The Venice Lagoon is very important. Venice is a world heritage site. The Venice Lagoon has struggled with pollution and rising sea levels for years. This summer, along with a campaign by the Venetian authorities to dissuade some of the city's 12 million annual visitors to take it easy on the islands' 70,000 residents, Greenpeace activists are giving tours to polluted areas of the lagoon. For many years a petrochemical and vinyl chloride plant at Porto Marghera, on the mainland, have been accused of polluting the lagoon.
Participants see sights from smokestacks to red mold on the banks a sign of toxic waste.
Greenpeace's most recent claim is that mussels poisoned from carcinogenic pollutants in the lagoon are illegally gathered in the dark of night and sold to nearby restaurants. Venetian authorities have denied this accusation. In addition to mussels, anemones, crabs, cuttlefish, oysters and sea bass are some of the animals that call the lagoon, with an average depth of two feet, home. And since all this food is readily available, swans, cormorants, ducks and spoonbills soar above the gray water. Pollution in Venice's waters ranges from agricultural runoff to human waste.