Italian police on Thursday broke up a toxic waste racket operating in and around Turin for the last three years.
Seven people were arrested on suspicion of dumping dangerous waste including asbestos in the countryside around Turin and Alessandria.
Police said they buried the waste in fields and packed it into unauthorised dumps.
The alleged ringleader was the head of a partly state-owned consortium which handled waste for 90 municipalities in the area.
Undercutting legitimate competitors and using bogus laboratory certificates, the racket infected farmland and the water supply, police said.
In a separate operation, police seized 22 containers in the port of Venice in a probe into illegal waste trafficking between the northern regions of Veneto and Friuli and China.
A similar trafficking ring between Genoa and China was busted in 2006.
