
Illegal toxic waste dumping in Italy (2014) - jxub
https://gizmodo.com/the-mob-is-secretly-dumping-nuclear-waste-across-italy-1513190243
======
the-rc
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.

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3xblah
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."

------
z3t4
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.

~~~
Red_Tarsius
Last year I watched a short tv reportage on Gela, Sicily. The small town was
next to a major industrial area of the island. 50 years of _omertà_ , bribes
and illegal dumping from the petrochemical factory caused the town's death
toll to skyrocket: +50% birth defects, +7% mortality for men and +15% for
women compared to the rest of Sicily. Tumors left and right. (data source:
[http://www.rainews.it/dl/rainews/TGR/media/sic-gela-
inquinam...](http://www.rainews.it/dl/rainews/TGR/media/sic-gela-inquinamenti-
eni-raffineria-petrolio-tumore-f2f6bae1-1b4c-4cfe-b36a-202f3ea00df4.html))

Now the former blue collar workers (the ones who haven't died yet) are coming
forward: " _I buried Eni 's toxic waste. They_ (He talks about the higher ups)
_used to say that everyone (the town) was going to die of tumor in the
future._ " The processing waste, " _from amianto to the reactor 's ceramic
rings_", were allegedly buried in 500m²*15m tanks near the factory.

I imagine this happens all the time, all over the world. Cutting corners – at
the expense of the labor force – is the norm, not the exception. Even worse,
imagine how difficult is to clean up the area. Even if you magically erase the
waste now, that district will still be a death show for decades to come.

------
siruncledrew
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...](https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/stemming-the-plastic-
tide-10-rivers-contribute-most-of-the-plastic-in-the-oceans/?redirect=1)) and
also the list of the most heavily polluted rivers ([https://www.conserve-
energy-future.com/most-polluted-rivers-...](https://www.conserve-energy-
future.com/most-polluted-rivers-world.php)). 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?

------
joe_the_user
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](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19923119)

~~~
rasz
Usual MO seems to be

-start a company using Bum off the street as a frontman

-import ship full of toxic waste

-rent dilapidated barracks from random farmer

-truck garbage in under cover of night

-set everything on fire

-go to step 1

At the start of 2018 there were 60 illegal toxic waste dumps in just first
_three months_.

[https://www.independent.co.uk/environment/poland-illegal-
was...](https://www.independent.co.uk/environment/poland-illegal-waste-uk-
return-plastic-pollution-environment-agency-greenpeace-a8491201.html)

[https://www.reuters.com/article/us-poland-waste/poland-
vows-...](https://www.reuters.com/article/us-poland-waste/poland-vows-to-
fight-illegal-waste-dumps-after-toxic-fires-idUSKCN1IU1QZ)

~~~
Red_Tarsius
Sometimes they bury the toxic waste under the same land used for growing crops
and keeping livestocks. Consequence: the contamination of the groundwater used
by all the local farms. The result is carcinogenic meat and produce. I first
read about it in Roberto Saviano's _Gomorrah_.

------
bsaul
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.

~~~
badpun
Can't imagine it's worse than Greece or Bulgaria.

~~~
metroholografix
It's so much worse since Greece hasn't been infiltrated by the mafia on a
state level. Greek politicians are corrupt but in a populist, power-to-rule-
over-masses way.

There are no large-scale mafia organizations that control parts of the
country, parts of the government, like in Italy which is pretty much a mafia
state.

This means that rackets like toxic waste disposal (= poisoning your own land
and killing your people) are unheard of in Greece.

~~~
badpun
We have no mafia here in Poland, and yet in my very own city some criminals
have been disposing illegally of some toxic waste on a large scale. Criminals
are everywhere, and all it takes is shitty police and judicial system for them
to thrive.

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

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

~~~
jxub
Sorry, I copied the submission title a bit too hastily.

------
steelframe
The guidelines for appropriate posts is here:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](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."

~~~
rubyn00bie
And further down the same page:

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