Nearly a million tons of untreated steel mill waste, buried underground, would have contaminated waters with heavy metals. It is Pandora’s box opened thanks to an important investigative activity coordinated by the Public Prosecutor’s Office of Reggio Emilia which brought to light an alleged illicit activity of waste disposal and environmental pollution in the industrial area on the outskirts of Brescello, in the Reggio Emilia area.
In the maxi investigation, conducted in synergy with the Carabinieri of the Reggio Emilia Investigation Unit and the NIPAAF (Investigation Unit of the Environmental, Agri-Food and Forestry Police) of the Carabinieri’s forestry specialty, nine people are involved, including entrepreneurs, professionals, public officials and a corporate body.
An environmental disaster submerged for years
What the police are bringing to light is alarming to say the least. At the center of the investigation would be a large illegal landfill of over 900,000 tons of untreated steel mill waste and smelting waste in a municipality in the lower Reggio Emilia area.
According to what was reported by the police, this submerged steel poison would have compromised and deteriorated the groundwater, with limit values for iron and arsenic exceeded. Compounding the situation is the attempt to cover up the disaster through ideological forgery in public documents by officials of the control body.
“The operation has put the spotlight on one of the most serious episodes of alleged environmental damage in the Reggio Emilia area. – the Carabinieri explain in a note – The preliminary investigations focus on a series of illicit conduct in environmental matters and ideological falsehood. The hypothesized crimes, in various capacities and in conjunction with each other, include: the construction and management of an unauthorized landfill of large quantities (over 900,000 tonnes) of non-hazardous waste, consisting of untreated waste and smelting waste, in an area located in a municipality in the lower Reggio Emilia area”.
From what emerges, the alleged illicit activity would have been going on since 2026. Among the crimes hypothesized by the Prosecutor’s Office, the following stand out: environmental pollution, due to the compromise and deterioration of groundwater in the area concerned, found due to the exceeding of the limit values of parameters such as iron and arsenic; and the ideological falsehood in public documents, alleged against employees of a Territorial Service of the Regional Agency for Prevention, the Environment and Energy, who allegedly attested to the falsehood in final control reports, in order to trace the exceeding of the pollution limits to the geochemical characteristics of the land and not to the disposal pipelines.
The investigations continue
The suspects in the steel poison investigation are between 34 and 82 years old: seven live in the lower Reggio Emilia area, one in Parma and one in the Modena area. Among these there are also public officials. Now the authorities are trying to go deeper into this serious matter, also searching the computer and paper material of the people involved, which will subsequently be examined by the investigators.
