Toxic Tour

With its turquoise water and white sand, Rosignano beach in Tuscany looks like a surfer's paradise. But the immaculate sand is due to a chemical factory that has been dumping its waste into the sea for over a century.

On 26 April 1986, the reactor core of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant exploded in the world’s worst nuclear disaster. The contaminated exclusion zone, forbidden to humans, is now a nature reserve which wolves, lynxes and bears call home.

In Romania, in the heart of the Carpathian Mountains, a village is disappearing every day, submerged by the waste from a nearby copper mine, opened in 1977.

In Germany's Rhineland, a gigantic open-pit coal mine is slowly swallowing up entire villages, wiped off the map by an ultra-polluting source of energy.

Everything is red here. In Provence an alumina refinery has been dumping tonnes of toxic red mud in the countryside and into the sea since the 1960, all with the blessing of the authorities.