(Bloomberg) -- When a 2017 study found that the Tuscan town of Rosignano had elevated death rates from Alzheimer’s and other ailments, some residents began to ask if it might be linked to the milky discharge pumped onto its famous White Beaches by Brussels-based chemical giant Solvay SA. 

For 65 years up to 2005, Solvay’s local soda ash plant had discharged waste containing a total of more than 400 tons of mercury, a neurotoxic heavy metal, directly onto the beach in dissolved and particulate form, Tuscany’s environmental protection agency (ARPAT) determined in 2008.  Executives at the $10-billion multinational have long maintained that its emissions aren’t a danger to humans or animals, containing only non-harmful, trace amounts of mercury and other metals.

To know for sure, the town would need a new study, one dedicated to discovering whether there was a relationship between the industrial discharge and those excess deaths.  In July 2019, Rosignano’s town council voted overwhelmingly to conduct one. Italy’s National Research Council, which was also involved in the earlier research on deaths, agreed to carry out the work. 

But in a series of heated meetings held over recent months, the town’s mayor, Daniele Donati, and his allies on the council have beaten back demands to fund and begin the research. Instead, he’s lauded the government’s decision to renew the plant’s license in January and cited Tuscan regional health authority data showing no anomalies in overall mortality.  

The showdown over this single, small research project lays bare the divisions and loyalties of a company town and opens a window into the complications that ensue when local officials have to make decisions that could affect major employers in their towns, even when the health of their population is at issue.

Solvay said in a statement whether to conduct a medical study was a matter for local authorities and it isn’t involved in the decision. Donati has said he’s not opposed to a new study in principle, but it wasn’t the right time for it.

Yet controversy over the beach dumping has already spurred the company to promise a change to its practices. On Sept. 6, Solvay said that by 2030 it would cut discharge from the Rosignano plant by 20% compared with the maximum allowed by regulators, rising to 40% by 2040. It also said its scientists had invented a process that would allow it to eliminate all such emissions globally by mid-century. The changes follow mounting pressure from environmental advocates and London-based activist hedge fund Bluebell Capital Partners.

An investigation published by Bloomberg on March 31 also showed that Italian prosecutors had found mercury above legal limits in the company’s soda ash discharge between May 2006 and January 2010.  Solvay has disputed the prosecutors’ findings, saying levels of heavy metals in its discharges didn’t violate the law then, and don’t now.

Mercury emissions have fallen since 2007, when Solvay discontinued a chlorine-making process that used the element, though the factory still pumped at least 20 tons of heavy metals and their compounds onto the beach annually over the four years through 2021, the company said in response to questions at its annual shareholder meetings in 2021 and 2022. 

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

The mayor’s main opponent in the hilltop city hall’s wood-beamed meeting room is a 63-year-old cardiologist and fellow council member, Claudio Marabotti. He was the lead author of the 2017 report showing elevated deaths and, today, is the lead advocate for a new study.  

The proposed one-year project would cross-reference the addresses of residents and their ailments, and then overlay a map of pollution from the industrial park, taking into account air currents from the factory and sea, Marabotti said.  Ultimately, the researchers would use a statistical analysis to see whether variations in sickness could only be explained by closeness to the industrial activity. That’s important, Marabotti said, because the ailments in question — cardiovascular and neurological diseases including Alzheimer’s – can be linked to multiple external factors.

The Italian Alzheimer Association’s Tuscan Coast branch backs the new study, which it says could be important for prevention. So does Giacomo Cantini, 62, whose father died of Alzheimer’s in 1999, and who hopes community-wide findings could point the way to community-wide solutions. 

As the publisher of nostalgic books about Rosignano’s past, however, Cantini said he knows what considerations weigh on local leaders caught between public health and local prosperity. Solvay literally built the modern part of town starting a century ago to house workers from its soda ash plant. A district by the beach is formally known as Rosignano Solvay. The company directly employs 465 people today, with a total 1,500 working in its industrial parks, and creates multiple business opportunities in the town of 30,000.

“It’s difficult to be critical,” Cantini said, sipping lemonade at a seaside café. “Few are independent.”

Those deep links were underscored in May when Donati, 58, appointed Marco Colatarci, Solvay’s Italy country head, as president of the board at a regional private waste-disposal company controlled by the town. The Solvay executive will share top duties at the waste firm with Rosignano’s previous mayor, who is the waste company’s chief executive officer. Colatarci did not respond to requests for comment. Solvay said he retired from the company at the end of October. 

Donati, a longtime banker at a local lender, didn’t respond to interview requests made in person and by phone to his office and via email. He said during a public meeting in July that the appointments were based on the candidates’ professional qualifications. None of the people interviewed by Bloomberg alleged any specific wrongdoing on the part of the mayor or any other council members.

Meanwhile, another point of contention has emerged over who should carry out the proposed study. Donati said during municipal meetings on June 30 and July 28 that he’s not opposed in principle but wants the local health authority to lead the research — and it’s been busy with Covid for most of the three years since the study was first approved. Marabotti said the study shouldn’t be done by the local health authority because it’s partly controlled by city hall and lacks the appropriate expertise, but by specialized epidemiologists at the National Research Council.

The cardiologist first entered the fray in 2016, when a friend on the town council asked him to take a look at death rates related to various illnesses in Rosignano. A few popped out as possibly exceeding the statistically expected range. “It was worth digging deeper,” he said.

The result was the 2017 study published in the International Journal of Occupational Medicine and Environmental Health by Marabotti and co-authors affiliated with the National Research Council, the US National Institutes of Health and the University of Pisa. It compared deaths from chronic-degenerative diseases in two neighboring towns: Rosignano, which has industrial activities that create pollution, and Cecina, which has none. And it compared those with the whole of Tuscany.

In Rosignano, the researchers found significant excess mortality due to the rare cancer mesothelioma, cerebrovascular diseases, ischemic heart disease, and Alzheimer’s and other degenerative nervous-system diseases. Cecina had normal levels of all of those except ischemic heart disease.

Marabotti said the findings meant that about 25 extra Rosignano residents died of those diseases each year than would normally be expected in the region. This wouldn’t necessarily make a statistically significant difference to the town’s overall mortality rate compared to Tuscany or Italy but it is enough to prompt a further look into the potential cause of deaths from these specific conditions, he said. 

His 2017 paper stopped short of declaring causality for ailments such as Alzheimer’s and the doctor said that the mesothelioma deaths were likely caused by other factors. But following its publication, Marabotti ran on a new slate of town commission candidates whose main issue was health — and won. The first proposal the new group made was for the follow-up medical study. 

In its response to Bloomberg, Solvay referred to a statement made by Chief Executive Ilham Kadri at its annual meeting in May, in which she said that “the local health authority in Tuscany recently issued a technical opinion, which confirms, again, that our effluents are of little significance for the population.” Solvay didn’t supply a copy of the report. A spokeswoman suggested asking the municipality for it and didn’t respond to questions about whether the company had a copy. Donati and officials at the local health authority for northwest Tuscany didn’t respond to emailed requests for comment. A spokesperson for the Florence-based Tuscan Regional Health Agency said it hadn't participated in any such evaluation, which would likely be the purview of the local health authority. Marabotti said he couldn’t find any such document in records available to him as a council member.

Solvay also said the 2017 study’s “scientific validity has been questioned” by the Institute for the Study and Prevention of Cancer.  Indeed, scientists from the Florence-based institute wrote a letter to the editor of the journal, raising issues with the methodology. However, the critique’s numbers showed a similar pattern of elevated deaths, and Marabotti and his team wrote a response in which they updated one figure in a table to correct for a clerical error. Marabotti said the error and the critique did not change the overall conclusion.

On July 28, a showdown during a virtual council meeting saw the study put to a formal vote for the first time since it originally passed.  A motion read by Marabotti called on the mayor to launch the study in “compliance with popular will” and to investigate “the possible presence of risks for human health connected to industrial pollution.”

The mayor reiterated arguments that echo Solvay’s: regional statistics show Rosignano’s overall mortality is in line with the region, so there’s no urgency.

When the vote was called, Donati leaned into his camera and intoned “contrario.” Within minutes, the measure had failed, with 11 against, six in favor and one abstention.

The next day, tucking into spaghetti and sea urchin at a restaurant a few miles north of White Beaches, Marabotti pointed to an area offshore. That stretch of sea floor has mercury levels exceeding Italian environmental standards, a legacy of past practices by Solvay, according to a 2021 report from ARPAT. If the discharge was found to be causing excess deaths, a cleanup might involve costly dredging, the cardiologist said.

“I’m not really sure (the study) will find a link,” he said. “But they don’t want to risk it.”

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