We raise our hands in resignation when confronted with statistics on death. Especially if they take the form of neonatal tumors. There are no statistics, no threshold, no historical trend—only pity. But we shouldn’t raise our hands, helpless, over statistics concerning life. And the biggest steel mill in Europe is life, development and wealth. It will be up to technicians to decide if the period from 2003 to 2009, now the subject of research, was the cause of present-day environmental conditions or if measures now in effect have brought improvements. Or, worse, if the picture has deteriorated in the last few years.
For the Italian public opinion as a whole, not only for that of Taranto or Apulia, the basic question still awaits an answer: is closure of the mill necessary? Is it necessary to stop the steelworks in Taranto, which employ 15,000 workers? “No, we must defeat cancer without eliminating jobs” is, in any case, the wisest answer, whether for those interested in environmental issues or those who hope to avoid losing this opportunity in manufacturing.
Furthermore, what happens in Taranto implies Cornigliano, Novi Ligure, Racconigi. And this comes at a moment when Italy is already losing its iron-ore strongholds, from Piombino to Terni—once the heart of the industrial revolution of the 1960s. If the discussion was stripped of ideology, and of the divisiveness that it has gathered with time, what would remain is the need for an extraordinary local, regional, national, and European effort to induce that site to adopt its own production standards that respect environmentally sustainable conditions.
An angry order to close can't save the tragic compromise between defending lives or jobs, and the delusion that the steel workers in one of the biggest steel cities in Europe can be immediately replaced by the same number of employees in the service and tourism sectors is of no help. Nor is the proposal to reduce production and outsource the majority of it (to export the deaths we'd like to avoid in our own country?).
The compromise is written into the complete environmental authorization approved by environmental minister Corrado Clini. For the steel mill, this is a demanding task; the request to modify production quotas considered too low is proof of this. But the forced reconversion of the plant, owned by the Riva family and partially refashioned, after having polluted for decades as a state-owned enterprise, must break free of these restraints: ILVA has contested the early closure of blast furnace 5, the plant’s heart and soul, a year ahead of schedule (in 2014); it requests safety distances for the placing of mineral parks that are less than those established by the AIA; it considers two months too short a period of time to get the project approved and three years insufficient for the construction of anti-powder cover; and it thinks it will be extremely difficult to start work within three months on the construction of enclosed deposits for powdered materials. In short, what AIA prescribes isn’t easy for the company.
But it is a necessary extra effort.
The other alternative that remains would be to voluntarily or forcibly abandon the site. But that would not be the right solution.
The true challenge, to help reverse this trend of terrible clinical data, is to transform the steelworks into a plant for environmentally sound production—a program that calls all involved, from the city to the European Union, to a concerted organizational and financial effort.
That will be the way to ensure jobs and to fend off those unacceptable deaths.
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Published on Il Sole24ore by Alberto Orioli, 23 october, 2012