The Parents Who Shut Down Europe's Biggest Steelworks

The ILVA plant at Taranto is the largest steelworks in Europe and sits directly against a residential quarter, and the association Genitori Tarantini was formed in 2015 by parents — many of them bereaved — who refused to accept the trade of work against children's lives. They collect the epidemiology rather than argue from grief: cancers and leukaemias in the neighbourhoods nearest the plant running above regional averages, and research showing that lead and arsenic exposure do not simply add together in children's development but amplify each other. Working within Taranto's wider Health and Environment Committee alongside PeaceLink and the Tamburi district committee, they have petitioned presidents and ministers and gone to court. In July 2026 the Court of Appeal upheld their complaint and ordered the hot-work area of the plant suspended within ninety days.