The pollution originating from the steelworks threatens the environment of the city and the health of its inhabitants.
ILVA is the biggest steelworks in Europe. Owned by the Italian Riva family and situated in the southern Italian city of Taranto, the 15 million square-meters steel plant [1] provides work to about 12,000 employees with a capacity to produce 8 million tonnes of steel per year. 2
The pollution originating from the steelworks threatens the environment of the city and the health of its inhabitants.
Environmental and civic associations accused the ILVA company of being responsible for more than 12 thousand deaths due to cardiovascular and respiratory diseases, as well as 27 thousand hospitalizations due to similar issues, according to an epidemiological report. 3
A few kilometers away from the ILVA steelworks, the Italian farmer Vincenzo Fornaro used to manage the Carmine Manor Farm, practicing livestock farming and olive growing.
On May, 3 2007, the environmental association Peacelink published a report 4 analyzing cheese and meat derived from sheep which grazed near the ILVA steelworks. Analysis found traces of dioxin in a quantity higher than legally allowed.
As a result of a complaint lodged by Peacelink, competent authorities put 1,221 animals down. Six hundred fifty of them belonged to Vinceno Fornaro. Consequently, he had to shut down the farm.
“We lost about €300,000 (more than £250,000) just because my herd had been killed” Fornaro said. “We couldn’t work anymore, we couldn’t hold a herd. Fortunately, I have a strong family behind me, so we decided not to abandon this land because we were born and bred here, and our roots are here. We turned from being entrepreneurs to seeking a job. We have had to fire 10 employees who used to work along with us,” Vincenzo Fornaro said, adding that he had lost even his mother, who died from cancer caused by pollution of the giant plant.
In 2014, Vincenzo Fornaro, along with several associations, sued the ILVA company. The trial was called “Ambiente Svenduto” (Environment Undersold). The trial focused on the damage made by dioxin and other heavy metals produced by the steelworks, in particular by the polluting furnaces and the related environmental disasters in the area.
Ambiente Svenduto’s trial started in July 2015 following 3 years of investigation and 6 months of preliminary hearings about ecological and health disasters caused by ILVA’s pollution. This trial counted 47 defendants (44 people and 3 firms linked to the Riva family) and 800 plaintiffs.
In December 2015 the trial stopped because of a material mistake.
The trial started from scratch in February 2016, in which all of the 47 investigated complaints were reconfirmed.
In the meantime, the European Court of Human Rights accused Italy of not protecting the lives and health of 182 citizens of Taranto from pollution caused by ILVA.
In December 2016 ILVA and two holdings belonging to the Riva family proposed a plea bargain, which excludes reparation due to plaintiffs who complained about this decision.
The trial is still in progress.
Vincenzo Fornaro’s activism against the ILVA pollution motivated him to take part in conferences about ecology and the environmental disaster caused by the steelworks. Thanks to a mutual friend, Fornaro met Claudio Natile, the president of CANAPUGLIA, a cultural-entrepreneurial project with the purpose to publicize the value of hemp for people, the environment and economy.
“As an association, we want to stimulate research about the potential of hemp in its many uses, even concerning the reclamation of contaminated lands. Hemp has been used in Chernobyl 5 along with sunflowers in 1994. We pinpointed in Fornaro an emblem of battle and struggle against pollution by iron and steel industry” Claudio Natile said.
In 2013 partnership between Vincenzo Fornaro and CANAPUGLIA began.
President Natile proposed to Fornaro that he should start an experiment inside the Fornaro property.
Claudio Natile’s idea was to plant hemp crops on the contaminated soils in order to verify if the plant was able to reclaim Vincenzo Fornaro’s lands, full of dioxin, PBC (polychlorinated biphenyls) and heavy metals. This would involve using a technology called phytoremediation, which sows living plants to clean up soil, air, and water contaminated with hazardous chemicals.
“The purpose of this project consists in valuing whether hemp can be used for phytoremediation and what hemp absorbs and how much it absorbs, where it localized the pollutant and whether hemp can be used for the production,” Claudio Natile clarified.
“We didn’t know the techniques to cultivate cannabis. A plot of land should be friable. The sowing has to be made 2 cm in-depth. We sowed 45 kg of seed per hectare. We used French and Italian seeds, either with a low rate of THC (Tetrahydrocannabinol, which is the principal psychoactive constituent of cannabis). For sowing, we spent €400 per hectare. Usually, a farmer can earn up to €1500 per hectare of hemp crops. You can make 1200 kg of trunks and be paid €15 per 100 kg” Vincenzo Fornaro said, while uprooting weeds from the bottom of the plant.
This is not the first time hemp has been used to try to reclaim contaminated soils. An explosion at a nuclear reactor on April 26th, 1986 in Chernobyl (Ukraine) created the world’s worst nuclear disaster to date. The blast contaminated agricultural lands within a 30 km radius around the reactor. In 1998, Consolidated Growers and Processors (CGP), PHYTOTECH, and the Ukraine’s Institute of Bast Crops began the planting of industrial hemp 6 along with sunflowers for the removal of contaminants in the soil surrounding Chernobyl.
Despite political setbacks and scientific uncertainty, this experiment opened up new ideas for the reclamation of contaminated soils and the use of hemp in the industry. What the project would aim is to surround the ILVA steelworks through with a green belt made by hemp crops in order to create a buffer zone for the pollution caused by the plant.
Nevertheless, this is just a stopgap measure because the pollution is too extensive to control. The real solution for the problem related to the pollution is getting the steelworks up to standard.
Sadly, the partnership between Caludio Natile and Vincenzo Fornaro ended in 2014 due to some differences of opinions.
However, Vincenzo Fornaro has to wait at least until 2018 for the first official survey of his soil with the presence of hemp in order to demonstrate accurately that hemp can clean up his contaminated land. It will be interesting to see what the future holds for this exciting prospect.
Source:
1] https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ilva
2 http://www.gruppoilva.com/it/gruppo-ilva/gruppo-ilva/breve
3 http://www.epiprev.it/materiali/2012/Taranto/Concl-perizia-epidemiol.pdf
4 https://www.tarantosociale.org/tarantosociale/docs/2000.pdf
5 https://sensiseeds.com/en/blog/hemp-decontamination-radioactive-soil/
6 http://www.cannabisculture.com/content/1999/06/03/160
Originally published in Weed World Magazine Issue 133
