Toxicities

Ground Zero: For months, everybody in New York breathed tiny particles of burnt and pulverized building, windows, furniture, insulation, people, office materials, jet fuel, asbestos, and dioxin.

PHOTOS AND TEXT BY VICE STAFF

ou don’t need to live in the smog-, garbage-, and disease-choked third world to be in the firing line of man-made disaster. In fact, it doesn’t seem to be a matter of IF you will get a disease from breathing the air where you live. It’s a matter of WHEN. Unless you’re in a cabin deep in the Yukon chopping wood and reading this on the internet on a computer you made yourself out of ferns and berries, you are almost definitely going to die because of pollution (and it is going to hurt, too). We asked each of our Vice magazine editors around the world to find the most pollution-spewing sites in their home city and send us a little toxic postcard. The results make Al Gore sound like Doris Day. Come along with us…

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.”

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.

Petrarca Neighborhood: Think African squatters, rotting, open-air bedrooms, illegal dumps, and toxic stand-water pools.

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.

Grazie. Ciao, bella! Now, what say we take a little jaunt on over to Brussels?

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?”

The Zenne, Brussels: The Zenne enters Brussels an attractive river and leaves it a biologically dead garbage chute. It’s underground in this picture.

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.

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.

Dang. Well, let’s head for the Big Apple to take a dip in the Atlantic.

Ouch! I think I’m ready to go Japanese! They are smart enough to not shit where they eat, right?

DEMONIC TRASH-BIRDS

Sixteen thousand feral Japanese ravens feast each morning on the rubbish left in plastic bags on Tokyo’s sidewalks and alleys. Once they are full of trash, they attack grown men and leave lampposts all the way down Shibuya’s main drag encrusted in shit. So yes, they are terrifying and their shit is full of bacteria—but how do they taste?

After feasting on blackbird stir-fried with pepper, fried blackbird, and blackbird pie, the governor of Tokyo said: “If there are too many blackbirds, we should eat them. Blackbird-meat pie tastes good. We should make it a Tokyo specialty.”

Suginami Disease: Suginami Waste Station processes 100 tons of waste daily. Suginami Disease is what the residents around the facility have. Symptoms include coughing, dullness of arms and legs, and headaches.

Dioxin in Toshima, Tokyo Bay: The bottom layers of Tokyo Bay are contaminated with various toxins including mercury and dioxin. Mercury freaks Japanese people out because Nippon is home to a type of mercury poisoning called Minamata Disease. Symptoms include vertigo and psychosis.

Tsukiji Market: The Central Wholesale Fish Market is being relocated to Toyosu, the former site of Tokyo Gas. The soil in the future site has shown high concentrations of lead, arsenic, chromium hexavalent, cyanogens, mercury, and benzene.

GROSS! OK, let’s keep going. Who’s next? Amsterdam?

That’s nice, Ardje, you fucking retarded Dutch squatter hippie. Get your bath there. Nice and clean. All sparklin’. We’re going to gay Paree.

TOUR MONTPARNASSE

The Tour Montparnasse is the second-tallest building in Paris. It’s filled with offices, stores, tourists, restaurants, and asbestos. Serge Jullineau, president of the Agence des Risques de la Santé, says, “Cancers related to asbestos are hard to trace, so it’s hard to convince 5,000 people to clear out of the building.”

A Montparnasse security guard pointed to the ceiling and said, “It’s everywhere. But I’ve been here for 25 years, and it’s never been a problem.” Some computer engineers said they hadn’t been aware of the asbestos in the building, but they didn’t really care. We told them it only takes ONE asbestos fiber piercing your throat to get cancer. Just one! A bartender overheard and said, “Bof, there’s been asbestos in this place for at least 40 years.”

Lead paint in la Goutte d’Or: Thirty percent of all Paris’s lead-poisoning cases come from 200 lead-paint-slathered buildings in the Goutte d’Or. This is one of them.

The Seine: Paris’s water-purification plant dumped 80,000 cubic meters of untreated water (sewage) a day into the Seine for a month last year. They wanted to do it for six months, but the Green Party convinced them to take it easy.

Air: Get up into some tall building and look down. You can see the smog from above. It’s a pretty shade of orange, like LA’s.

Sacre bleu! “People still live here, so I guess there’s no problem”? We’re going down under, where the water is blue and the accents are… tolerable.

Meh. Call us when you have AIDS. In the meantime, we’re going to take a quick jaunt through the hellhole known as London.

KENSINGTON OLYMPIA TRAINS STATION

Every week, highly toxic waste is transported through London’s commuter-rail stations, along the North London and Gospel Oak lines to the Sellafield nuclear site. We’d tell you to mind the irradiated rods, but train times are kept secret, so it’s impossible to know when a toxic train is coming through. Environmental activist Fabrizzio Ardani explained to us that small amounts of contaminated water can pass through the containing flasks, drip onto the ground, and slowly poison the soil of residential areas near the station. Bottoms up, London!

Clapton Square, Hackney: In this unofficial city dumping ground, you’ll find all sorts of domestic waste. Sofas, fridges, broken chairs, beer cans, condoms, and sanitary towels. It’s like the rear end of England’s middle class splayed out before you. Nice.

The River Thames: Thanks to London’s Victorian sewer system, untreated sewage is released into the capital’s river every week.

Olympic Village, East London: The 450 residents of the Clays Lane Estate are being vacated to make way for the Olympic Village. Clays Lane inhabitants have uncovered information suggesting that radioactive waste was dumped on land next to their estate in 1959. (This is part of their case for why residential homes should stay?)

Well, bugger all. London is fucked too (as if we couldn’t guess). How about their cold, cold neighbors to the north in Sweden?

Wait, that isn’t so bad. Let’s leave Sweden on the list of possible places to wait out the apocalypse. But just in case, let’s take a gander at Spain.

COLLSEROLA WOODS, TIBIDABO

The Tibidabo is the highest peak of the Collserola Sierra Mountains and is surrounded by an enormous green belt that acts as the lungs of Barcelona. However, a strange relationship between the natural lands and the tourist area has evolved, as luxury hotels and amusement parks press at the Tibidabo’s protected borders. The most visible symptoms of the unnatural proximity between city and nature are the packs of wild dogs abandoned by their owners in the mountain area. They have become angry and territorial, endangering not only the few native species left in Tibidabo but also those tourists who decide to go for a stroll in the woods. Recently a pack of wild terriers attacked some kids in a park. May we go blind if we are lying.

Sant Adrià Depurating Plant, Coastline: This dreary industrial landscape boasts a thermal-power station, an urban-waste incinerator, and a sewage-treatment plant.

Industrial Poble Nou: They’re building some shitty apartments on top of a former industrial site. According to a landlord, the flowers in front of his building have an average lifespan of two weeks.

Fake Beaches, La Mina Ecoparc: Fake beaches interrupt the natural sand flow. In some places, such as the Maresme coast, the sand has vanished so now the sea is threatening the railway track. Great.

Not so much with the ecological nightmare, Spain, but roving wild dog packs? Fuck that! We’re outta here. What do the Jerrys have to offer…

Wow. Gold medal winner here. Yay, Deutschland! But, let’s not forget Canada like the rest of the world usually does. Whaddya got, tabernacs?

HAMILTON SMOG DAYS

Welcome to Toronto. Now please don’t breathe: It’s a smog day. That’s when the Air Quality Index is so bad that the city warns its workers to take it easy on the whole inhale-exhale thing. But don’t sweat it, we had about 30 of these last year, and nobody died that we know of. It’s just that there’s a thick cloudy cocktail of sulfur oxides, carbon monoxide, carbon dioxide, hydrochloric acid, nitrogen oxides, and chlorine gas floating over the city.

Sunnyside Beach: During the 1920s, Sunnyside used to be where Toronto’s affluent Parkdale residents congregated for tea and socializing. Now, during the warm season, Sunnyside is unswimmable most of the time due to high traces of E.Coli. Oh, and sometimes you can even find weird skinned rodent carcasses lying around. Surf’s up!

Chinatown: During the summer of 2004, public health officials shut down the entire Dragon City food court citing such health violations as rat- and roach-infested kitchens and food containing traces of salmonella and other hazardous bacteria.

Pickering Nuclear Power Station: At the beginning of each year, teachers in the Pickering area hand out potassium iodide pills which are supposed to help prevent radiation poisoning to the thyroid gland if a meltdown ever occurs.

Fuck this. We need a cabin in the Yukon after all. And we’re going to buy some tea-tree oil to put in our hair while we’re at it. Yeah, we quit washing it. It’s like the government makes you think you have to wash your hair, but you totally don’t. Same with buying food. Ow, my overalls are pulling. Anyway, I can’t believe I used to have Windex in my house. Hey, wait! Where are you going?