This is what we can see in a BFM Paris report issued this Sunday, August 7:

“We are going to go to a car wash, there are currently restrictions, people cannot wash vehicles at home and they cannot wash them in car washes either,” explains the Ile-de service chief. -France Regional Office of the OFB (French Office for Biodiversity).

Once there, there is no flagrante delicto, but puddles on the ground testify to recent use. Then, an OFB inspector contacts the manager to place signs informing users that only vehicles for health obligations can use this station and that individuals cannot.

• Help for professionals?

The same observation in the Rhône department, where a report by BFM Lyon shows that some motorists are challenging this ban.

Main problem for professionals, the absence of public aid in case of closure. What drives some to stay open:

“Behind we are shocked in relation to billing (…). They asked us to close, we automatically ask to be compensated because I have positions and employees to pay, I’m not going to tell my employee: ‘stay at home, I don’t pay them’ (…) so we are asking Grand Lyon to help us or at least compensate our employees,” testifies a station manager.

All his competitors made the same decision, risking a fine of 7,500 euros. On the private side, in the case of flagrante delicto, the penalty can be around 1,500 euros.

Guest of BFM Lyon, the prefect of the Rhône Vanina Nicoli acknowledges however that the decision is still “very recent”, with a decree signed on Tuesday, August 9 to apply the next day: “I imagine that the information does not arrive again with all our fellow citizens.

“Until now, the car washes were authorized because we were at a high alert level (the third level of drought alert out of four). At crisis level they no longer have the right to do so, except for emergency vehicles for example,” he said. specifies.

But station closures are not necessarily decreed when a department reaches the maximum level of drought. In Calvados, a manager of four stations explains to us that the environmental police forced him to close one of his centers, which is in an area that was at level 3 of “reinforced alert”.

“Given the evolution of the weather, I think we will close the other three in the next few days,” he explains, also asking the affected professionals for help: “We would like to help in the same way as restaurateurs during Covid-19”.