It caused a serious environmental disaster by contaminating a large area of Veneto with PFAS, the so-calledchemicals forever“and making hundreds of people sick. Then it closed the shutters in 2018. But Miteni continues to live on.
After its closure, the plant was sold, dismantled and rebuilt in India, where it now produces the same chemicals as before, selling them to both old and new customers.
This is what emerges from an interesting investigation which is the result of months of field reporting between Italy and India, published by Il Friday di Repubblica and The Guardian with the support of Journalismfund Europe and Ij4Eu.
What happened
In early 2025, the plant Laxmi of Lote Parshuram is fully operational and producing chemicals that will be used in pesticides, pharmaceuticals, dyes, cosmetics and other products.
It is almost new, but its machinery is not: it comes from the former Miteni factory in Trissino, Vicenza. Miteni closed its doors in 2018 after one of the worst environmental scandals in the country’s recent history: after decades of chemical production forever, the company’s management was prosecuted for contaminating water resources in an area where 350,000 people live.
In June, its former executives were found guilty by a Vicenza court of causing environmental pollution and other charges and sentenced to prison terms.
Yet all of the company’s equipment, its patents and its processes – everything needed to practically produce PFAS – ended up here, in Lote Parshuram MIDCa vast industrial enclave wedged between villages and groves of trees.
In short, after Miteni’s bankruptcy, its assets were purchased in 2019 by Viva Lifesciences, a subsidiary of the Indian chemical company Laxmi Organic Industries, the only bidder at the public auction. As of early 2023, all equipment was traveling on cargo ships bound for Mumbai. Meanwhile, Laxmi boasted about its new acquisition to investors and, as the Guardian explains, transcripts of shareholder meetings show how Laxmi management downplayed environmental concerns, with its chairman, Harshvardhan Goenkawhich stated that Miteni was “doing everything legally according to European standards“.
Once known for its specialization in the development of processes for advanced chemicals, Miteni is indeed now infamous for the toxic legacy it has left. In 2011, scientists found extraordinarily high concentrations of Pfas in the plant’s wastewater. Hundreds of thousands of residents have been exposed through drinking water.
The most affected were the Miteni workers themselves. High levels of Pfas in the blood are associated with an increased risk of cancer, cardiovascular disease, liver and kidney damage, reproductive disorders and more.
All this seems to be overlooked in India, where the issue is not yet on the political agenda. Among other things, the Lote Parshuram industrial district is served by a centralized wastewater treatment plant that has been at the center of complaints, and after its establishment in 1986, “the livelihood of fishing communities in this region completely collapsed,” explains Parineeta Dandekar, coordinator of the South Asia Network on Dams, Rivers, and People.
Local villages have always said that it doesn’t work properly – continues Dandekar. When there is no electricity, a frequent occurrence in the rural state of Maharashtra, the plant cannot function and industries release the polluted water directly into waterways. Environmental authorities have sent several warning letters to the plant in recent years.
Meanwhile in Europe, the European Chemicals Agency is examining a proposal to ban the production, import and use of more than 10,000 chemicals forever. This attention could push the sector towards the southern hemisphere, according to Claudia Marcolungo, professor of environmental law at the University of Padua. “I believe that the issue needs to be investigated, because the fact that Miteni’s production, patents and machinery have been transferred to a country like India should lead us to reflect, at the very least, on the power that these multinationals have to relocate to countries where the race to the bottom in terms of environmental protection is evident”.
Miteni has closed, but the company’s toxic legacy lives on, at the contaminated site in Vicenza and in Lote. And the health impacts of PFAS production are very likely to affect communities that have already been struggling with an unsafe environment for generations.
