The neighbors Dieneke Eikens, Gré Klingenberg and Henk Zandman have united as a kind of neighborhood committee in the matter of the wood dust crisis. They have already tried everything in the past four years: “We have raised it twice during the village round (where the municipality makes a round of neighborhoods and villages to get into conversation with residents, ed.), and we have had many conversations with the previous and the current mayor, the municipality, lawyers, jurists. So far it has not worked.”
“Some people complain about itchy eyes, others have problems with their airways,” Eikens sums up. “It’s a finer substance, which gets deeper into your airways. It makes you stuffy. A bad feeling. We don’t know exactly what’s in it and are therefore worried about our health. Some days you can even smell it in the downtown, so it’s not just us who have to deal with it.”
In addition, neighbor Gré Klingenberg has a layer of wood dust on the garden furniture almost every morning: “I keep busy cleaning.” She and her husband can’t sit outside carefree: “We live closest to the company, so we have the first nuisance: from the noise and the falling dust.”