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arsENIco: english news

On November 29th 2000, justice Vincenzo Pedone blocked all activities in the 120000t/yr rdf incinerator in Scarlino (southern Tuscan coast), owned by ENI, one of the very few italian multinationals, and reknown for gas and oil prospecting.
The seizure results from requests and documents submitted to the justice over the last 2 years by a grassroot organization active in Scarlino and nearby municipalities. It seems unlikely that ENI will be permitted to restart incineration immediately. The citizens' exposees show that ENI operates the incinerator in the absence of authorizations. The Ministry of the Industry appears as an active supporter of the illegal situation.
The Ministry of the Environment explained (when asked) that ENI was acting illegally but never challenged ENI. The Ministry of Justice seized the incineretor with a 2yrs delay. The regional gvt of Toscana and the provincilal junta of Grosseto were also major allies to ENI.
Finally, municipalities opposing ENI, studiously resorted to ineffectual actions. Prior to the "final authorization" the incinerator was screened with an e.i.a. The regional gvt, green party included, because the assessment turned out favourable upon conditions, adopted it omitting the conditions.
Infact Region and Province, major authorising bodies, kept repeating that a favourable e.i.a. was delivered. The incinerator, activated in 1998, is arranged in makeshift fashion, in a section of the huge industrial apparatus that kept roasting local pyritis for most of this century.
The incinerator went into operation in a deal that apparently spared state-owned ENI, several hundreds billion lire of clean-up of abandoned industrial and mining sites throughout the Grosseto province, one of the largest mining districts in Italy.
This vast area is ridden with cyanide, arsenic, quicksilver in soil, water: concentrations are hundreds, sometime thousands of times larger than legally permitted. Other very possible pollutants such as dioxines are typically not probed. Entire valleys and hundreds of kilometers of mining tunnels are stuffed with toxic mining residues. The same residues, roasted, landscape since decades the sorroundings of the incinerator. They are still in use for road or levee construction and maintanance throughout the province. They are also exported as construction material.