The Italians and Their Garbage

The Italian city of Naples now has over 100,000 metric tons of garbage disintegrating in the street. Strombolis, gucci purses, and Peroni bottles all just left out to rot. Imagine trying to enjoy some fine beef carpaccio or ride your moped with a bunch of garbage in your face. At the heart of the problem is the lack of facilities to dispose of the garbage, the mafia, men in speedos and women with unshaven armpits and pubis. Landfills have filled up thanks to the illegal dumping of the mafia, and the government does not have any incinerators to burn the garbage. They came up with the idea to put the garbage in an old rubbish dump in the suburb of Pianura, but residents have blocked access to that dump. Just like in the Sopranos, the garbage business in Italy is controlled by the mafia. The Camorra, the Naples equivalent of the Cosa Nostra mafia of Sicily, has been turning filth into cash for decades in the city. By undercutting legitimate operators, the Camorra won a host of local authority contracts and ended up in charge of the region's then-privately owned landfills. The Camorra isn't actually that interested in household waste but it is interested in controlling the waste cycle, controlling the dumps. The Camorra filled the dumps, not just with household trash but also with industrial waste trucked in from around Italy. This traffic remains one of organized crime's most lucrative activities rivaling, and possibly exceeding, narcotics for profitability. A state of emergency, declared in 1994, was meant to tackle the problem by taking waste dumps into public hands and defining a coherent waste strategy. But six successive trash tsars have been unable to banish the Camorra from the sector.