In Italy, clans and their middlemen earned over 65 billion dollars in just four years from waste management

"...Below the surface lies the cause. Campania, according to Legambiente, the environmental group, is the industrial dumping ground of Italy, and Europe. Just as Naples is the port that sucks in counterfeited goods and raw materials for clothing made in Campania and sent round the world, so the region is also where much comes back to be buried. And both are controlled by the Camorra, the Naples mafia.

If all of southern Italy's illegally stashed trash were piled together, estimates Legambiente, it would tower above Everest and weigh 14m tonnes."....

"It is the triangle of death," says Marco the protester....."significantly inc­reased rates" of congenital malformation and cancer in parts of Naples and Caserta."

"Understandably, Campania's residents fear that if incinerators are used, as the government has proposed for years, illegal toxic waste will simply be blasted into the atmosphere. Private "consortiu...... Mr Saviano, who lives under police protection, estimates Camorra clans and their middlemen earned €44bn ($65.5bn, £33.5bn) in just four years from waste management. Such are their skills that Chinese gangs have studied and copied their methods, turning farmland in southern China into poisoned wasteland.

In Italy a whole chain of people is involved and officials are complicit in signing off the paperwork.....

Everyone blames everyone, especially the easily targeted Camorra, but no one is taking responsibility."
15/1/2008 3:53:17 πμ
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