Italian City Faces Rubbish Crisis

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Italian city faces rubbish crisis

Residents of the Italian city of Naples have been torching piles of rotting rubbish in the steets amid a worsening refuse crisis.

One of the area's landfill sites is full, meaning that rubbish collectors have not been doing their rounds.

The streets are stinking, piled with thousands of tonnes of rotting rubbish in sweltering temperatures.

President Giorgio Napolitano, who is from Naples, has pledged to help end the crisis.

The southern city of one million people is experiencing an early heatwave that has already seen temperatures touch 30C.

"The stench is truly unbearable. Look at all these dogs running about. We'll all die at this rate," local student Michela Giordano told Reuters news agency.

'Threat of toxins'

Frustrated residents have taken to torching heaps of rubbish - by one count, there were 130 such fires on Tuesday night alone, reports the BBC's Mark Duff in Milan. (more)

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Mafia Dominates Garbage Industry

By Francesca Colombo*

An estimated 158 families in organized crime rings in Italy are getting rich off the trafficking of 35 million tons of garbage a year.

MILAN - Traditional areas of business apparently came up short for the Italian mafia, which is diversifying into a new and promising field: trafficking in toxic waste that poses a threat to residents' health and the environment, moving 2.6 billion dollars a year.

Italy produces 80 million tons of waste a year – both ordinary trash and toxic waste -- of which 35 million tons are handled by criminal organizations, like "cosa nostra" of Sicily, "La 'ndreghetta reggina" of Calabria, "sacra corona" of Puglia or the "camorra" in Naples, which deal with waste collection, elimination and recycling.

"It's a complex problem. It is too costly for industries to treat their waste, so they accept the offers of the trafficking companies, which charge 400 times less than the others," said Stefano Di Franco, chief of Rome's Forestry Corps, a police unit specializing in environmental protection.

The mafia, which emerged in Italy in the 19th century, manages 78 billion dollars a year, a flow that comes from extortion, smuggling and drug trafficking. But it also controls prostitution, clandestine immigration, and trafficking of human organs, weapons and animals, according to the study "Crime and Money", published in 2002 by the Bocconi University of Milan. (more)