The sprawling ILVA steelworks has loomed over the skyline of Taranto and dominated the city’s economy for 50 years, but toxic pollution has transformed the site from a symbol of post-World War II prosperity to an emblem of Italy’s long industrial decline.
Following years of uncontrolled environmental abuse, the future of the plant, the largest steel producer in Europe, now hangs in the balance after judges finally stepped in last month and ordered it to clean up or be shut down.
The plant’s owners, the family-owned Riva Group, must now wait until the end of next month for a specially appointed group of experts to decide what action it must take to gain a new environmental certificate allowing continued operation.
As many as 20,000 jobs are at risk in an area already weakened by high unemployment, while officials look for a solution to a problem that has produced abnormal levels of tumors and chronic respiratory disease in the city, located on the “heel” of southern Italy.
“How are people supposed to live?” said former ILVA worker Michele Fiorino, as he stood in Tamburi, a rundown Taranto suburb that stands in the shadow of the plant and where mortality rates are as much as 70 percent above the city average.
“At night, when it’s hot like this, you’ve got a choice — sleep with the windows open and risk getting covered in black dust, or closing the windows and turning on the air conditioning, and not everyone around here can afford that,” he said.
Behind the immediate health threat, ILVA is a stark example of the suffocating mix of short-term political expediency, poor oversight and endemic corruption that has given Italy the most sluggish economy of any eurozone country over the course of a decade, with average growth of less than 1 percent a year.
Unlike more modern steel plants in Germany or France, with their advanced filters and safety systems, ILVA’s huge smokestacks dump thousands of tonnes of choking dust on the city every year, giving many of the buildings in Tamburi a distinctive black or dull-red tone.
Emissions of dioxins, benzoapyrene and other cancer-causing chemicals have poisoned fishing and farmland for kilometers around in what a Taranto court described as an “environmental disaster.”
Court documents say the Riva Group has made numerous unfulfilled pledges to clean up at the site and company head Emilio Riva has been convicted twice of environmental offenses over the past decade.
However, until magistrates seized key parts of the site at the end of last month, no effective action had ever been taken to stop the pollution or make ILVA match environmental standards laid down in EU regulations.
Giorgio Assennato, head of the ARPA environmental authority in the Puglia region where Taranto is located, said the fact that it took the courts to intervene and shut the plant, despite repeated warnings from ARPA and other authorities, laid bare a dangerous weakness in regulatory control.
“We have to accept the fact that in Italy you have to turn to the criminal justice system because the system of environmental governance is unbalanced by lobbies, which use improper practices to influence institutions for their own advantage,” Assenato said.
As national elections approach next year, the case of ILVA, one of the few big industrial employers left in the south, underlines the complexity and scale of the challenge that will face any government trying to make the deep structural reforms needed to restore Italy’s sclerotic economy.
“The story of Taranto is not just a story of pollution and jobs, it is the story of a country that has been unable to create an alternative to its old heavy industry,” said Andrea Colli, a professor at Milan’s Bocconi University, and a specialist in industrial and business history. “It says a great deal about the wider problems in the Italian economy.”
Built by the state-owned Italsider group in the late 1950s during a drive to industrialize the poor and underdeveloped south, ILVA was originally intended to be a specialist maker of steel tubes for Italy’s then-booming oil refinery sector. By the time its furnaces began operations in 1964, political interests had changed the original project and created Italy’s fourth-largest general-purpose steelmaker, aimed in part at providing jobs in an underdeveloped region and incidentally serving as a votes factory for local politicians.
Thousands of agricultural workers left the land for secure and relatively well-paid work in the factory, joining the economic boom that was transforming Italy, but which at the same time was leaving the south dangerously dependent on a few isolated industrial mastodons.
“It was like manna from heaven for the region when it opened,” said Franco Tocci, who worked at the plant from 1964 until he retired in 1995, a month after ILVA was privatized and sold to the Riva Group. “No one talked about pollution until much later.”
Environmental concerns counted for little, and the economic justification for the plant played second fiddle to regional development and the political convenience of a large workforce in a major industrial site.
The plant’s workforce has since fallen from more than 22,000 at its height in the 1980s to just 12,000 today, with another 8,000 workers who depend directly on the plant.
Fears of job losses have continued to hamper action in a region where unemployment stands at 37 percent in some areas and where only one working-age person in three has a job.
Concerns about pollution were easily brushed aside by the management, unions and local politicians, despite plentiful evidence of serious problems at the site.
“This has been a problem for 40 years,” said Ippazio Stefano, the mayor of Taranto and a doctor who has observed the effect of the pollution at first hand. “I got my degree in 1970, when ILVA had been operating for 10 years. My thesis was: ‘An increase in lung tumors in an industrial city.’”
Prosecutors finally acted after a damning series of reports from ARPA and an analysis of dioxin in a sample of local pecorino sheep’s cheese commissioned by a local environmental group in 2008 added to growing evidence of abuse.
Documents from the Taranto court that ordered the ILVA plant be put under special administration and cleaned up suggest the problem was deliberately concealed by management.
The court, which initially ran into fierce union and government opposition, accuses the Riva Group of obstructing environmental inspectors and knowingly allowing the deadly pollution to continue.
It has placed Emilio Riva and two others under house arrest pending further investigations that involve a number of politicians and public officials.
However, many questions remain about why the problem was allowed to persist without anyone intervening to stop it and in particular why the plant was granted an environmental clearance last year.
Prosecution wiretap evidence cited in the documents alleges that senior executives of the group tried to silence journalists and, in at least one case, pay off an outside expert to provide a favorable environmental assessment of the site.
“There’s been no conviction, and it’s still unproven of course, but it does seem that there has been corruption involved,” Stefano said.
ILVA did not respond to repeated e-mail and telephone requests for comment, but Bruno Ferrante, the former government official named last month to run the plant, has pledged to cooperate with environmental authorities in the cleanup.
Beyond the allegations of individual wrongdoing, the case points to the weakness of the institutions supposed to regulate industry and ultimately ensure that it matches the standards observed by competitors in other countries.
“This is a potential bomb in terms of jobs, but there shouldn’t have to be a choice between jobs and the environment,” said Marco Bentivogli, secretary of the FIM-CISL metalworkers union.
A gap appears to be emerging between Washington’s foreign policy elites and the broader American public on how the United States should respond to China’s rise. From my vantage working at a think tank in Washington, DC, and through regular travel around the United States, I increasingly experience two distinct discussions. This divergence — between America’s elite hawkishness and public caution — may become one of the least appreciated and most consequential external factors influencing Taiwan’s security environment in the years ahead. Within the American policy community, the dominant view of China has grown unmistakably tough. Many members of Congress, as
After declaring Iran’s military “gone,” US President Donald Trump appealed to the UK, France, Japan and South Korea — as well as China, Iran’s strategic partner — to send minesweepers and naval forces to reopen the Strait of Hormuz. When allies balked, the request turned into a warning: NATO would face “a very bad” future if it refused. The prevailing wisdom is that Trump faces a credibility problem: having spent years insulting allies, he finds they would not rally when he needs them. That is true, but superficial, as though a structural collapse could be caused by wounded feelings. Something
Former Taipei mayor and Taiwan People’s Party (TPP) founding chairman Ko Wen-je (柯文哲) was sentenced to 17 years in prison on Thursday, making headlines across major media. However, another case linked to the TPP — the indictment of Chinese immigrant Xu Chunying (徐春鶯) for alleged violations of the Anti-Infiltration Act (反滲透法) on Tuesday — has also stirred up heated discussions. Born in Shanghai, Xu became a resident of Taiwan through marriage in 1993. Currently the director of the Taiwan New Immigrant Development Association, she was elected to serve as legislator-at-large for the TPP in 2023, but was later charged with involvement
Out of 64 participating universities in this year’s Stars Program — through which schools directly recommend their top students to universities for admission — only 19 filled their admissions quotas. There were 922 vacancies, down more than 200 from last year; top universities had 37 unfilled places, 40 fewer than last year. The original purpose of the Stars Program was to expand admissions to a wider range of students. However, certain departments at elite universities that failed to meet their admissions quotas are not improving. Vacancies at top universities are linked to students’ program preferences on their applications, but inappropriate admission
RSS