Toxicities that matter: Slow bureaucracy and polluting temporalities in a southern Italian city

Our plain-English summary of Toxicities that matter: Slow bureaucracy and polluting temporalities in a southern Italian city, by A.R. Ippolito (Environment and Planning. C, Politics and Space, 2024).

The study

• Author: A.R. Ippolito
• Journal: Environment and Planning. C, Politics and Space
• Published: 2024;42(1):31-44
• Cited by: 2 articles, as counted by NIH iCite
• Read it: PubMed · Publisher · Free full text

Abstract

This paper deconstructs toxicity through a juxtaposition of a conventional epidemiological approach to pollutants and the lived experience of a highly polluted residential area next to the largest steel production plant in Europe. An ethnographic analysis of toxicity in Taranto illustrates the complexity of various temporal scales through which toxic chemicals contribute to new biological, political and moral balances. Attuning to the slow experiences of pollution is fundamental to shed light on the processes moulding aspirations to environmental justice within the community. In particular, law and bureaucracy imbue pollutants with experiential legitimacy, allowing them to be seen, contested and collectivized. I focus on the residents' and workers' dissonant experiences with the bureaucratic system to illustrate how their encounter with asbestos has profoundly shaped toxic exposure to less bureaucratically visible shapeshifting pollutants, thus contributing to a diffused sense of political resignation.

© The Author(s) 2022.

In plain English

This article is an ethnographic (social science) study, not a medical or epidemiological one. The author did fieldwork from 2017 to 2020 in Tamburi, a working-class district of Taranto, southern Italy, next to the ex-Ilva steel plant. The work included 12 months of participant observation and 47 semi-structured interviews with residents, factory workers, activists and medical and legal professionals. The author compared how people experienced asbestos, whose health effects the author described as fully recognized in Italian law, with pollutants such as benzo(a)pyrene, whose legal limits had been suspended. Retired workers often recalled asbestos exposure as a bureaucratic rather than a toxic experience. One described being recognized as exposed as a positive event that allowed early retirement. A worker called asbestos-related disease 'a time bomb.' The widow of a worker who died of pleural mesothelioma described the compensation process. Another widow, whose husband died of lung cancer, could not get compensation. The author concluded that the special legal status of asbestos shaped how the community experienced pollution more broadly.

We wrote this plain-English summary from the full article with the help of AI, and a second AI model checked each sentence against the article. It is not the authors' wording; the abstract and the article are their own account.

What the study did and found

• Design: Ethnographic study: participant observation over a 12-month period plus 47 semi-structured in-depth interviews
• Who was studied: Residents, factory workers, environmental activists, and medical and legal professionals in the Tamburi district of Taranto, Italy, next to the ex-Ilva steel plant; fieldwork from 2017 to 2020
• Exposure: Occupational asbestos exposure among Ilva steel plant workers who entered the factory before 2003 (no fiber type named). This was contrasted with residents' exposure to other industrial pollutants such as dioxin, benzo(a)pyrene and mineral dust.
• Main results:
  • The author described asbestos as having complete legal recognition of its health effects in Italy.
  • Many workers who worked with asbestos recalled exposure as a bureaucratic rather than a toxic experience.
  • One retired worker recalled being recognized as asbestos-exposed as a positive event that allowed retirement at age 53.
  • Workers described asbestos-related disease as something that could strike at any time.
  • The widow of a worker who died of pleural mesothelioma described the compensation process, and the family later refused a settlement offer and continued their lawsuit.
  • Another widow could not obtain compensation because her husband's lung cancer was not recognized as occupational. He was also a smoker.
  • Before official benzo(a)pyrene monitoring began, the Italian government suspended the legal limits for that pollutant.
  • A worker who handled mineral dust with his bare hand viewed it in a way the author found similar to how other workers viewed asbestos.
• The authors' conclusion: The author concluded that the special institutional status given to asbestos gave it symbolic power that shapes the community's cultural and political experience of pollution.

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