Port Talbot is for many a version of the 'Valleys-by-the-sea', and certainly its heavy industry, shoehorned into a narrow belt of flat land, feels like a 21st-century throwback to coal-mining Rhondda. The brainchild of an old-fashioned coal baron, and of the politically-inspired siting of heavy industry, Port Talbot in fact has a more genteel past as a resort, and may have a 'clean' future as a centre of environmental research and practice.

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