On 6 May, more than 250 civil parties appeared before examining magistrate Andrea Perelli for the trial against Solvay in Alessandria.
The chemical multinational Solvay has been called to answer for culpable environmental disaster before the court of Alessandria, where its industrial site is located — a site that produces hazardous substances such as Pfas, endocrine disruptors considered carcinogenic and known as forever chemicals, eternal pollutants, because once released into the environment they do not degrade.
On 6 May, at the preliminary hearing at the court of Alessandria, more than 250 civil parties appeared before the judge, including environmental associations and institutions. In the meantime, however, beneath the production facility lies Europe's most Pfas-contaminated aquifer. The first instances of drinking water contamination have already emerged, yet the remediation plan remains stalled before the administrative court.
Solvay's former directors, Stefano Bigini and Andrea Diotto, both transferred in recent months, must answer to the charge of culpable environmental disaster for "having failed to carry out the most effective remediation of the pre-existing contamination of the site and the most effective containment of the release of contaminants both in the aquifer beneath the plant and downstream, where widespread Pfas contamination has been established," as stated in the committal order signed by public prosecutor Enrico Cieri.
In addition to the ongoing contamination from historical substances such as chloroform, among the grounds for the charge one reads "for having, through such culpable conduct and omissions, perpetuated and aggravated the already significant (irreversible) alteration of the environmental matrices of water, air and soil," thereby underscoring the risk of exposure to substances considered carcinogenic across the entire Alessandria area.
The multinational, which since December has changed its name from Solvay to Syensqo, manufactures forever chemical Pfas in Alessandria — substances the European Union considers so hazardous that they are subject to a European restriction process.
The forerunner of Pfas, Pfoa, has in fact been classified as carcinogenic by the IARC — the International Agency for Research on Cancer — since November 2023, and was recently detected in Alessandria's drinking water, just a few kilometres from the chemical hub. The entire Alessandria area is therefore the subject of the second Pfas trial in Italy, after the one that began in 2021 in Vicenza, where the company Miteni, which had been producing Pfoa since the 1960s, is on trial for environmental disaster and water poisoning.
As with Vicenza, so too with Alessandria: the trial came about thanks to citizens and associations who chose to file a series of complaints from 2020 onwards and went on to appear as civil parties on Monday 6 May. A choice that mirrors the one made in 2008 for the first trial against Solvay, which was convicted of environmental disaster caused by historical substances such as hexavalent chromium in 2015 and before the Court of Appeal in 2019.
In addition to private citizens, several public bodies also joined the proceedings: the municipalities of Alessandria and Montecastello, which are exposed to Pfas in the urban air; the Piedmont Region, which has already indicated a possible compensation figure of 320,000 euros for healthcare costs incurred to date, including blood and food testing; and the Ministry of the Environment. Alongside them are the various associations that over the years, and throughout the previous trial, have supported citizens with environmental campaigns and complaints: WWF, Legambiente, Medicina Democratica, Greenpeace and other groups.
Notably absent was the Province of Alessandria, which had not joined the proceedings as a civil party in the first trial either.
The next hearing date will be 6 July, the deadline by which Solvay, now Syensqo, must identify any possible incompatibilities with the civil parties, through lawyers Santamaria and Bolognesi. Both defence counsel represented the company and its executives in the first trial, which lasted ten years. Bolognesi also acted as lawyer for the Veneto Region for two years in the trial against Miteni, a company that produced Pfas on behalf of Solvay as well.
Even as the trial opens — four years after the first complaint was filed and three years into the Alessandria carabinieri's investigation — for those living around one of Italy's largest chemical hubs, the situation is far from straightforward.
Despite the statutory obligation since 1999 to remediate land contaminated by industrial facilities, and despite a first remediation plan having been submitted in 2001 as part of Solvay's purchase of the former Edison site, the Province of Alessandria only issued the necessary order to remediate the land outside the site in early April 2024, identifying both the Edison management and its successor Solvay as the two parties responsible for the pollution. Agricultural land owned by Solvay and leased to local farmers.
This document reconstructs forty years of discharges into the aquifer, the soil and the air, identifying which contaminants were released and the proportions attributable to past and current management.
A table shows the presence of Pfoa in the aquifer from 1982 onwards, while cC6O4, its replacement from 2012, has been detected since 2017. The order sets out in percentage terms the contamination attributable to Edison's production — eighty per cent for Pfoa — and to Solvay, which bears one hundred per cent of the responsibility for the compound cC6O4, as it is a product patented by the multinational. It is worth remembering that these substances persist in the environment because they are not biodegradable; they therefore remain for decades and bioaccumulate in living organisms.
However, the company decided to appeal to the Tar, the Piedmont Administrative Court, against this order, maintaining that it bears no responsibility for the contamination.
That same compound, cC6O4, had in recent months already caused considerable unease within Solvay/Syensqo and alarm among the local population.
At the end of March, the company filed a self-report disclosing anomalous readings detected in a well beneath the containment basin for Pfas-bearing effluent. An internal contamination event that the company was evidently no longer able to manage.
The recipient of the self-report — again the Province — instructed Arpa Alessandria to take samples at the same point, and the results alarmed all local institutions: 220,000 micrograms per litre of the compound in the aquifer. A level never previously recorded in Europe. In the days that followed, the company announced it had suspended production of the compound, attributing the ongoing contamination to the failure of two valves needed to operate a reactor inside the basin. Without the containment basin, production of the substances is not possible.
Sampling by Solvay and Arpa continued in an effort to understand what was happening, until Saturday 13 April, when Arpa was alerted by residents to a strange foam present in the outfall through which the hub discharges treated effluent into the river Bormida.
A sample of this foam was also analysed by the company, which, through its new director Stefano Colosio, announced that the foam was produced upstream of the outfall and was therefore not contaminated by Pfas.
Just a few hours after this explanation, however, Arpa Alessandria contradicts the director by publishing the following statement on its website: "The foams observed on 13 April at the discharge point of the chemical plant into the Bormida are objectively attributable to the plant, as analysis results have established that the wastewater from the Polo chimico della Bormida contains concentrations of surfactants and cC6O4 a ADV that have almost doubled compared to the last routine inspection in January 2024."
The data are presented to the relevant authorities during several technical meetings called by the mayor of Alessandria, Giorgio Abonante, who goes so far as to say how essential it is to comply with the environmental criteria required by Solvay's environmental permit in order to avert the possible closure of part of the plant. This on 16 April — at a time when that same environmental permit had not been renewed since 2019 by the Province, which issued a remediation order just a few days ago.
In the weeks that followed, the mayor no longer attended the technical meetings — which he himself had called and scheduled on a weekly basis — and Arpa's data were no longer published. The trial therefore begins in an atmosphere of uncertainty and silence.
