Not just Naples’ problem
I’m adding a new article from BBC News that seems to have a handle on how this crisis is developing. I’ve been waiting for seven years for the Italian people to get angry enough to shake their fists in the faces of those who don’t serve them. They are in the piazzas now doing just that.
In addition, there is another blog with an article on this problem with more discussion among people who care about waste.
Bear with me please. I am going to try to bring you the real story of what is happening and has been happening in Naples concerning refuse. Rai Television has films used on the newscasts, in Italian, of course, but the visuals are compelling. I’m hoping that link will take you straight to the first story, but if it doesn’t, you can select TG1 Emergenza Napoli Rifiuti, but first you must watch a brief commercial starring the old man of Italian TV.
And then you can see this, TG1 - Rifiuti, Campania ancora nel caos. I know you won’t understand the words unless you speak Italian, but the images will help you understand what’s going on.
It’s possible that this only takes you to the player and you will have to select the film you want to see.
There’s some print media on the subject, like here at Yahoo! news. I think the reports are seriously underplayed. The crisis is mindblowingly terrible and it has been building for over a decade. When I was in Campania last autumn, my friends and I walked through a beautiful gem of a city, Caserta, and had to encircle piles of trash in the streets, stinking and rotting. There’s too much trash and nowhere to put it.
The reason is partly nimby and partly corruption and partly that like almost everywhere these days, people make too much junk. Somehow, and I will let the Neapolitan politicians explain how that happened, refuse contracts were made with the mob, which in Naples is the Camorra. Even though they and their families live there, they didn’t have the sense to know they had to keep dangerous medical refuse separated from household refuse, that they needed to contract for and build landfills and that they really needed to cart the stuff away and get rid of it. Instead, they took the money and ran, not far, because they would have no power at all outside Campania, and they therefore proved that criminals are stupid, the politicians who play ball with criminals are stupid and people in general will have to come to grips with organized crime because no one else will. Now the criminals, the corrupt and weak politicians and all of the millions who live in Campania live with the resulting mountains of deadly refuse. The people have gone to the streets over this and set fire to the trash mountains, with possibly even more deadly results. I’m not sure which is more sick-making; breathing those fumes or drinking water polluted by the unburned trash.
So, you ask, why should you care? Isn’t it enough to just say we’ll skip Campania on our trip to Italy?
I don’t think so. There is no place on earth that is proof against this problem of too much trash produced over a long period of time. Those mountains of refuse were produced in what is one of the poorer parts of Italy. Imagine what is being produced in more affluent parts of the world. Now multiply that by the length of time it will take for your grandchildren to grow up. What will happen to all this stuff? Will you fill the Grand Canyon? Throw it in the ocean and kill or make poisonous all the fish? Or the latest, which is to throw it into active volcanoes? What if it just gets thrown back up?
This article in the Independent expands the statistics to include other European areas, but we all know that it isn’t just Europe.
The truth is that we all have to take responsibility for ourselves and our production of waste. We have to think hard about every single thing that becomes refuse in our own lives and how it could have been prevented in the first place. Whether that is new packaging ideas, tighter recycling laws and possibilities or just saying no to packaging and disposables and cutting back on the endless purchasing we do, something must change.
The next story could be yours.
20 comments January 5th, 2008
