 Trash burning in the streets, firemen and journalists under attack, an unbearable stench from a carpet of garbage from bags deliberately slit open strewn over the main streets of eight or nine major Neapolitan neighborhoods by unknown hands, probably of people desperate to further dramatize the tragedy of the Naple's trash emergency just days before Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi will on Wednesday, May 21st, hold there, as promised, the first cabinet meeting of his new government.
It is unclear just what Berlusconi has in find to fulfil his other promise, to clean up the trash emergency in a couple of months: Italian newspapers speculate about a series of possibilities: that he is planning on making ample use of the Italian army to get trash collected and taken to dumps or stockpile sites, if necessary pushing aside blockades set up by the "not in my backyard" protesters; that he is thinking of utilizing dumps in secret locations where locals would not have the time or means to protest; that he will pass a law streamlining the complex bureaucratic procedures needed in this country to plan and build anything, including the incinerators or thermocycling plants that experts agree are the only way to deal both with the backlog of trash that has built up since last December and the 7200 tons of refuse that the inhabitants of the Campania region produce daily. Just to repeat the statistics once more, of the 50-odd thermocycling plants in Italy, only five are in the populous Italian south and none of those are in Campania. In recent days the situation appears to have worsened; a few weeks ago special trash commissioner, Gianni De Gennaro, whose three month mandate expires in a week, had at least appeared to have cleaned up downtown Naples, where the loss of tourism appeared likely to set off a new economic downturn. Now, reports stress, there is no different between the outlying poor neigborhoods and downtown Naples, although one radical paper did publish a photo on Sunday of the spotlessly clean street on which Regional President Antonio Bassolino lives.
The current crisis seems to have been set off last December by a combination of factors: the near-total saturation level of most of the dumps in the area, the poor functioning of the area's seven CDR plants which were conceived as structures to do some separation of garbage but instead do little more than compact it, and the increase of solid urban waste in the area leading up to the Christmas holidays. This means that when De Gennaro was appointed in January he was faced with the prospect have having to get rid of about a million tons of refuse in the coming three months. By the end of April he had managed to stockpile 700.000 tons in provisional sites and to ship off another 200,000 to top level German waste management plants which are only too happy to produce more low-cost energy and recycled materials.But there has clearly been a new build up since then.
But the origins of the crisis go back at least 15 years - De Gennaro is in fact the 15th commissario speciale to attempt to deal with a situation that Italy's populations preferred to put on the back burner. This is not surprising in a country where planning is not a national instinct and where things rarely get done until disaster looms. So that is where we are now and possibly more than any other aspect of Italian life, the trash emergency demonstrates the degree to which government in some parts of this country has almost totally abdicated its responsibilities. After all, governing should mean, in the first instance, having the capacity for and the willingness to make decisions for the general good, and in the second instance to make unpopular decisions when necessary and then persuade people to accept them and/or enforce them. This has never been done, because it was easier not to do it, and now it really may be too late. Powered by AkoComment 2.0! |
