Trash mountain
The words "trash" and "mafia" are often heard today being used in the same sentence with "politicians", "business", and "justice" - especially in South and East Europe. The only difference in the case of Napoli is that when the people of Campania use these words, they whisper them and then look around with fright, as if they're being listened. In South Italy, these words are not just part of a political metaphor or some populist rhetoric, it's a murderous reality.
There were mass protests on the Neapolitan streets last year, and the one issue that sticks out was the continuous dumping of dangerous, deadly waste that's being practiced by the Camorra, and has been poisoning the local communities for decades, and is now even taking human lives. NGOs, magistrates, national and local authorities, the police, even the Church are now recognizing the grave threat on people's health and the country's economy that's coming from the criminal disposal of toxic trash, now affecting not just the Italian South but the entire country. Heads are being raised, voices are getting louder, and serious counter-action is being taken.
The images of the huge Neapolitan protests started circulating around the newsrooms of the world in mid November last year. There were people carrying photos of relatives who they claim had died of cancer caused by poisonous pollution. One of the organizers of the protests was Legambiente, an influential environmental organization that's been beating the drum about the dangerous disposal of risky waste since the 80s. Indeed, from an obscure source of income for the mafia, this practice has now grown into a monstrous business worth several billion euros annually. Thousands of hectares of agricultural land have been obtained by the Camorra through the years, and are being used for illegal disposal of toxic waste.
This business has been developed as a side product of the economic ascent of the industrial North in the 80s. Now there are criminals openly bragging that they're making more money from trash dumping than they used to from cocaine dealing. Everything started when the mafia enticed a lot of businesses by offering them to dispose of their useless trash at half the market price, and then write the full price in the books for tax-fraud purposes. But of course you always need two to tango. The Camorra needs partners from outside the criminal circles to sustain this scheme. And sure it does find a lot of support among businesspeople, investors, politicians - all in all, important folks who could provide capital that could help turn the wheel and launder some money, and also power and protection to keep the scheme going without bumps along the way. Some estimates point to almost 500 business entities throughout Central and North Italy now being part of this criminal activity. More than 30 million tons of industrial waste has been splashed all around the country since the mid 2000s, now dumped in countless locations throughout Italy, most of which remain unaccounted for.
The shocking proportions of the damage on public health and people's lives have only started to surface today from beneath the heaps of garbage, after decades of intensive burying under toxic materials. Today, the relation between the illegal dumping of poisons into the environment and the drastic rise of some types of illnesses, is undeniable. The cases of cancer have risen 2 to 3 times in the affected regions. For example there are 20,000 additional cases of untypically early occurrence of breast cancer (at age 24-35, whereas the usual peak is at age 45). Due to the increased mortality rate caused by toxic particles in the air, soil and water, the locals have come up with a new name for the area between Napoli and Caserta, the "Triangle of Death".
The ways of the mafia may generally be associated with violence and abuse, but also silence - that is, shutting the mouth of people who appeal with the authorities against all this. And of course, corruption - bullying and/or buying politicians, bureaucrats, judges and journalists. In this sense, the EU resolution from October against organized crime and money laundering might be an encouraging breath of fresh air, because it includes specific prescriptions and initiatives for countering corruption. What remains is to find the political will and courage to implement them.
In fact, apart from the usual drive for profit, there's another factor for the success of these criminal activities: the countless loopholes in the legislation, and the lack of coordination between the various security institutions. Naturally, the criminals always turn out to be one step ahead of the legal framework, and they sure possess monstrous creativity in this respect. When the regional strategies for waste processing were introduced in Italy in the 90s, the criminal clans promptly masked their business behind legal facades. They legally bought facilities for processing dangerous materials, then used them to conceal the ongoing illegal dumping of dangerous materials in the adjacent agricultural land. And when the European and Italian legislation for territorial organization was tightened in the decades to follow, the mafia found a new way, and started incorporating the poisons in various infrastructural projects which had been granted to companies they had already bought - through public commissions. Thus, whenever they were commissioned to put asphalt on a road or a street, they would mix it with trash, and no one would ever know. Thousands of kilometers of streets, roads, sidewalks, school yards and other public facilities across Italy now contain toxic chemicals.
Things have gone so far that even the Holy See is getting involved in the fight against the trash. The Archbishop of Napoli, cardinal Sepe has said polluters should not receive holy communion. And the president of the Pontifical Council for Legislative Texts, cardinal Francesco Coccopalmerio has supported this position, saying that "Who pollutes ruins the people and all created by God, attacks the right of others and the love for the next. There is incompatibility between the lack of love for others and the participation in the Eucharist". Indeed, the last few years have made people in Italy extremely sensitive to the activities of the ecomafia, and things may've already reached a critical point where fear of retribution becomes irrelevant, or at least is trumped by the consequences of pollution. When one is pressed against the wall by the circumstances, all they have remaining is courage. Because they start to realize that they have nothing to lose.
Meanwhile, we shouldn't competely discount the real steps that have been made by the authorities in attempt to address the problem. The Italian legislature has recognized since 2010 that waste contraband is a viable criminal activity, and they've crafted a plan that would impose responsibility to the regional prosecutors for dealing with it. That was actually the turning point, and now the regional prosecutors have the jurisdiction to prosecute these crimes, and involve examining magistrates in these cases.
Later, in 2012, the national prosecutor signed a memorandum with the State Forestry Corps which usually works on ecological crime. Now the information systems of the regional prosecutors are interconnected, they can trace information on crimes of a lower category, such as the illegal waste dumping, and establish the presence of organized crime. With the help of the shared database, they can connect all the dots, and if a business happens to dump their waste in Napoli today, tomorrow in Venezia and in Firenze the day after, they'll damn sure be all over them in a heartbeat.
All these measures have led to the first positive outcomes in the fight against the criminal trafficking of waste from the North in a southern direction that has buried the Italian South under heaps of toxic trash over the last twenty years. Nowadays, the clans are making alliances with non-mafia structures, and are compelled to start dumping the waste elsewhere, outside the region. Which of couse is not a long-term solution, but at least is some relief for Italy. In result, the poisons are now traveling to destinations as distant as China, or some developing countries, or Eastern Europe (particularly Albania and Romania). In any case, that can never be a long-term solution, and what's needed instead is an overhaul of the legal framework, and reorganization of the way trans-border waste disposal is being handled.
And still, the main prerequisite for the illegal spread of toxic trash is the actions or inactions of politicians. In the past, many mayors were part of this business. The clans were getting support from public servants in white collars. And now the problem has spread way beyond South Italy. At the beginning it was just a flow of poisons from the north to the south, particularly to the region of Campania. Now the problem is all over Italy.
And the biggest threat is that it's beginning to undermine the famous Italian agricultural industry. The reports about mass poisoning of soils and waters is threatening Italy's position as one of Europe's and the world's leaders in the export of food products. That fame could easily be destroyed, and the Italian fruits, vegetables, wines, oils, meat and dairy products could see many doors being shut in front of them. It's come to a point where some Italian producers are explicitly presenting their products with the disclaimer that they're coming from regions still unaffected by toxic poisoning. There's a considerable amount of fear in the air already, especially since a year ago the locals witnessed the first campaign using slogans like "imported, hence healthy". That could have devastating consequences on the economy.
It's a vicious circle that's looming over Italy: grave health effects, enormous expenses related to the unregulated waste disposal, and a major industry going to the scrapheap (in this case, quite literally). No one wants this. But this is exactly what things have come to, after decades of indifference, negligence and corruption. The good news is, now a new generation of politicians are coming up, feeling increasingly compelled to take the issue to the public arena and seek for urgent solutions to the problem. In fact, people have been aware of this situation for more than twenty years, but their politicians have refused to listen. Now they've figured it's not just the courts and the police who are part of the problem, but the entire society should participate in its solution, including the people themselves. Unless good practices are systematically stimulated, and companies are encouraged to follow the law, nothing will get done, ever.
If there's one politician who's been elected with the clear task to continue the fight against the Camorra's poisonous legacy, it must be Luigi de Magistris. He became popular as a public prosecutor in Napoli and Catanzaro in the late 90s and until 2009. He has always focused on the politicians' ties to the mafia in his investigations. In Catanzaro he dug deep into various cases of fraud with EU funds that involved the construction of waste-water treatment plants, sewerage systems and other infrastructure projects throughout Calabria - and he was duly dismissed for all that, eventually. Because his investigations touched on famous names such as former Italian prime-minister and EU Commission president Romano Prodi, and former Minister of Justice, Clemente Mastella. So De Magistris has successfully remained in the focus of public attention for many years. He launched his political career in 2009 when he entered the EU parliament as the candidate with the second-best electoral support in Italy. In 2011 he was elected Mayor of Napoli with 65% of the votes at the secound round. De Magestris is well aware of the expectation to fight for people's ecological security, and he's openly talking of an all-out war on the mafia "entrepreneurs", particularly in the environmental sector - especially the Camorra.
In response to the crisis, Napoli has launched the first zero-waste regional strategy in Italy. It provides a difficult but very clear road-map: putting an end to open dumps and incinerators, and moving on to separate waste collection and recycling, solid composting and partly mechanized waste processing and using of renewable resources, with broad participation from the citizenry. The project began with handling 2500 tons of trash that had plagued the Napolitan streets for months, and now the process is in its structural phase. The examples include a composting plant at the Secondigliano prison, and a follow-up project that'll process another 30-40 thousand tons of waste from the region.
De Magistris has consistently refused to lay down the guns and accept that Napoli is just doomed to become a city of wastes and poisons. In fact he's seeing an opportunity in the crisis. The region of Campania doesn't need more cement and asphalt, he says; what it needs is an economy based on the most important resource: emotions. But no, I'm not talking of irrational reverence to nature and beauty in general - of course if those are preserved, so much the better. I'm rather talking of supporting the local communities, particularly small and middle business, and thus, the entire economy. If relentlessly fighting the ecomafia and disrupting its links with the politicians is what it takes to achieve that, so be it. The vision for the necessary reforms should go way beyond just rehabilitation of the polluted territories and restructuring the waste-processing. What's more, we shouldn't just be talking of trash, we should be talking of a revolution of some sorts. A change of the culture of consumption. Because it's not the stock exchange or the bank interest rates that should be the leading element of an economy, it should be an economy that's based on the local resources, on stuff that's being produced from the land. And, crafting innovative environmental policies is the way of reshaping Napoli from its current status of the capital of poisonous trash, into the safe, prosperous city that it used to be. Only then, the words "trash" and "mafia" would be separated from the words "politicians", "business" and "justice". And only then, the things that lurk behind wouldn't cause so much suffering and death.
