Italian Beauty Looking for Urgent Solutions
I’ve just seen Gomorra, the movie recently came out in Italy and based on the bestselling book Gomorrah: Italy’s Other Mafia, by Roberto Saviano.
Never before south of Italy has been so popular on media and newspapers like in this period and not for good news! Naples, a city long defined by both its loveliness and its squalor, is collapsing for a garbage emergency linked to the local mafia, the Camorra.
Where is the connection between rubbish and Naples’s crime system?
The trash problem has been blamed on years of weak governance and organized crime. As trash dumps filled over the years, it proved impossible to find new places to get rid of garbage, because of local protests and also because the Camorra earn illegally controlling many of the trucks and workers used to haul away trash.
The newly elected Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi has now to work hardly to save the city from a public health crisis, as warned by the European Union. The rising temperatures could bring disease and there is also risk from the toxic fumes released by tonnes of uncollected rubbish, piled up around the streets.
The European Union announced on 6 May that it was taking Italy to the European Court of Justice over its management of waste in this area. Barbara Helfferich, a spokeswoman for Environment Commissioner, Stavros Dimas, said: “Obviously things need to be done and Italy should not wait until the court has resolved the issue to take action”.
As Berlusconi promised during the election campaign, he’ll find all the measures to solve the crisis and this may include calling in the army to help clear away Naples’ garbage. But the main goal is to create waste-management measures, including recycling, in an area where only 10 percent of the trash is separated for collection, according to Legambiente, a national environmental group.
To understand how much south of Italy could improve with a good management just see to other regions of the country where recycle is a custom. On February 24, 2007, the town of Capannori (population about 50,000, located near Lucca in Tuscany) became the first in Italy to declare a Zero Waste strategy.
Based on the concept that waste should be eliminated, Zero Waste strategy considers the entire life-cycle of our products and processes in the context of our interactions with nature and search for inefficiencies at all stages. In Capannori, the door-to-door collection system (three times a week) has achieved in some cases an 80% saving the community money and now the Mayor is talking about a tax rebate.
Other communities in northern Italy have achieved 50% of garbage collection in a short time and there are two special examples: in the Treviso region some cities have topped 80% in 5 years and Novara, near Turin, (population 100,000) has achieved a 70% in just 18 months.
Italian reality is really complex, in all respects, and is very difficult to find a standard solution for the whole country. But strive for a national goal is not a dream and follows two simple rules: community responsibility, based on reduce, reuse and recycling and industrial responsibility with sustainable design and use of ecological materials.
Sources:
Il Corriere
La Repubblica
Ansa
Image courtesy of Flickr
