FusiOrari

Waste management business increasingly takes global features. Criminal organizations do not hesitate to spoil the natural beauties of a country, of a region, of a town as long as this means earning enormous profits.

INDUSTRIAL WASTE – All industrial waste produced by Italian manufacturing ends up polluting the countryside of Campania and Apulia, irreparably compromising their agricultural production. Waste coming from steelmaking,  catalyst powders for exhaust fumes abatement, paint sludge, asbestos, liquid waste polluted by heavy metals, tannery mud, residual mud from purification plants. These types of waste, which represent a cost for disposal for a company located in Northern or Central Italy, are taken charge of  by companies linked or constituted with clans’ financing, which commit themselves with cutting down these costs.  Once a profitable agreement is reached by the parties, the owners of  warehousing centres collect waste and mix it with ordinary waste, declassifying the danger of toxic waste according to the European Waste Catalogue (E.W.C.) . After this operation has been carried out, chemists charged with the analysis on toxicity of the shipment fill in a forged identification form with false analysis codes. At this stage, road haulage contractors take the motorway and from Northern Italy they reach Campania, where they entrust the shipment to the managers of authorized landfill sites (the latter always controlled by clans), to owners of disused quarries or to owners of fields turned into unauthorized dumps. Obviously, the whole cycle works thanks to the complicity of public officials who entrust the management of whole pieces of ground or of dozens of quarries and dumps to people linked up with Camorra clans. It is estimated that, in the last 10 years, about 6 tons of illegal waste have been disposed of in Campania, mainly in the provinces of Caserta and Naples.  Consequently, the inhabitants of Naples and Caserta areas are rotting in their own rubbish: quarries packed with waste, dumps overfilled with any type of poison, the countryside producing rotten fruit, noxious crops and damaged products.

A GLOBAL BUSINESS – The fact that clans are turning their attention to other countries searching for new areas where expanding their business cannot comfort us. Albania, Costarica, Somalia, Nigeria, Mozambique, Romania have become “conquest territories”, where one can buy up hundreds hectares of land at low prices with the consent of local authorities.  The discovery made after December 2004, when a violent tsunami devastated the coasts of South-Eastern Asia is emblematic of this situation. The rogue wave reached also Somalia’s coasts, where it killed 21 people. But the horrible fact was discovering that, on the seashore between Obbia and Warsheik, barrels full of radioactive waste, buried there in previous years, floated in the water just next to the dead bodies. There was sufficient material to open an inquiry and verify the responsibility of Campania clans. But media fund-raising campaigns in favour of the populations hit by the flood and the veto from corrupted local authorities prevented magistrates from starting any kind of legal actions.  Moreover, stowing bulk carriers with toxic waste in order to feign an accident and then let them sink is a well-establish practice: in this way, the sea swallows the “precious” load and insurance companies pay compensation for damages deriving from the false accident statement.

THE DEVASTATION OF A WONDERFUL LAND – A merciless strategy, which is spreading death, desolation and poverty wherever it is put into practice, but which finds fertile ground in social situations where moral and material decay reign. Situations where not only a town councillor or a petty civil servant are corrupted, but every citizen, hiding himself with the excuse of a being in a difficult situation, does not hesitate in reacting against police, in taking attitudes based on a conspiracy of silence, in knocking at the doors of mafia bosses in order to obtain a favour, to take a short cut, an undue facilitation in exchange of an absolute devotion to the system. After all, institutions are made of people who, in their turn,  reflect the “quality” of their fellow-citizens.