The Toxic Crime of the Century

Think you've got it bad where you live? Be glad you don't live in Naples or its environs in the Campania region of southern Italy. If you do, my heart goes out to you.

This story first came to my attention care of Aquarello Italiano, a bi-monthly Italian language news magazine put out by Champs Elysee. As further reported today by Tracy Wilkinson of the Los Angeles Times:

"The Naples-based Camorra controls the import, transport and disposal of millions of tons of rubbish, an extremely lucrative business in which the group follows its own rules, ignores regulations on toxic waste and contaminates once-fertile farmland, country fields, forests and rivers.

Beyond the ugliness of it all, evidence now suggests that the garbage is poisoning the food chain and may be causing cancer, birth defects and other health problems."

For months now, Campania has been suffocating under heaps of uncollected garbage shipped from economically sound northern Italian regions to Camorra-controlled companies in the much poorer south. As Wilkinson reports:

"The Camorra has enthusiastically made Italy's poor south the trash dump to the world, or at least part of the world. Trucks transport the waste to the south day and night, year-round, and deposit it in mostly illegal and unregulated landfills.

No trash is too foul: metallurgical dross, sludge from tanneries, tires, discarded refrigerators and stoves, rotting animal carcasses, medical waste -- a nauseating cesspool of crud."

Cancer rates in Campania are double to triple those in the rest of Italy. Residents have had to contend with garbage heaps that cover their streets, their sidewalks, even the entrances to schools. The situation even spawned a hit dance song in Neapolitan dialect by Italian artist Gianluca Manzieri -- Quanta Gioia, Quanta Munezza ("So Much Joy, So Much Garbage"). This year citizens, under the leadership of environmentalist Raffaele del Giudice, decided to take their land back and clean things up. But neither the Camorra nor the politicians in the crime-syndicate's pocket cooperated. According to the L.A. Times:

"Mafia gunmen allegedly began to systematically eliminate several people who were cooperating with prosecutors in criminal cases against the Camorra. Four people were killed in a matter of weeks, including businessman Michele Orsi.

Orsi ran a waste disposal company and worked with the Camorra. But after years of having to pay off the mobsters and take orders from them and their political masters, he agreed to turn state's witness. He was killed by a barrage of 18 bullets shortly before he was to testify in court on alleged ties between the Camorra and politicians.

Intimidation of the farmers and others who were working with Del Giudice was more subtle. Farmers arrived at their fields to find trees had been cut down overnight, or their machinery was destroyed. Gunmen shot up barns and greenhouses."

Now the garbage dumps in Campania, legal and otherwise, are nearly full. In a story far more horrifying than any episode of the Sopranos, The Camorra have started a "toys for garbage" exchange program with China. A ship stops in Italy to deliver goods from China, and returns with toxic Italian waste.

So what does this story have to do with us? Well, for one thing, the world's best Buffalo Mozzarella comes from the Campania region of Italy. And while I've sworn off Italian Buffalo Mozzarella for years because so much of that industry is also controlled by the Camorra under heart-breakingly cruel conditions (see Buffalo Mozzarella), there's now another reason not to eat it: unacceptably high levels of the cancer-causing agent dioxin have been detected in some Italian mozzarella.

But on an even more serious note, the whole Italian trash debacle should get us thinking about our own problems with trash and our part in global waste management. Because reducing the amount of waste we produce isn't just a matter of preventing global warming. We, too, are running out of places where we can dump our junk and not have it affect our health and welfare, and we can no longer afford to be lazy or cite convenience as an excuse to just throw any old things in the trash or down the toilet. Flushed cat feces are believed responsible for infecting sea otters with the toxoplasma gondii bacterium (sea otters), medicines and household products flushed down the toilet or washed down the drain have been found in unnaturally high levels in fish (Science-a-go-go), and those pesky and so-far still ubiquitous plastic bags cause slow and painful deaths for far too many animals (Planet Ark). Between 1991 and 1996 The Environmental Protection Agency recorded an average of 8,200 tons of hazardous wastes per year shipped to the U.S. from Mexico (Foreign Policy in Focus).

Remember the opening scene in Sex, Lies and Videotape, the one in which Andie MacDowell's character tells her psychologist she's been obsessing about garbage? "All I've been thinking about all week is garbage. I can't stop thinking about it. ... I mean, we have to run out of places to put this stuff eventually." Her doctor tells her she's obsessing about something over which she has no control. But we do have some control. Maybe not over the mafia, maybe not over Mexico, but certainly over ourselves. We can and must engage in this millenia's three "R"s: reduce, reuse, recycle (Hazardous Household Substances).

Because the world is getting smaller. But those piles of garbage aren't.

 

Comments

[olivesforbreakfast]

am i missing something? i just received this via email on the 6th. it was posted on the 4th. can it be that this was posted a full two days ago and there is not even one comment? maybe my server didn't get it right. somehow one would think that this story, as with all ecocrime stories, would be at the top of everyone's list of topics that we must address.