Big-city consumption
Given their high population densities, cities naturally produce large amounts of consumer waste. Land values, however, are also high, which leads to two major complications: it is expensive to purchase land for waste disposal; and landowners want to protect their investment. The latter complication also frequently leads to issues related to environmental justice, as rich neighbourhoods use their superior wealth and education to manipulate the legal system to keep landfills and incinerators out of their backyards.
Due to these social and economic dynamics, waste management facilities inevitably end up in poor neighbourhoods, rural areas, or other urban areas that are willing to absorb the waste for a fee. As urban areas sprawl outward and rural areas become suburbs, surrounding areas become less and less willing to take on city rubbish when landfills reach capacity (or are needed for their own waste), and also when suburban land values rise. Once the cheap options for urban waste disposal are exhausted, cities are left with a series of far tougher alternatives.
One option is to keep looking for other places to dump the waste, places usually farther and farther away. The City of Chicago, for example, trucks its waste up to 160 kilometres to reach landfills beyond its sprawling suburbs. Seen from this perspective, it should not come as such a surprise that Naples is shipping its solid waste as far afield as Germany, a situation that takes on even more irony in that many experts blame Naples' overloaded landfills on the fact that their operators have been filling their dumps with industrial waste from the country's industrial north. Germany, for its part, was caught in 2007 illegally dumping municipal waste in southern Hungary, showing that few states are immune from dirty dealings related to waste.
Morselli is nevertheless optimistic about the future, citing the improving European legislation and high separated waste targets for 2013-15 as reasons to believe that the Naples experience will not repeat itself elsewhere, adding: "I hope it will be the last time." With proper planning in cities like Sofia, he could be right.
