ArcelorMittal linked to toxic mine where air, water and food are poisoning thousands

On 21 August 2025, an intruder ploughed through the waves off Dunkirk (northern France). In full view of holidaymakers enjoying the beach, the 230m-long cargo boat made its way towards the Malo jetty. In its holds, a pile of coal, the most polluting fossil fuel. The ship was bound for the ArcelorMittal steel complex bordering the city. There, the coal is mixed with iron ore to make huge quantities of steel: 15,000 tonnes a day, or twice the weight of the structure of the Eiffel Tower. A process that is extremely toxic. The factory produces 12 million tonnes of CO2 per year. That’s 15% of greenhouse gases emitted by French industry.

The multinational has received at least €244m of public aid [more than $282m] since 2021 to help it reduce its environmental impact and make cleaner steel. In Dunkirk, ArcelorMittal initially pledged to substitute part of its coal with hydrogen and to build two electric ovens by 2027 to replace its blast furnaces. It then backtracked. The project, postponed to 2029, now makes provision for just one oven rather than two. The plan to use hydrogen has been dropped.

Until the industrial group goes green for real, it will continue to see coal as a raw material that is both strategic and opaque – its provenance is not mentioned in any of the documents the company has made public.

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Coal in their lungs

Disclose, in partnership with French media outlet Socialter, has traced back ArcelorMittal’s supply chain. The cargo boat that docked in Dunkirk in August 2025 carried 79,000 tonnes of coal from the port of Nacala, Mozambique, according to exclusive data produced by French commodity intelligence company Kpler and shared by NGO Aria. Part of the cargo was unloaded in Dunkirk before the ship sailed on to Germany and Poland. The coal is extracted from an extremely toxic open cast mine in Moatize, central Mozambique. Its 40,000 residents breathe in, drink and eat dust that is poisoning them, as we found out when we investigated on location.

The mine has swallowed up the town of Moatize. Its small houses with their corrugated iron roofs used to be bordered with hills dotted with shrubs. Now moat-like black trenches dozens of metres deep surround the town on its west and east sides. They are the scars of fanatic mining in one of the world’s largest coal reserves. Twelve million tonnes of coal are mined each year by ArcelorMittal partner Vulcan Minerals, a subsidiary of Indian mining giant Jindal Steel.

Since the mine began operating in 2011, hardly a day goes by without black fumes covering the town with a thick veil of dust. They carry pollutants that penetrate deep into people’s bodies, into their lungs, as revealed by exclusive analyses by association Justiça Ambiental (Friends of the Earth Mozambique) seen by Disclose and Socialter. Between September and October 2024, air monitors set up in three districts of Moatize measured alarming concentrations of fine particles (PM10): up to 340 μg/m³ (microgrammes per cubic metre) near a motel, or seven times the threshold recommended by the World Health Organisation. Comparatively, the air close to ArcelorMittal’s Dunkirk plant contained up to 64 μg/m3 fine particles during the same period.

The fumes from the mine also contain dust from metals likely to be hazardous for locals. For instance, zinc levels are close to 20 times higher than the thresholds recommended in neighbouring South Africa for residential areas — no standard has been set in Mozambique. Vanadium and manganese are 12 and seven times higher respectively than these limits. “This is extremely worrying,” says Rico Euripidou, an epidemiologist and campaign coordinator at South African NGO Groundwork. “It has been clearly established scientifically that these substances [vanadium and manganese] are very toxic and that they cause cancer.” 

“I had to have a termination because TB was preventing my baby from developing.”

Isabel Graça Correia, a resident from Moatize

Since the only hospital in Moatize is funded by Vulcan Minerals, doctors will not give interviews about the impact of pollution on health. An anonymous hospital official in the neighbouring town of Tete quoted in a local media outlet in February 2022 gives us an idea of how dire the situation is in the area: “Every day, here at the hospital, we receive an ever greater number of people with tuberculosis. We believe this is due to the pollution.”

Many scientific studies have established a clear link between tuberculosis and coal mining in Subsaharan Africa. In Malawi, which shares a border with  Mozambique, a study showed in 2020 that coal miners were 10-15 times more likely to develop TB than the rest of the population. Residents of Moatize are particularly at risk, given that the town and the mine have become fused into one. 

“I have had many health issues, including TB,” Isabel Graça Correia, 43, told Disclose. She moved to Moatize in 2007, a year before work began at the mine, and settled in the Liberdade district, close to the mining complex. “I was five months pregnant in 2010 and had to have a termination because [TB] was preventing my baby from developing. I have not been able to become pregnant again. We live in disastrous circumstances.”

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Emissions from the mine not only pollute the air in Moatize but also rivers and groundwater as shown by a study published in February in the journal Environmental Geochemistry and Health. Scientists found high concentrations of metals including copper and selenium in 30 water samples from the area around Moatize. They identified “significant health risks associated with groundwater consumption, particularly […] for children” including liver and kidney damage, neurological disorders and hair loss.

Red-hot rock hits house

Coal particles also contaminate the soil and food. “Look at me, I’m covered in dust,” says Marcos Xadreque Chabluca, who farms on the banks of the river Moatize. “The dust comes all the way to my fields. I’ve only been weeding and I’m covered in dust from tip to toe.” The farmer says he does not recognise his crops. “I used to grow all kinds of vegetables here, including corn, beans and gourds, but nothing will grow any more. I have lost two hectares of produce this year and I have not been able to sow because of the coal,” he says. Corn, a staple food in Mozambique, is used to make chima, a traditional dish, but coal dust also gets into food. “We can no longer make our corn flour outside as we end up eating coal dust.”

Mining also has an impact on houses. Vulcan Minerals means business, and in order to extract the coal sold at premium prices to ArcelorMittal, explosives are used. Felix Filipe Mainato showed us the cracked walls in his home. “This house was built under a year ago but its walls are already cracked because of blasts. There are explosions twice a day, between 1pm and 2pm. When they happen, we go outside and stay there.”

In January, one of his neighbours, Ermenegildo Bartolomeu Macie, saw his house torn apart by a projectile from the mine. “It was a red-hot rock. It must have weighed at least five kilos. There was smoke everywhere,” he says. “It could have been a disaster as my wife and daughter were watching TV inside when it happened.” The family had to wait a whole month before an engineer sent by Vulcan Minerals came to plug the gap with bricks, ignoring other damage sustained by the house. 

The ArcelorMittal group cannot be unaware of the fact that its supplier is jeopardising the health of locals. The Moatize nightmare is well documented, including by the United Nations Development Programme. Vulcan Minerals did not return the request for comment sent by Disclose and Socialter. ArcelorMittal says that “due diligence requirements have been met by [its] supplier”. In defiance of the facts, the steel group says that “on the basis of the most recent assessment, no material risk, no warning signal and no unfavourable observation have been identified.”

According to French law on duty of care, the multinational is required to “prevent grave human rights violations […] and serious harm to the health and safety of people and their environment […] from the activities of subcontractors and suppliers with whom a business relationship is maintained“. For ArcelorMittal, it seems that dependence on coal is still paying dividends: the company made a $3.15bn (€2.73bn) profit last year.