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.
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.
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...)
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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."
> Please don't complain that a submission is inappropriate. If a story is spam or off-topic, flag it. Don't feed egregious comments by replying; flag them instead. If you flag, please don't also comment that you did.
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.