Casale Monferrato is a town with a population of 35 thousand. It was the ancient and proud capital of the Monferrato region, a land of rolling hills and plains, crossed by the River Po, where the Eternit plant was established in the early 1900s until 1986, the oldest and the largest Eternit plant in the country. The Eternit Trial gets its name from the multinational which had plants in Italy and in other countries where asbestos cement products were made for decades. The product, asbestos-cement, was widely used because it was fireproof and cheap. It was so widely used that decontamination and its replacement with alternative safe materials is a gigantic task. Products included water pipes, sheets and roofs, used to cover millions of square meters of industrial plants, schools, hospitals, markets, stations and private houses. Casale Monferrato, thanks the Association of Relatives and Victim of Asbestos, has become the symbol of the struggle against asbestos. In the province of Alessandria more than 2000 people died for diseases connected to asbestos and unfortunately there are about 50 new mesothelioma cases a year. The Eternit trial started in 2009 against the two heads of Eternit Stephan Scmidheiny and Louis De Cartier (died in 2013) for the mesothelioma deaths of the Eternit workers. After being a conviction and a sentence of 18 years for the enviromental disaster crime and milions to give to the Regione Piemonte and the city of Casale Monferrato as a compensation, the trial ended in november 2014 when the court applied the prescription and revoked the sentence and all the compensation for the civil parts.

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