Flirting with disaster
Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi's recent victory speech included two key pledges to the Italian people: to rescue struggling national airline Alitalia; and to resolve the acute rubbish crisis in Naples. Also saddled with a sputtering economy and the largest national debt in Europe, the thrice-elected prime minister would seem to have bigger fish to fry; that he would instead point to one city's municipal solid waste problem speaks volumes about how dire the situation has become — with the army even called in to assist the cleanup. Nonetheless, the EU decided in April that Italy had been given enough chances to solve the problem, and that the country should face prosecution for repeated failure to deliver a suitable waste strategy.
Italy's third largest city, Naples has been flirting with a solid-waste disaster for years, with the city's major landfills nearing (or even exceeding, depending on who is making the calculations) full capacity. With the landfills full and complaints mounting from local residents, operators finally locked up their gates. Angry citizens, who had been fighting the opening of new dumps or incinerators out of health concerns, accused the owners of illegally filling the dumps with hazardous industrial wastes. The local government finally threw up its hands in despair, and as the days passed and garbage trucks no longer made the rounds, private waste accumulating on the pavements grew into formidable rubbish heaps.
Although below the EU average in percentage of waste recycling, Italy as a whole is far from the worst in Europe. The European Environment Agency, for example, has praised the country for proportionally reducing its landfilled biodegradable waste, and northern Italy successfully collects about half of its waste as separated content, according to waste expert Luciano Moreselli of the Department of Industrial and Material Chemistry at the University of Bologna (Rimini branch). Southern Italy, however, has achieved separated waste content of less than 10 percent — no surprise, given that most of the country's recycling and incineration plants are located in the north.
The ECJ, having sent repeated warnings to Naples and the Campania region, has finally summoned Italy to court, citing officially the country's failure to provide a "clear timetable for the completion and entry into operation of the sorting plants, landfills, incinerators and other infrastructure needed to resolve the region's waste problems."
This being the case, Bulgaria would be wise to pick up several clear signals which emerge from Italy's run-in with the EU. First of all, regional and national governments will be held accountable for what would normally be seen as a municipal failure. Second, throwing money at a problem is not enough: Over the past 14 years, the Italian government has spent more than EUR 1.3 billion trying to end the Naples crisis. Third, the EU will not accept the presence of organised crime elements as an excuse, at least if the tough talk from EU Environmental Minister Stavros Dimas is anything to go by.
