Decades of Dumping Plagued an Italian Beach Paradise. Then Officials Detected Mercury

For more than a century, the coastal waters off Rosignano Solvay, a Tuscan town named for the company that built it, have been a dumping ground for millions of tons of milky white industrial discharge that have transformed the beaches — and the seabed beyond.

Italian government agencies have warned for years that mercury, a neurotoxic heavy metal, has contaminated the sea floor — an unwelcome legacy that researchers have linked to work done years ago at a plant operated by Solvay SA. Executives for the 10 billion-euro ($11.1 billion) multinational chemicals-maker have long maintained that its waste isn’t a danger to humans or animals and that the plant’s discharges contain only non-harmful trace amounts of mercury and other metals.

But questions about the plant’s environmental impact are mounting as activists, a dissident Solvay shareholder and, most recently, a United Nations official have expressed skepticism about how it disposes of its industrial byproducts. Amid the controversy, in January, the Italian government renewed Solvay’s permit to operate, a decision that sparked outcry among opponents, who have challenged it in court.

Now a Bloomberg News review of that permit, along with reams of regulatory documents and a 2013 criminal court record, shows that prosecutors found the plant’s soda-ash unit had exceeded legal limits for mercury, as well as for other potentially harmful substances. After regulatory officials subsequently sought plant improvements aimed at reducing the heavy-metals content, the company employed a fix that was only shown to abate lead, according to test results that Solvay reported to Italy’s environment ministry.

In 2013, a judge sentenced two Solvay employees to pay fines in a plea bargain that Solvay sought after investigators found that the effluent contained mercury at six times the legal limit, according to a court record that was unsealed at Bloomberg’s request. The plea bargain settled charges related to pollution and improper testing, according to the sentencing record, and the employees were given leaner sentences because the company pledged to change the plant to prevent similar episodes.

Solvay has never disclosed to investors the plea-bargain sentence, saying it wasn’t material. The employees who paid fines did not admit guilt, and Solvay disputes the prosecutors’ findings, saying the levels of heavy metals in its discharges didn’t violate the law then, and they don’t now.

The company says the treatment modifications it made in response to a requirement from the environment ministry do not “result in any change in the magnitude of metals concentration, which remains limited to trace amounts.” It declined to make Chief Executive Officer Ilham Kadri available for an interview.

The environment ministry, formally known as the Ministry for Ecological Transition, said by email that it renewed Solvay’s permit this year in “full transparency,” with opportunities for public comment in a process that began in 2019. It added that heavy metals in the plant’s discharges have been within legal limits and said that if the terms of the permit aren’t met, regulators would re-examine the license and could issue a warning. In February, after the permit renewal was greeted with public criticism, the ministry announced that it would review reports it received in 2020 and 2021 on Solvay’s practices at the Rosignano site. It provided no additional details.

Last year, the company said in its annual report that it faces a new preliminary criminal investigation related to alleged “contamination of certain areas” outside its plant, without elaborating.

For Solvay, which has production sites on five continents, these clashes on the Tuscan coast reflect the widespread concern scientists, environmental activists and even criminal prosecutors have raised over chemical companies’ plants and operations. Such factories, often critical cogs in local economies, pose challenges for overwhelmed or outmoded public authorities, compounding public skepticism. In the case of Rosignano Solvay — a short drive from the medieval and Renaissance treasures of Pisa and Florence — Italy’s outdated regulatory standards and the plant’s history of dumping industrial byproducts close to shore have drawn condemnation from activists and experts alike.

“It is striking that this can still happen,” said Jules van Lier, a wastewater treatment and environmental engineering professor at Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands, in reference to the dumping. “There’s already evidence of environmental harm in the area and the latent health impact of heavy metals cannot be estimated.”

While the damage is not clear, the potential stakes are high: A 2017 study found that local residents have elevated incidences of deadly diseases, and researchers have suggested that heavy metals “could contribute” to increased death rates from them. But a planned study that would examine the causes of those health problems hasn’t begun yet.

Regardless, summer-time bathers have been perfectly content to use the faux-Caribbean beaches.

Company Town

Painted on the inner wall of Solvay’s intake canal is a piece of street art: a sea monster. In a mural signed by the Tuscan artist known as Exit Enter, the creature’s horns billow smoke that forms the word “Welcome,” in English. Its serpentine body is rendered as sections of pipe labeled with Italian words for pollutants: zinc, arsenic, mercury, and so forth. The monster bares its teeth at a small figure on its back: the sea god Neptune, who brandishes a tiny trident at the industrial leviathan. Just inland, the canal leads to a sprawling factory, where vapor rises above a cooling tower.

Brussels-based Solvay built this plant in 1912, and it’s still the economic engine of its community. Rosignano Solvay blossomed on the plains below the medieval hill town Rosignano Marittimo; the company helped build a hospital, theater, schools and housing for employees. To this day, as it has for decades, a siren fills the air to signal each factory shift.

In the plant, workers make products including soda ash, a key ingredient in glass manufacturing. Global sales of soda ash and derivatives brought Solvay €1.5 billion in 2021, or 15% of its revenue. Earlier this month, Solvay announced plans to split into two companies, one for high-growth ventures and the other for more stable, cash-generating business lines, including soda ash. The Rosignano plant’s permit renewal increased its value ahead of that reshuffling, which is subject to shareholder approval.

Soda ash is produced via the so-called Solvay process, which involves breaking down limestone in a hot reaction that’s aided by cooling water sucked in from the sea and run through tubes attached to the production equipment. The process also results in byproducts. Each year, the Rosignano plant discards solid material weighing almost 250,000 tons. That’s roughly equivalent to the weight of 170,000 automobiles, or about 20 Honda Accords an hour. Mixed with wastewater, this is the milky discharge that gives the White Ditch and the White Beaches their names.

Solvay says its soda-ash process doesn’t add or use mercury. But the limestone it uses naturally contains such metals. To keep the discharge within the limits of Italian law, Solvay must take samples and report the contents to regulators, while ensuring that any pollutants don’t exceed certain threshold concentrations, as expressed in milligrams per liter.

Experts such as Philip Landrigan, a professor at Boston College and director of its Global Observatory on Pollution and Health, say the Italian law’s focus on heavy metals’ concentrations — instead of their absolute amounts — is decades out of date. The environment ministry says its rules are in line with European Union requirements.

The Italian standard is also easier to circumvent than one based on reporting actual amounts of pollutants. A plant could stay within the limits not by reducing the metals in its discharge, but by increasing the amount of water around them. To prevent that, the law includes a prohibition: No dilution allowed. Any water included in samples must be “process water” — meaning it’s used in the actual manufacturing of chemicals. It’s illegal to dilute samples with water from other functions, like the seawater the Solvay plant uses for cooling.

Yet that’s what police found during a lengthy investigation that culminated in the 2013 settlement agreement. Investigators made more than 70 visits to the plant to take samples and gather information, public records show. Ultimately, Judge Antonio Pirato in the nearby port city of Livorno ratified a plea bargain under which two Solvay soda-ash employees paid  fines to settle charges for two crimes: polluting the stretch of sea in front of the plant and testing samples of effluent that contained non-process cooling water.

As part of their case, prosecutors developed estimates of what the concentrations for certain metals would have been if Solvay had measured them correctly at the soda ash facility and other units; those levels exceeded legal limits for some.

Beyond Legal Limits

Prosecutors’ estimates of Solvay’s effluent content from the 2013 criminal sentence

Mercury

lead

poisonous heavy metal

poisonous heavy metal

Prosecutors’ result:

0.03 mg/liter

Prosecutors’ result:

0.3 mg/liter

Legal limit:

0.005 mg/liter

Legal limit:

0.2 mg/liter

500% over legal limit

50% over legal limit

Selenium

toxic at high concentrations

Prosecutors’ result:

0.04 mg/liter

Legal limit:

0.03 mg/liter

33% over legal limit

Mercury

poisonous heavy metal

Legal limit:

0.005 mg/liter

Prosecutors’ result:

0.03 mg/liter

500% over legal limit

lead

poisonous heavy metal

Prosecutors’ result:

0.3 mg/liter

Legal limit:

0.2 mg/liter

50% over legal limit

Selenium

toxic at high concentrations

Legal limit:

0.03 mg/liter

Prosecutors’ result:

0.04 mg/liter

33% over legal limit

Mercury

lead

Selenium

poisonous heavy metal

poisonous heavy metal

toxic at high concentrations

Prosecutors’

result:

0.03 mg/liter

Prosecutors’

result:

0.3 mg/liter

Prosecutors’

result:

0.04 mg/liter

Legal limit:

0.005 mg/liter

Legal limit:

0.2 mg/liter

Legal limit:

0.03 mg/liter

500% over legal limit

50% over legal limit

33% over legal limit

In the sentence, which Bloomberg obtained and translated from Italian, Pirato cited “the harmful and dangerous consequences of the crime committed.” The two employees at the soda ash unit paid fines totaling 41,720 euros ($56,626). Details of the criminal allegations and the settlement, parts of which have been reported by local media, have never been revealed in full, chiefly because Italian court records aren’t generally open to the public and the sentencing hearing happened behind closed doors.

Solvay points out that the offenses are minor criminal violations akin to misdemeanors, not felonies. Although it agreed to the settlement, avoiding a public trial, the company disputes the prosecutors’ estimates.

The sentence document noted that the offenses could have led to stiffer penalties, including prison time for the employees or a seizure of the premises. Pirato approved the imposition of financial penalties instead partly because the company had “taken steps … to carry out plant modifications” aimed at preventing repeat offenses, his sentence says.

A few months before that plea bargain was approved, in June 2013, Solvay sent some proposed plant modifications to the environment ministry. The company’s proposal would have installed equipment to remove both heavy metals and ammonia, an essential part of the soda-ash manufacturing process, with chemicals and a physical process that “allows the separation of larger particles,” regulatory records show. The company also told the ministry it would move its sampling point, so that any pollutants would be measured before the effluent mixed with the cooling seawater. Solvay told the ministry that the heavy-metals treatment and new measuring spot were among changes it had committed to before the court, according to a letter posted on the regulator’s website.

But by July 2013, Solvay’s new plan called for building a unit that would use pressurized seawater to cut ammonia. That change meant about a third of the seawater that Solvay used for cooling purposes would be newly accounted for as “process water” in the discharge. The additional water would effectively reduce the concentrations of any heavy metals without reducing their actual amounts.

The company also reworked its plans for treating heavy metals; records show it adapted an existing portion of its ditch and relabeled it a “reactor.” In lab experiments, Solvay said, mixing seawater into the effluent triggered lead to fall out of solution. While that process was already happening previously, the company said its modifications to the ditch would “maximize the mixing and reaction time.” Tests and experiments that Solvay reported to regulators never showed that the method would have any effect on mercury or any metals other than lead.

In the end, the company didn’t move its sampling point. A Solvay spokesperson told Bloomberg that executives decided it would be too difficult to move pipes around. Samples are still taken at a spot known on company maps as SP4 — a point at which the discharge is fully diluted with non-process water. The company now uses a mathematical formula designed to back out the effect of that water and reports the result to regulators.

Since these modifications became fully functional in January 2019, those reports for mercury, cadmium, arsenic and other pollutants have often reflected values that the company said were too low to measure. The ministry, which officially imposed its requirement for additional heavy-metals treatment in 2015, said it wasn’t able to comment on Bloomberg’s reporting or whether Solvay had met that requirement in full.

New Scrutiny

Solvay says it never disclosed the 2013 plea bargain sentence because the judge merely accepted the terms of an agreement that resulted in fines, which doesn’t constitute a determination of guilt. (An Italian unit of the company did refer to the case in a 2013 filing that was not broadly available to the public. That filing says that a settlement was reached with a court following a prosecutors’ probe; it provides no details.) “Given that there was no conviction of a crime, and the settlement did not approach a level of materiality, there was no public disclosure warranted,” the company said in a statement to Bloomberg.

In 2020, a Solvay executive, Vincent De Cuyper, made a categorical defense of Solvay’s procedures. The “Rosignano facility has always treated — and continues to treat — its effluents in compliance with all legal requirements,” De Cuyper, who has since retired, wrote to one shareholder. “Asserting otherwise is not only incorrect, but damaging to our company and its shareholders.” Solvay declined to comment on the letter’s contents.

The shareholder who had received De Cuyper’s letter, Giuseppe Bivona, was not convinced of Solvay’s environmental protections. Bivona is the co-founder of Bluebell Capital Partners, an activist money manager that has drawn headlines for its scrutiny of drugmaker GlaxoSmithKline Plc and mining titan Glencore Plc. In September 2020, Bivona had set his sights on Solvay as part of what Bluebell calls a pledge to pursue socially responsible causes. Bivona says the firm bought one share of the chemical maker and began raising questions, beginning with an 18-page letter that elicited De Cuyper’s response.

Last May, during Solvay’s annual shareholders meeting, Bivona peppered executives with 52 questions aimed at revealing exactly how the Rosignano plant uses the more than 80 million cubic meters of seawater that it pulls from the Mediterranean annually. He walked away unsatisfied with the answers, he says, but undaunted.

Last month, Bluebell volleyed with Solvay again. In an open letter, the chemical company accused the investment fund of promoting “misleading information” about its operations. Bluebell responded in a news release that Solvay’s disposal of soda-ash byproducts “has created an open landfill, with the captivating (and misleading) appearance of an idyllic Caribbean beach.”

Such scrutiny contrasts with the high ratings on environmental, social and governance issues, or ESG, that Solvay has enjoyed. Until a year ago, it was rated AAA, the highest possible, by MSCI Inc., a leading ESG rating company. MSCI ratings are used by asset managers, such as BlackRock Inc., Solvay’s largest outside shareholder, for investment funds that reflect ESG issues. In March 2021, MSCI lowered its rating one notch, to AA, citing media attention about the Tuscan plant and other environmental controversies that Solvay faces elsewhere. Bivona says he’s making it his mission to question the company’s environmental credentials further.

Others are raising questions as well. Marcos Orellana, the U.N.’s special rapporteur on toxics and human rights, traveled to Italy in December. He said he’s concerned about Rosignano for a litany of issues: excess mortality among local residents; reports of hazardous substances being discharged; the impact on seagrass; and questions around the use of water, free of charge.

“Clearly, the environmental impact is a question — the beach is white,” Orellana said in an interview.

Several newly emboldened environmental activists have begun calling attention to a body of evidence that they say has long sat in plain sight: scientific studies that have detailed damage at Rosignano Solvay and raised questions about the plant.

Tuscany’s regional environmental protection agency, ARPAT, said in a 2020 report that the seabed beside the town is already contaminated with high levels of mercury. That’s linked to the legacy of a process at a separate chemical unit at Solvay’s facility that the company replaced in 2007, according to the report.

Researchers also say the soda ash factory is killing off seagrass that’s essential to the marine food chain. Material dumped by Solvay covers the roots and parts of the Posidonia oceanica grass, which grows in meadows across the Mediterranean, according to a 2017 study on the bay by Italy’s National Research Council (CNR) and its Institute for Coastal Marine Environment. Solvay has consistently responded that its white discharge stabilizes the coastline and that “underwater currents ensure that the non-toxic limestone does not accumulate.”

Local residents experience elevated rates of Alzheimer’s, coronary heart disease and cerebrovascular disease, according to a 2017 study published in the International Journal of Occupational Medicine and Environmental Health. Nobody has pinpointed the causes. But data from the European Pollution Release and Transfer Register point to the discharge of “considerable amounts of pollutants” in the seawater around Rosignano, leading the 2017 study’s authors to conclude that heavy metals “could contribute to explain the increased mortality from both Alzheimer’s disease and cardiovascular diseases.” Solvay says that mortality rates in Rosignano are in line with the Tuscan region.

A follow-up study to geographically map out residents and scour their medical records to try to assess causality between pollution and mortality is awaiting funds from Rosignano city hall. Many Rosignano residents, who live every day with the White Beaches and all the questions they raise, are simply resigned to wait for answers.

One woman who lives just outside the plant mused on such matters as she hung her laundry on a recent sunny morning. “You have to die of something,” she said, declining to give her name. Over her back fence, the seawater intake canal gurgled away.