Septic isle How one community got rid of a toxic dump

Toru Ishii remembers when the shredded car tyres, batteries and runoff the colour and consistency of treacle blighted the landscape on Teshima, his island home in Japan’s inland sea. Those sights are now confined to a museum, as a reminder of how environmental destruction can unfold in plain sight, and how ordinary people can fight back.

For several years, almost a million tonnes of industrial waste were dumped