TOXICITIES - PART 2We're All Fucked!
PHOTOS AND TEXT BY VICE STAFF
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FIAMMA ABRASIVI FACTORY
Welcome to Milan, home of the Fiamma Abrasivi factory, which regularly releases clouds of lovely naphthalene into the air. Aldo Bonora, the head of a local branch of Italy’s largest environmental NGO, explained that there is no scientific proof that naphthalene is carcinogenic when inhaled.
But then he also said that children at the school located down the street from Fiamma vomit if they play in the schoolyard for too long. And of the 90 people living in the building above the factory, 30 have cancer. How about them odds?
Liliana Di Marzo is one of them. She said, “Nothing will grow in my flowerpots. They blast naphthalene at night, when we’re asleep.”
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The Sisas Factory and Chemical Dump: After shutting its doors, the Sisas factory boxed and buried three mountains of waste above Milan’s water supply. As water is pulled out of the substratum, the vacuum pulls the waste deeper into the soil, closer to the water. Tick-tock.
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Petrarca Neighborhood: Think African squatters, rotting, open-air bedrooms, illegal dumps, and toxic stand-water pools. |
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Asbestos Student Center: In West Milan, a wide redbrick building entirely laminated in asbestos used to serve as a student center. It’s in the background there. It’s closed now, but 100 yards from it, there’s a kids’ park with swings and slides. |
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Grazie. Ciao, bella! Now, what say we take a little jaunt on over to Brussels?
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THE CHURCH OF ST. JACOB, ANTWERP
Brussels’s Church of St. Jacob is best known as the place where Peter Paul Rubens is buried. Lesser known are the 14 square meters of illegally installed, radioactive lightning conductors on St. Jacob’s roof. The measured value of radium 226 in the church is approximately 1,000 times the legal amount—enough to set the alarm off at a nuclear-power plant. Erik Verbeeck, an engineer campaigning to ban radioactive lightning conductors, told us, “If you were to take some sugar, carefully wipe it across the roof, and then drop the sugar in someone’s coffee... You know what happened to that Russian guy in London, right?”
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| The Zenne, Brussels: The Zenne enters Brussels an attractive river and leaves it a biologically dead garbage chute. It’s underground in this picture. |
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Military Hospital, Antwerp: Cleaning products used in the now-closed hospital’s laundry have filtered into the groundwater, making this the military’s No. 1 most polluted wasteland.
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Cokeries du Marly, Brussels: A few years ago, a fire broke out in one of the factory’s towers and spewed benzene and polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons into the air for a week. You could smell it 110 miles away. |
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Dang. Well, let’s head for the Big Apple to take a dip in the Atlantic.
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TO BE CONTINUED:
TOXICITIES... | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | Next>
 Anonymous, on Nov 2, 2008 wrote:
there is such a high frequency of homosexuality among males in hamilton, then it gets balanced out with BET on basic cable, its a fucked social sistuation. i’ve lived it my whole life, i can’t leave the house because of it. | | |
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