The British ´Erin Brockovich´

A "toxic tort" action is a special type of personal injury claim in which the claimant alleges that exposure to a toxic substance has led to some form of harm or disease.

From time to time, toxic tort actions allege exposure of large numbers of individuals to a chemical that has been introduced by the defendant into the environment. When these multi-party environmental toxic tort actions happen in real life, they invariably attract their fair share of headlines. The storylines of a number of Hollywood blockbuster films ("A Civil Action" and "Erin Brockovich", to name a couple) have been based on them.

In the UK at least, it is extremely rare for environmental toxic tort actions to make it to trial, and rarer still for the claimants actually to win. Evidentially, claimants often have a mountain to climb, and the cost of putting a case together (if it is possible at all) is usually prohibitive.