Many Italians depend on a plant that is wrecking the environment

“Oh come on, two more tumours per year . . . That’s nothing.”

The speaker is Fabio Riva, managing director of the Riva family-owned steel giant, Ilva, Italy’s largest steel producer and one of the biggest in Europe. The comment, recorded on June 9th, 2010, comes from a wiretap ordered by Taranto-based investigating magistrates.

In the conversation, Riva is talking to company lawyer Francesco Perli, who warns him about forthcoming problems with the Italian senate’s environmental commission. Senators have been listening to alarming reports about the company’s plant in the southern Italian city of Taranto from the Puglia region’s regional environmental protection body.

There is little edifying about Ilva which, in 2011, produced 8.5 million tonnes of steel, or 30 per cent of Italy’s steel production. On November 26th, judge Patrizia Todisco ordered the arrest of seven people, including Riva, his father Emilio and five other members of the Ilva management, as well as the sequestration of steel at the plant.

The basic accusation levelled at the Riva family is that, over a 17-year period, pollution from its Taranto plant has poisoned not only Ilva workers and local people but also the entire eco-system of the surrounding region.

Pollution dossier

One of the managers arrested, Girolamo Archina, is accused of having paid a €10,000 bribe in August 2010 to the president of Taranto Polytechnic, Lorenzo Liberti, who had been commissioned by magistrates to prepare a dossier on the pollution emanating from the plant.

Fabio Riva, believed to be in England, is officially listed as a fugitive from justice for whom an international arrest warrant has been issued. That warrant accuses him of “criminal association” that has generated an “environmental disaster” by the “emission of poisonous substances”.

Management closed down the factory because of the seizure of the steel. When, one week later, a government decree calling for a clean-up at Ilva enabled the plant to start up again, Tonia Marsella, from the “Women for Taranto” group, sent an open letter to state president Giorgio Napolitano: “You have signed our death warrants . . . In Taranto, there is an emergency bylaw forbidding animals to graze within 20km of the industrial area of the town . . . but we live in those 20km and so do our children.”

Writing in weekly magazine L’Espresso, senior Democratic Party figure and medical expert Ignazio Marino summed up the situation: “The Sentieri [health] study has established once and for all that the mortality rate in Taranto is 11 per cent higher than in the rest of Puglia . . . Furthermore it establishes another fact, namely that the steel plant is . . . 99 per cent responsible for the health-endangering pollution. In other words, Ilva is the guilty party.”

Dr Marino points out that, following the publication of the Sentieri report, the Puglia Doctor’s Association advised all GPs to tell people, especially those who live in the Tamburi area, not to let their children come in contact with the earth. So high is the atmospheric pollution from black dust that people were advised to take a shower immediately and wash their clothes daily.

An earlier study in 2010 revealed the soil in Tamburi area close to the steel plant contained high levels of beryllium, lead and polychlorinated biphenyl. Residents are also subject to above-average sterility levels, while 90 per cent of babies suffer asthma.

Sheep to slaughter

In 2008, nearly 2,000 sheep were slaughtered after dangerous levels of dioxin were found.

The last thing any government needs is the closure of the plant, with the immediate loss of 5,000 jobs and the long-term loss of another 15,000.

Even environmentalists argue that closure could result in the plant polluting the region for decades to come.

For the time being, the best solution offered by the technocrat government of outgoing prime minister Mario Monti is a state-monitored, €3 billion clean-up. When the Ilva question came before the European Parliament in early December, MEPs urged the “Who pollutes, pays” principle be respected. Given the Riva family is believed to have lodged €200 million of Ilva profits with the family holding company, Riva Fire, not everyone is convinced that principle will work.