Italy – report from Naples on the waste mountain

The city of Naples, Italy‘‘s third biggest, the capital of the south, is caught in a trap of its own devising. And if you drive to the suburb of Pianura where police have been fighting with residents this week, you can get a good idea of the cruelty and fatality of this trap; and why there is a whiff of fear in the city‘‘s air just now, mixed with the stench of putrid rubbish.



The fear is that the Naples disease, which has put its rubbish-clogged streets on the world‘‘s news bulletins and newspapers day after day, is beyond cure. That for all the bold talk by politicians and by the new “rubbish tsar”, who took up his emergency powers yesterday, there really is no way out.



Nowhere in this city has escaped the crisis that has been building since 21 December, the date of the last regular rubbish collection. The collections ceased because there was no longer anywhere to put the stuff: the plant where they compact solid waste into bales had again reached capacity and could take no more.



The city‘‘s landfill sites were closed years ago, on the orders of magistrates. The incinerator designed to burn the bales, that should have been completed and commissioned years back, is only half-built, the works frozen while magistrates investigate dirty dealings. So the domestic rubbish, dumped in wheelie bins on the street and awaiting collection, stayed where it was chucked. And accumulated. And accumulated and accumulated some more.



It‘‘s frightening to see how quickly a modern city can be swallowed by its own refuse. We start from the railway station and drive towards the northern suburb of Pianura and it‘‘s clear that nowhere has been spared. Everywhere, the big plastic or steel bins are disappearing under a rising tide of plastic bags, cardboard boxes, Christmas trees, bits of polystyrene, rotting vegetables, used disposable nappies, broken kitchen implements, crap of every description.



You drive down a clean, swept street and begin to think that some enchanted suburb has found a solution – but there, at the end of the road, by the petrol station, by a patch of waste ground or under the windows of some unlucky flat-dwellers, the dwellers of the clean, swept street have reached a silent compact to dump their stuff.



Pianura is punctuated, like everywhere else, with these huge, putrifying mounds, some 8ft or 10ft high now, sliding down to swallow the entire pavement so mothers with pushchairs and old folks with walking sticks are forced to fight with Naples‘‘s uniquely aggressive traffic for a share of the road.



But Pianura is doubly cursed. Because, as well as producing its own share of the city‘‘s millions of tonnes of daily waste, it is home to an old rubbish dump. It was closed seven years ago along with others in the city: the hope was that a new generation of clean, green, energy-generating incinerators would take their place. But now the only way the regional government can climb out of its present, evil-smelling hole is to reopen Pianura and start dumping there again.



The residents are not amused. Nobody in the world likes a rubbish dump in their back yard, even less an ex-rubbish dump of which they believed themselves well rid. But it‘‘s worse than that.



The equivalent of the Mafia in Naples is called the Camorra. A chaotically divided, feuding patchwork of gangs and clans, for decades it dominated every aspect of waste disposal in the region. “Before 1994, the Camorra controlled the entire waste cycle,” said Michele Buonomo, president of an environmental group called Legambiente Campana. “The Camorra isn‘‘t actually that interested in household waste but it is interested in controlling the waste cycle, controlling the dumps.”



By undercutting the bids of legitimate operators, the gangs took over du