Illegal toxic waste dumping in Italy (2014)

I'm from that area, in the suburbs of Naples, and left 25 years ago, but my family is still there. Yes, there is a higher incidence of cancer in the region and, most likely, chemicals play a central part in that, but a good chunk of cases is for lungs and bladder, which also correlate with the sadly large number of smokers. (The smoke and the utter lack of consideration for others makes any visit home an exercise in frustration from day one or two.)

This has been going on for a long time. At some point in the early 90s, a cousin and her friends went biking away from town, passing through an industrial area. Even though the weather had been dry, there was a big puddle on the side of the road and she tried to make her way through it anyway. It turned out to be some toxic smelling and sticky substance. She had to get rid of her clothing AND the entire bike, whose gears and chain had become unusable. Even then, the assumption was that pollutants were being hauled mostly from factories in the North, not just from the South, and dumped in the region.

Most deaths I hear of are due to cancer. There might be a bit of selection bias at play, though. A case that was in the news recently was a seven year old girl that lost her year-long battle. Then there was the 17 year old who looked pregnant, but turned out to have a very large benign tumor. Those are shocking and heavily discussed, but I don't think rates in that age range are actually much different from the national average. It's from 60 on that the real numbers look very bad.

Here's how one police commander recalled a wiretapped conversation between two mob members:

"We're polluting our own house and our own land," the mobster said. "What are we going to drink?"

"You idiot," the boss replied. "We'll drink mineral water."

Its after reading articles like this you start to think about the working conditions for the people who made your childrens clothes or your latest smartphone. Somewhere there are people that knows perfectly well that these dangerous chemicals will just be dumped somewhere, but still give it away, likely for a profit.

When the article highlighted the potential for global organized crime in the trash disposal industry that really made me think about how little of the process flow for waste disposal is mapped out.

In essence, when we pay a neighbor to dispose of our waste for us, they could just be dumping it somewhere that comes right back to bite us in the ass.

There’s the famous list of rivers bringing the most plastic waste into the oceans (https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/stemming-the-plas...) and also the list of the most heavily polluted rivers (https://www.conserve-energy-future.com/most-polluted-rivers-...). Spoiler: the Sarno in Naples is one of them.

There’s lot of speculation over who’s doing the polluting and why, but as a base level we really need to capture the full journey of the waste to see what is actually going on in order to address it better.

What are the chances that when individuals try to do the right thing and be responsible, that the aggregate of waste goes into the hands of a group doing the wrong thing and hurting everyone as a result?

I wonder if this submission was in response to recent hn post[1], wherein the Bloomberg report and author Adam Minter said: "In the two decades I’ve covered the transglobal trade in discards, I’ve yet to see a shipping container of discards “dumped” on a developing country."

Perhaps the Mafia doesn't use shipping containers in particular. Perhaps this story this story has been thoroughly debunked somewhere. Yet as it stand, this story, sad and earlier as it might be, makes this reporter and son of junk yard owner, look a bit too beholden to the garbage industry that he has apparently always been a part of.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19923119

Everytime i hear about those stories i wonder how italy got its free pass to enter the european union. It sometimes feel like a country from the other side of the sea.

I highly recommend Gomorrah, a fictionalised set of inter-related stories about the role of the Camorra in running Naples (including waste disposal).

The article is from 2014 and should be marked as such. Can the mods do that?

The guidelines for appropriate posts is here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

"What to Submit

On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.

Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic."