Confronting Europe’s toxics trade from below: the contested global legacy of the 1976 Seveso disaster

The 1976 Seveso disaster and its scandal-ridden aftermath had a lasting legacy that extended to the European Community (EC) and even beyond. When hazardous waste from the Seveso disaster site went missing, it generated a pan-European media scandal and a powerful symbol of the risks that modern industrialized capitalism produced. The scandal also revealed the perverse mechanisms that facilitated and even encouraged the dumping of chemical waste in and outside Europe. A variety of societal groups, ranging from consumers and environmentalists to development organizations, mobilized jointly to campaign against the trade in hazardous wastes. They all shared the same analysis, namely that the EC was both the core of the problem and the beginning of a solution. Setting out three case studies of grassroots mobilization in response to the trade in hazardous waste, this article examines how these activists found their way to EC institutions and how their campaigns evolved in the process. The first deals with the waste trade on the Common Market, the second with the global impact of waste exports from the EC and the third with a local anti-pollution movement emerging in response to the waste trade. Each of these mobilizations involved coalition building, allowing for a broad idea of environmental justice to emerge and for these coalitions to channel grassroots grievances with the waste trade to the EC institutions. In doing so, these grassroots mobilizations contributed to the EC becoming an increasingly important venue for global environmental governance towards the late 1980s.