THE ‘DIRTY NEIGHBOR’ NEXT DOOR.

“You don’t see a sign that it’s unhealthy to live here. You have the dunes, you have the sea…

It looks healthy, but it’s like living next to a highway or something like that,” Venniker said.

He didn’t know that for years, the community had been plagued by graphite rain, loud noises and the stench of heavy metals.  

Research by the National Institute for Public Health and the Environment (RIVM) revealed that children in the region intake an unsafe amount of lead and metals from the dust, and that Tata Steel is responsible for a large chunk of these emissions. Venniker, a father of four, says knowing what his children breathe in every day puts a heavy weight on his shoulders.  

“As an outsider, it is hard to imagine having to worry about this all the time, down to small things like leaving a bouncy castle outside overnight,” Venniker said. “That is simply not possible, because otherwise the children will be jumping in steel fabrics the next day.” 

Venniker is one of the three committee members of the Fresh Wind Now Foundation, a resident-led organization hoping to hold the company responsible for the harm it’s caused to the community. There’s been some victories, like when they caught the attention of Dutch public prosecutors with a 1,200-person complaint deemed powerful enough to launch a criminal investigation into the factory in February 2021. 

If found guilty for “intentional and unlawful” pollution, those managing the Tata Steel location in IJmuiden could face 12 to 15 years in prison.  

Now the organization’s latest strategy to compile evidence is in the form of a 24/7 surveillance camera. The team runs through the footage every day, catching moments of fire, yellow and black plumes, and other emission violations upwards of five times a day.   

Since the camera’s launch 6 weeks ago, the team has sent in 115 complaints to local environmental authorities for the times Tata Steel allegedly violated their emission allowances. They say most incidents come from the plant’s 50-year-old coke factory, where coal turns into a porous, nearly-all carbon substance called coke in order to melt iron ore.

“It’s like a very old car that’s not able to drive on the road, but they just put it on the road. They make a lot of money from it, it’s the cash cow of Tata Steel. They will not close it if they don’t have to because it makes a lot of money,” Venniker said. 

Exposure to these coke oven emissions, which contain a mix of carcinogens like cadmium and arsenic, is an internationally recognized way to increase people’s chances of lung cancer.