waste emergency an environmental and democratic crime


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wasteemergency.com is a web platform created to host a project for a documentary movie on Italian waste emergencies.

Imagine to be in the south of Italy, and precisely in the Campania region: cuddled between one of the most fertile lands and one of the most beautiful sea of the world.

It is the summer of 2009, less than a year after the eruption of the last tragic waste crisis. Several waste emergencies have been happening in sequence since 1994, and the governments, both the leftwing and rightwing ones, have shown complete incapability in managing them.

In March 2008 the huge piles of rubbish spread along the streets of the historical centre of Naples, had caused a great deal of resentment among citizens, such to contribute to the fall of the leftwing government of Romano Prodi.

Silvio Berlusconi had thus decided to address that resentment in his electoral campaign, a move that has prove him winner. Once elected, Berlusconi ‘solves’ the problem by burning tonnes of waste in national and foreign incinerators, and by burying and hiding the rest (tonnes were found in the Villa of Sandokan, a Camorra boss now in jail.)

Soon enough it is possible again to take a walk along the elegant Bourbon streets of Naples, but the unlucky suburbs of the city will have to suffer the consequences of that rushed ‘solution’.

For this the protest erupts. The police are sent to violently suppress it. The mainstream media are turned into a theatre where politicians accuse the protesters of being “il popolo del NO” (the people of the NO) and of being manoeuvred by the Camorra, the local organised crime. The rightwing politicians start excusing themselves with: would you rather want black rubbish bags all-over again?

No, say citizens. We would prefer a different way of managing waste. We would like to recycling with kerbside collection, as it is made by the Consorzio Priula recycling centre in Treviso (north of Italy) or the “global kerbside collection” of Agropoli (Campania), and we would like to see implemented any alternative technology to incineration and landfill. Which, in the end, would only mean respecting EU normatives.

But in Italy, since few years, what decides is the ‘law’ of the outlaws. Anything big is made through a dispensation, and justified with the ‘state of emergency’ (see waste emergencies, the organisation of the last G8 summit, and the disaster relief of Abruzzo’s earthquake.)

Landfills and incinerators are now areas of ‘national strategic interest’, protected by the army and by a state secret, making it impossible for citizens to check on related health and environmental risks.

However, all around people are dying, and the correlation between environmental pollution and the incidence of cancer and congenital malformations is increasingly witnessed by a growing number of national and international medical studies.

The blazes of toxic waste of ‘the land of fires’ keep happening without control, while soldiers are used to ‘protect’ waste from citizens, instead of citizens from waste.

It is all the civil battles, the hope, the attempts to break the authoritarian wall imposed by the government, the appeals of scientists, doctors, lawyers, it is the great value of a civil, democratic and environmental consciousness that arose in contraposition to the committed abuses that have inspired us for the creation of this documentary project.

Until the documentary will be ready, we will keep this platform updated with news, podcast and comments about the topic.
“For future memory, if memory has a future.” (L. Sciascia)

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