The project

The project was born in London in November 2008. At the time, we were two young Italian journalists abroad, who had the occasion to follow from outside the sparking, explosion and development of the last Campania’s waste crisis. This has allowed us to realized that much had been ignored by the news.

We noticed it was very hard to find objective and well researched information on people's protests as well as on the alternative waste managing solutions that citizens were proposing.

The voices of the civil participation were being ignored, and as a result an important chance of change was lost.

The dominant industrial culture that imposes - with the help of politics - a system of production and consumption - that ends up with the burying and burning of waste for the maximization of profit - shows lack of foresight. It causes a loss of our biggest richness, the environment and its resources, damaging, as a result, the whole of the country’s economy. Sadly, who rules the country seems not to care. What counts is individual gaining, for the detriment of common sense and human solidarity.

However, considering the future of humanity, in a world in which environmental sustainability is ever more stressed and about to collapse, this way of acting is simply nonsense.

While researching the truth behind waste emergencies, what has most impressed us has been the sentence chosen in order to represent the website chiaianodiscarica.it by its authors. “Disinformation kills”, says their header, as if it were a packet of cigarettes. But they are right: in this very case disinformation is killing for real, it is killing people and the environment.

Even though there have been several journalists who have tried to tell this story in the most accurate way possible, they have found themselves as being isolated voices in the landscape of Italian media.

For mainstream media, in line with the Italian governmental structures, have largely ignored the calls for help that were and are coming from local citizens, as well as the enormous potential for changing that the situation is offering us.

It can happen because Italian mainstream media are too interwoven with the industrial and political structures of those ventures that are gaining a huge amount of profit out of this situation.

Thus our aim is to tell this story to any man and woman of good will who wants to hear it, in Italy and abroad.
Firstly, in order to denounce an anomalous situation when compared to the European Union’s one, where both among public opinion and in the legislation, both among scientific research and in the culture, what is gaining increasing importance is the reduction, reuse and recycling of waste, as well as a sustainable treatment of raw matter and resources.
Secondly, in order to challenge the lack of freedom of expression that too often, in Italy, cuts the voices of citizens and journalists.

We are now working on the territory, between Naples and other Italian cities, where thanks to the help of citizens, citizen journalists, doctors, lawyers, scientists and some politicians who are sensitive to the topic, we are filming and making researches needed for the realization of the final work.

We are also looking for possible producers, in the hope that this emblematic situation can play as international example of the consequences of waste (not) managing on the environment and on human democracy.