Yahoo News 3 Jan 08;
The Naples region was grappling Thursday with a chronic rubbish disposal problem, with at least 2,000 tonnes of excess garbage piled up outside dumps and in the streets.
Overburdened waste treatment centres in the impoverished southern region have been unable to handle the surplus, in a scenario that has been repeated countless times over the past decade and a half.
The daily La Repubblica described the region, with a population of some six million, as "a community that is sinking and suffocating in its own excrement."
Firefighters overnight doused 70 flaming rubbish heaps, set alight by angry area residents, the ANSA news agency reported.
For the second day in a row, defying a warning of tough action by the interior ministry, protesters blocked traffic on a main road near a condemned dump in the western Naples suburb of Pianura that authorities are trying to reopen, ANSA said.
Clandestine dumping by organised crime dubbed the "ecomafia" has forced the closure of several treatment centres.
Criminal investigators say the Camorra mafia pay truckers to haul industrial waste from factories in northern Italy for fees that undercut those of the legal trade. They bring it to illegal dumps in the Naples region made by blasting holes in mountainsides.
In Brussels, a spokeswoman for EU Environment Commissioner Stavros Dimas said the European Union was monitoring the situation, having opened an infringement case last June, when it sought a response on measures for protecting human health and the environment in the impoverished southern region.
"We are concerned about the waste issues," Barbara Helfferich told AFP on Thursday, adding that "if necessary we will take the infringement case a step further."
A "waste disposal state of emergency," first decreed for the region in 1994, has been renewed annually ever since.
"They call it an emergency, but ... the same story has been repeated for a decade now," commented leading Italian daily Corriere della Sera.
While Naples' Camorra mafia are well known for drug trafficking, experts say the multi-billion euro waste business is their second source of revenue, begun in the 1980s and accelerated in the 1990s.
The area's waste disposal problem was dramatised by a report in the British medical journal The Lancet Oncology in 2004 that identified a "triangle of death" east of Naples where toxic waste has been linked to a higher incidence of cancer, especially liver cancer.
Neapolitans protest against garbage crisis plan
Reuters 3 Jan 08;
NAPLES (Reuters) - About 200 people on Thursday blocked the entrance to a waste dump in Naples which authorities planned to reopen to resolve a garbage crisis blamed on mismanagement, corruption and organized crime.
Shoulder-high mounds of rotting, rat-infested garbage have accumulated in the southern city for months as delays have dogged the opening of a massive incinerator meant to end a 14-year 'state of emergency' for waste in the Naples area.
An end-year deadline for opening the incinerator, designed to burn the waste, was missed and all waste dumps are full, forcing the authorities to try to reopen a landfill that was closed in 1996.
Hundreds of garbage piles in Naples and surrounding towns have been set alight by frustrated residents in recent days, fire authorities said, prompting fears of high levels of cancer-causing dioxin emissions.
Italy declared a state of emergency for waste in Campania, the region of which Naples is the capital, in 1994. But successive trash tsars appointed by the government have failed to end the crisis.
Part of the problem is that organized crime -- rife in the Naples area -- has made illegal waste disposal an industry that was worth 5.8 billion euros ($8.6 billion) in 2006, according to a study by conservation group Legambiente.
Mafia-controlled waste disposal -- by burial or burning -- has poisoned the environment so badly that people in some parts of the region are two to three times more likely to get liver cancer than in the rest of the country, according to Italy's National Research Council.
Italy risks a legal suit from the European Commission, which has sent the government warnings about its failure to deal with waste in Campania.
"The latest developments are a cause for concern and the Commission will look at it more closely in coming weeks," said Barbara Helfferich, Commission spokeswoman for the environment.
(Additional reporting by Darren Ennis in Brussels)
(Writing by Robin Pomeroy; Editing by Sarah Marsh)
Garbage crisis stirs protest in Naples
Salvatore Laporta, Associated Press Yahoo News 5 Jan 08;
The mayor of Naples appealed to angry residents Saturday to stay calm in the city's two-week-old garbage crisis, and the prime minister called it an emergency that must to be tackled quickly.
Scattered clashes between youths and police continued, news reports said, as garbage accumulated in stinking mountains in the city. Collectors stopped picking up trash Dec. 21 because there is no more room for it at dumps.
Premier Romano Prodi told journalists in his hometown of Bologna that Naples' garbage problems had to be solved "once and for all," and that government ministers would meet on Monday to come up with a strategy.
"Everybody's watching us, and I don't want Italy to give off this negative image," Prodi said. "It's an emergency we must tackle rapidly."
Garbage pileups due to shortage of space in dumps have plagued the port city sporadically for several years. Although citizens are angered by the uncollected trash, they have also blocked plans to open new dumps in the Naples area.
Groups of youths with their faces largely covered threw stones and pieces of metal at police in several parts of the Pianura neighborhood before dashing away, some of them on motor scooters, the Italian news agency Apcom reported from Naples.
Naples Mayor Rosa Russo Iervolino said she was appealing to the "overwhelming majority" of law-abiding citizens in the Pianura neighborhood, where work has begun to reopen a long-closed dump.
"Respect the law," the mayor was quoted as saying by the Italian news agency ANSA.
In Pianura, the heart of the protests, residents tossed tree trunks on roads and spread oil on streets to try to thwart the arrival of police.
Officials have blamed organized crime infiltration of garbage collection services and disorganized bureaucracy for the piles of trash, on the city's outskirts and lining streets in Naples' historic center.
Italian President Giorgio Napolitano has said he was alarmed by the situation and called on officials to take up their responsibilities in resolving the problem.
Residents have taken to burning the trash, unleashing clouds of smoke in the city.
