Italy faces smelly summer as waste crisis burns

By Robin Pomeroy

ROME (Reuters) - Parts of southern Italy face a hot and smelly summer as residents set fire to putrefying rubbish piled in the streets while authorities try to win a war they have long been losing against trash.

Streets in Naples and nearby towns are piled with household waste that has nowhere else to go -- the fault of political mismanagement, conflicting interests and organized crime, according to the head of parliament's environment committee.

"There's been a climate of general irresponsibility," Ermete Realacci told Reuters in an interview in which he tried to explain how a G8 country could allow waste to be burned and dumped illegally for so long that it has poisoned the water and land that hundreds of thousands of people live on.

"This week will be hot and that increases the unpleasantness and people's tendency to burn it -- that's when the worst dioxin pollution happens," said Realacci.

Italy declared a state of emergency for waste in the Campania region in 1994, but a series of trash tsars have been failing to stop the periodic crises in which locals have no choice but to dump, and often burn, rubbish in the streets.

Part of the problem is that organized crime -- rife in the Naples area where the Camorra holds sway -- has made illegal waste disposal an industry worth 5.8 billion euros a year in 2006, according to a study by conservation group Legambiente.

"The Camorra has been illegally dumping industrial waste," Realacci said. "For household rubbish, they are involved in transport, and the Camorra has an interest in keeping this situation of confusion because it means that controlling illegality (in waste transport) is more difficult."

"In recent years, the waste emergency has become an industry in itself."

Mafia-controlled waste disposal -- where it is buried or burned in uncontrolled conditions -- has poisoned the environment so badly in parts of the region that people are two-to-three times more likely to get liver cancer than in the rest of Italy, according to Italy's National Research Council.

The current trash tsar, Guido Bertolaso, has set himself an end-year deadline to solve the crisis. By then a massive incinerator should be operational, despite opposition by the locals, in Acerra -- a small town in the highly polluted area known as the "triangle of death."

Bertolaso's car was attacked by protesters when he tried to visit the mayor of Ariano Irpino, another small town where he has demanded that a decommissioned rubbish dump be reopened for three weeks as a short-term bid to ease the crisis.

The hot, smelly summer may also hurt Prime Minister Romano Prodi as the Campania region is a stronghold of his centre-left coalition where politicians are accused of failing their voters.