Dirk Weidema
From his living room in IJmuiden-Noord, on IJmuiderstraatweg, Dirk Weidema has been looking directly at Tata Steel for fifty-four years. Across the North Sea Canal, he has an unobstructed view of steaming coke plants, smoking blast furnaces, a pellet plant with six chimneys continuously spewing thick clouds, and ships carrying coal and iron ore.
“What you don’t see, doesn’t bother you,” he says. “But I see everything.”
Black plumes rising slowly, the hissing of the quenching towers, the smell of tar seeping into the curtains.
“And then they say it’s steam. Yeah, right.”
He lets out a wry laugh, but fatigue and bitterness linger beneath it.
The factory keeps smoking, but inside the house things fell silent. His wife became ill and passed away; he himself was diagnosed with cancer.
Still, he continues to report, to write, to call.
“I report what I see. And I don’t stop.”
Activism as a daily routine, woven in between care and treatments. Not out of idealism, he says, but because someone has to do it.
On his computer are dozens of folders, neatly organised: correspondence with the environmental agency, penalty orders, lawsuits, photographs of black clouds, videos, reports.
He opens one, scrolls through the file names.
“They can’t say it isn’t there,” he says softly. “I’ve documented everything.”
He knows the regulations better than many officials.
“BAT-46 is crystal clear,” he says. “They must guarantee that no raw ovens occur. Not try — guarantee.”
A raw oven is a dense, black, toxic soot cloud from a coke plant. In the past, there were as many as three a day; now they are prohibited under threat of closure.
The prohibition — one of the few tangible results of years of environmental protest — can largely be attributed to this solitary figure. The only real success to emerge from that struggle lies with this small, determined man.
The ban destabilises the entire Tata Steel IJmuiden complex.
Since 2017, he has documented everything: time, wind direction, colour of the plume. In recent years, a high-resolution camera from Frisse Wind has been mounted on his roof, capturing every violation — even at night. The footage is streamed live on YouTube.
The environmental agency, embarrassed by the scale of previously documented violations, has since also introduced camera monitoring. Greenpeace has published the footage on its own platform: Spotdegifwolk.nl.
Since then, reports of violations have poured in.
“It’s driving them mad.”
Still, the responses from the environmental agency long remained predictable.
“They are in compliance with regulations.”
“As if they were copying and pasting.”
When he reaches his limit, he files a formal enforcement request. At first, these were rejected. Until, at some point, a provincial executive finally recognised the issue.
Since then, one penalty order has followed another — millions of euros in fines.
“And still they continue,” he says. “Because no one dares to shut them down.”
He sees patterns.
Sprinklers above the quenching line, so the black plume settles before it can be filmed. Cameras positioned just slightly too low. Footage that is not shared with the outside world.
“The environmental agency says they are investigating,” he says. “But everything just keeps going. It’s endless patchwork.”
Every ten minutes, the four quenching towers release vast, almost apocalyptic amounts of steam — “about 25 grams of dust per tonne” — settling on cars, windowsills, garden tables. “And then they say: we measure nothing. Of course not — if you measure where the air is clean, you measure nothing.”
His voice rises briefly. Behind every technical detail lies irritation.
“They already know. But no one wants to get burned.”
He often feels alone in the struggle.
Quenching tower of Coke Gas Plant 1 (KGF-1), Tata Steel IJmuiden. 2025. n the coke gas plants, coal is heated to produce coke for use in the blast furnaces. This process releases substances including benzene and other harmful compounds. Measurements by the North Sea Canal Area Environmental Service showed benzene concentrations up to twenty times above the permitted limit.
In the neighbourhood, “the steelworks” remains almost sacred. Friends drifted away; online he was insulted.
“Get a hobby,” they told him.
He shrugs.
“This is my hobby.”
Then, more quietly:
“Most people just don’t want to know. Because once you know, you can’t look away.”
Beneath the stacks of paper — and in the folders on his screen — lies a conviction that does not change:
Economic interest still outweighs health.
Not because inspectors don’t want to act, he says, but because the system is structured that way.
“If a third penalty order is exceeded, they are required to revoke the permit. That’s the law. But no one dares to do it, because that would shut down the coke plant — and with it the entire complex. So they keep postponing it, all the way to 2030, when Tata itself plans to close one coke plant.”
Still, he does not want the steel plant to disappear.
“I don’t want Tata to leave,” he says. “It just has to be cleaner. Not tomorrow — today.”
He sees that there have been some improvements — fewer plumes, better extraction — but too slow, too cautious.
Hydrogen is not yet available. Natural gas as an interim solution is expensive. The plant will depend on subsidies for years.
“The government and Tata are keeping each other alive,” he says. “And in the meantime, we’re the ones breathing it in.”
On the green steel plans, he remains pragmatic.
“Nice story. But I’ll believe it when I see it.”
He looks outside, at the smoke drifting slowly across the canal.
“Nothing has changed,” he says.
Then, after a pause:
“I report what I see. I report it. And I don’t stop.”