Toxic News is now archived, following the completion of the European Research Council-funded project Toxic Expertise in 2020. The Toxic Expertise research team launched and edited the e-magazine between 2015 and 2021. We hope to be able to relaunch this publication in another form the future. In the meantime, Toxic News will be kept online as an archive.
Toxic News online magazine is a forum for discussions about toxics in everyday life. We aim to bring together a wide range of stories, cases, and perspectives about toxics, from researchers, activists, writers, and artists. Given the immense scale, scope, variety, and complexity of toxic issues around the world, this is a unique space for sharing questions and insights.
We breathe toxics, we wear toxics, we work with toxics, we play with toxics. Toxic substances are all around us. They are commonly associated with synthetic chemicals, but they are also found throughout the natural world. Toxics vary widely: unsafe at particular levels and doses, ranging from the mildly irritating to the deadly poisonous. Toxics are also largely invisible, difficult to measure, and their impacts are felt unevenly.
Some of the worst toxic places in the world include battery-recycling dumps in Ghana; contaminated nuclear waste sites on native reservations in the United States; mines and heavy metal factories in northern Russia and Canada; and vast industrial zones in China. Toxics are felt acutely by ‘fenceline’ communities who live near to toxic waste sites or polluting industries.
But toxics are also felt in less obvious places, where people don’t expect to find them: in ordinary rural and urban communities, in modern homes and workplaces, and in rivers, forests, and parks.
We publish articles about all things ‘toxic’, broadly defined, particularly in relation to toxic landscapes, legacies, and controversies, and toxic effects on health and the environment.
For a full list of our previous issues, please see the Past issues page.