Toxic waste near Naples

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The toxic waste near Naples poses an environmental risk for the region around Naples and Caserta . The waste has been illegally disposed of since the 1970s .

history

In Campania , north of Naples and south of Caserta , the Mafia has illegally dumped and set on fire or buried millions of tons of industrial waste since the 1970s and increasingly from the 1980s. Hospital waste, rubbish from pharmaceutical manufacturers and probably radioactive waste can be found on many wild rubbish tips . Local farmers say they were forced by the Camorra to dump industrial sludge on their fields as early as the 1970s .

Triangolo della morte (death triangle)

The toxic waste is spread over many places and buried up to 30 meters deep. Because of the fires, Italians call this part of Campania La terra dei fuochi , 'Land of Fires', or Triangolo della morte , 'Triangle of Death' because of the health problems . The illegal disposal of toxic waste by the Mafia had long been known, especially locally. So is z. For example, the Resit landfill in Giugliano in Campania near Naples has been closed for years because of its highly toxic industrial sludge. The mafia received millions for this type of garbage disposal. The government is said to have been corrupted by the mafia and has remained inactive for 30 years.

Carmine Schiavone, a 70-year-old man, and Pentito , a former member of the Cosa Nostra , cousin of the boss of the Casalesi clan , were arrested in 1992 because his cronies had betrayed him to the police when he tried to prevent them from dealing with toxic waste. The Casalesi are based in Campania, but for historical reasons call themselves the Campanian branch of the Cosa Nostra, the Sicilian Mafia. Schiavone began working with the authorities in 1993 within a witness protection program . In 1994 he was interrogated in a barracks near Munich for around two weeks by investigators from several German authorities. Ernst Wirth, a former key witness expert at the State Criminal Police Office in Bavaria , said in an interview with the BR in January 2014: “For me, Carmine Schiavone is absolutely credible, that is his capital ... Now you have to check in detail where he made these statements [about radioactive waste from Germany]. I can only say, not with me in my interrogations. ”The Federal Criminal Police Office in Wiesbaden and the Federal Intelligence Service also announced that there were meetings with Schiavone in 1994 that it was about Casalesi's business on German soil, but about talks about poisonous or toxic substances The officials concerned had no memory of nuclear waste. Schiavone, however, asserts that radioactive material, “probably from East Germany”, was delivered in lead cassettes about 50 centimeters long: “It was buried at a depth of up to 20 meters. But the probe, with which radiation was measured there later, came only 6 meters deep. "Schiavone:" There were barrels on trucks with German license plates. "

In 1997, Schiavone testified before a secret parliamentary committee of inquiry in Rome that the Camorra in southern Italy was storing toxic waste from all over Europe. He described in detail what was going on in Campania, naming the transport companies involved and showing the investigators where hazardous waste was hidden. He said that trucks from Germany, among others, had brought radioactive waste into lead boxes, that his clan had earned at least 700 million lire a month from the illegal garbage business in the early 1990s , and the methods used by the Camorra to set up the 106 mayors of Campania and how many policemen there were their payrolls were up. Schiavone's statement culminated in the sentence: "The people in the area risk all of them dying of cancer in twenty years." The hearing was then classified by Parliament.

A household garbage chaos in Campania had been known in Germany since 2001, when two trains a day made of 22 wagons loaded with 500 to 600 tons of Campanian household waste drove to North Rhine-Westphalia to be incinerated . The governor of the Campania region, Antonio Bassolino, negotiated this with an emergency request to the North Rhine-Westphalian state government. One thousand tons of garbage was only around a seventh of the 7200 tons that were produced daily in Campania and that cost the Italian state 170 to 200 euros per ton including transport. H. 200,000 euros per day.

In 2006, the author Roberto Saviano described the machinations of the Camorra in his book Gomorrah - Journey into the Empire of the Camorra , which was later made into a film. Saviano had researched that in 2004 the Camorra charged around ten cents for the removal of one kilo of toxic waste, and that proper disposal cost up to 62 cents. The Italian environmental protection organization Legambiente has estimated that the Mafia generated 3.1 billion euros in toxic waste disposal in 2011 and over 16 billion euros in total illegal waste disposal in 2012, with 11.6 million tons of illegally disposed of annually.

In October 2013, two Italian MPs managed to have the text of the 16-year-old minutes of Schiavone's statements published. Schiavone has since publicly declared: "We have accepted and buried everything, including radioactive waste, from all over Italy, France, Austria, Germany and other countries". Especially after the fall of the Berlin Wall , the Mafia is said to have made a lot of money doing business in Germany, with connections to Dortmund , Munich and Baden-Baden . Schiavone claimed to the Italian state television RAI that the Camorra continues the illegal waste disposal to this day. Legambiente commented that the open secret had been revealed.

Environmental damage

The toxins from the garbage dumps have contaminated the soil, groundwater and, through the garbage fires, the air we breathe. Foams, which release carcinogenic dioxins and chlorine compounds when burned , lead , mercury and other heavy metals, solvents such as tetrachlorethylene , and asbestos were carried away by the wind. The soil around Naples is one of the most fertile in Europe and is used intensively for agriculture. In the third largest agricultural region with up to four harvests per year, farmers now have difficulties selling their products. The provincial government has closed many cultivation areas since it was officially announced. One landowner complained that he had to lay off ten of his workers and suffered a loss of 100,000 euros, even though he had been confirmed by experts that his vegetables were not contaminated.

The entrepreneur who z. B. operated by the company Resit, which has since been closed down, and did business with the Mafia clans, was arrested and his property was confiscated. Because of the "infiltration of the Camorra", the entire administration of the municipality of Giugliano in Campania was dissolved in the spring of 2013 and the city was placed under temporary administration. Among other things, it was found that Giugliano, one of the largest transshipment centers for fruit and vegetables in Italy, does not have any controls despite the enormous environmental damage. Fields around the old toxic waste dump continued to be cultivated despite the ban. The Italian Agricultural Association has warned that the "Agro-Mafia" has discovered agriculture as a new business, that farmers are being put under pressure, have to sell at cheap prices, the indications of origin are falsified and the goods are being resold.

US Navy risk assessment

The US Navy base in Gricignano di Aversa is about 15 kilometers north of Naples and about 13 kilometers southwest of Caserta, where thousands of soldiers and their relatives are stationed. Air, water and soil were examined. Based on the results, soldiers are prohibited from living outside of the US neighborhood. Nobody is allowed to stay in Naples for more than two years. The barracks are halfway between two contaminated areas. The Americans took samples of earth, water and air from more than a thousand square kilometers around their base as part of a $ 30 million study by the US Navy in 2011. Over 5281 contaminated or suspicious locations are mentioned. 92 percent of the water samples from private wells outside the barracks area showed an “unacceptable health risk” and the values ​​for uranium were “unacceptably high” in five percent of all cases. Tap water may not be used to brush your teeth in the barracks. The Americans judged: "In the course of time it has become clear that the inability of the (Italian) authorities to enforce laws has contributed to this situation." If one of the soldiers does not want to live on the barracks, he is advised to move into to move into a multi-storey building; further up, the exposure to toxic gases is lower. Three residential areas not far from the base have now been declared completely prohibited zones for the soldiers - there will no longer be any new US tenants there. The medical journal The Lancet Oncology renamed the region around Naples in 2004 the "death triangle".

Health consequences

Young parents got sick. Increasingly, children with congenital tumors in the liver, kidneys and brain are being registered. An official cancer registry does not exist, but increased cancer rates in Naples and the surrounding area have been asserted from several sides. A study by the Sbarro Institute for Cancer Research at Temple University of Philadelphia, led by Antonio Giordano and with the help of Giulio Tarro, chief physician at the Cotugno Hospital (named after Domenico Cotugno) in Naples, found that cancer rates in some places were around 80 Percent higher than average. On July 30, 2012, the Pascale National Cancer Institute of Naples reported that 47% more people develop cancer in Naples than in the rest of the country. Oncologist Antonio Marfella from the Italian Cancer Research Institute in Naples has been recording for years that people are getting sick, fertility and life expectancy have fallen in Campania and that the number of tumors has increased. Children die from leukemia and adults from tumors more often than in the rest of Italy. Tumor diseases in men in the province of Naples had increased by 47 percent within two decades; Above all, the number of lung cancers is growing, even among non-smokers. The Campania region now has the highest infertility rate in Italy and is also a leader in cases of severe autism. According to Antonio Marfella, the rate of lung cancer in women has doubled in the past decade. "It is clear that the death rate of the population is higher near landfills and places where garbage is secretly buried," said Giuseppe Comella, head of the National Cancer Research Institute in Naples. According to the oncologist and toxicologist Antonio Marfella, precisely those types of cancer that can be traced back to environmental influences are on the rise. For example, there are up to three times more cancers of the liver - an organ that has to do more when the environment is polluted.

A few kilometers south of Orta di Atella in the village of Frattamaggiore, who has been based since 2010, the 47-year-old family doctor and general practitioner Luigi Costanzo, who looks after around 1,600 patients there, said that he had noticed how certain diseases were increasing. In almost every family someone has cancer, asthma and thyroid problems are also increasing, there is an extremely high rate of infertile couples and deformities in the unborn. Luigi Costanzo requested data from the Naples North Health Authority, which shows that cancer in his region more than tripled between 2008 and 2012, the rate of breast cancer among women under forty has increased by a third in the last 10 years and that it is a veritable epidemic of thyroid cancer. Allergies and miscarriages have also increased.

In a community named by the newspaper Die Welt , cancer cases are said to have skyrocketed from 136 in 2008 to 420 in 2012. The Ministry of Health in Rome announced that there was no evidence of a connection between environmental toxins and cancer rates. Minister Beatrice Lorenzin, a member of the Il Popolo della Libertà (PdL) party, said in July 2013 that a causal relationship was just a hypothesis. One must also ask oneself whether an unhealthy lifestyle in the Campania region is not one of the causes of the increased disease rates. The Frankfurter Rundschau reported on a 51-year-old woman who has lived with her family for twenty years one kilometer as the crow flies from the now disused rubbish dump in Giugliano, one of the largest in the area. Like her daughter, mother and mother-in-law, she suffers from Hashimoto's syndrome, an autoimmune thyroid disease that can be triggered by environmental toxins.

Schiavone said that the terra dei fuochi was largely uninhabitable, and anyone who stayed there had their fate sealed ("Die. What else?"). A group of Roma lives right next to one of the most toxic landfills in Giugliano. They were sent there by the prefecture with their caravans - they even provided a connection to the power supply.

Statements by Carmine Schiavone

Schiavone has openly criticized the state in interviews since October 2013: “I only know 10% of the story. If one had followed up on my leads back then [1997] and had carried out investigations, it would have come out that the whole of Italy was poisoned. The state didn't care. He suppressed the truth because the state and the mafia were partners. "Schiavone:" The garbage business is not very expensive and brings more money than the drug business. "His organization earned at least 700 million lire a month, around 350,000 euros . "If we are guilty, then it is all the more those who have allowed all of this: police officers, prosecutors and politicians." The chairman of the environmental committee in the Roman parliament, Social Democrat MP and former environmentalist Ermete Realacci, pointed out that we should not forget that it was a former criminal: "In the hearing from back then he told some truths and a lot of nonsense." For example, the investigators never found radioactive waste in Campania. The prosecutors did their job well and followed up on all leads.

Reactions

Citizen protests and citizens' initiatives

For years, a dozen orphaned women have met once a week with Father Maurizio Patriciello from Caivano in a self-help group . Allegedly, many others do not come because they are too desperate. Patriciello is a kind of leader of the citizens' movement against toxic waste that started in his rectory in 2011. After the loss of their children, mothers charged those who were allegedly responsible. They met with the Prime Minister Giorgio Napolitano to point out the fate of their relatives, although they ruled out leaving the area: “Where should we go? Even if they gave us a new home - we don't believe anything or anyone anymore. "

There are citizens' groups fighting against pollution, documenting the incineration of waste and the consequences for people and the environment in pictures, collecting information about chemicals that are hazardous to health, organizing information events and demonstrations, suing mayors and creating maps on the Internet showing the locations of new illegal waste dumps enter. An umbrella organization of citizens 'initiatives is skeptical that landowners are being prosecuted, as entire mountains of files with the names of those involved have been available to the public prosecutor's offices for years and innumerable complaints from the citizens' committees have remained without consequences. More and more people are joining the citizens' movement: almost 50,000 people came to a demonstration in October 2013, and in November 2013 around 100,000 residents of the suburbs of Naples took to the streets to protest against the conditions and the inaction of the politicians

Catholic Church

The Archbishop of Naples and bishops of local dioceses wrote in an open letter to President Giorgio Napolitano, "An environmental disaster ... has turned into a humanitarian tragedy". In July 2014, Pope Francis renewed his criticism of the Mafia at a mass in Caserta.

Authorities

For more than 30 years, the Italian authorities hardly did anything, which for the residents of the "Terra dei Fuochi" is proof that the Italian state had no interest in telling them the truth and protecting them.

In 2013, Sergio Costa , the provincial commander of the environmental police Corpo Forestale, stated in an interview with the state news channel RAINews in a field in Caivano ten kilometers from Orta di Atella that 200,000 cubic meters of hazardous waste were stored under his feet over seven hectares. The environmental police have developed a method to track down buried garbage using thermal images taken from the air. According to Costa, 23 hectares were seized by his authority. The owners of the fields would only have to fear a fine. Until the site was closed in June 2013, broccoli thrived over a four-meter-high layer of waste. From the confiscated vegetables, broccoli and tomatoes contained cadmium , arsenic and lead in a concentration that exceeded the permitted maximum 500 times. The owner of the broccoli field was allegedly a well-known freelancer from the area and, according to Police General Costa, "... not a fool, but an educated man who knew exactly what he was doing." But although he had put the health of his fellow citizens at risk , only threatens him a fine, since environmental pollution in Italy is not punishable by imprisonment. When poison barrels were dug up under seven hectares of cabbage fields in Caivano, the plastic gloves of some officials dissolved when they came into contact with the toxins.

However, police officers on site also wrote critical reports such as B. Roberto Mancini. His 300-page investigation report was ignored until 2008. He was transferred to Rome until he died of cancer in 2014, aged just 53.

Politician

In October 2013, the Italian Parliament passed a law to track down illegal dumps and give medical examinations to 1.2 million people in the region. A total of 900 hectares should be examined and rehabilitated, including the coastline in front of Licola north of Naples. The multi-million dollar contracts would mean huge profits for renovation companies. Schiavone: “Who cleans up a landfill? A clean company, but who is behind the clean company? ”“ In the end, the heavily indebted Italian state will have to pay. So far, toxic waste has not been removed from any of the confiscated areas. ”Public prosecutor Giovanni Conzo said in an interview with RTL that was carried out under strong personal protection:“ The Omertà hinders the investigation; the few key witnesses are very important. "

The focus is on the following politicians:

  • Giorgio Napolitano , then Minister of the Interior and chief employer of the investigators, Italy's President until February 2014; said that the Camorra was primarily responsible for the environmental disaster near his home town of Naples, he did not comment on his own responsibility.
  • According to Schiavone, Gennaro Capoluongo was in the helicopter in 1997 on the way to the site visit at the toxic waste dumps; In 2014 he was Italy's Interpol boss.
  • Alessandro Pansa, then on the command staff of the mobile police force, was head of the Italian state police in 2014.
  • Nicola Cavaliere, who, according to Schiavone, was in charge of the files on the case in the criminal investigation department, was Vice President of Domestic Intelligence in 2014 and said he had "never dealt with the whole matter directly".

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c d e f g h i Regina Kerner: Garbage contaminates Italy. In the poison chamber of Campania. In: Berliner Zeitung. November 11, 2013, accessed February 17, 2014 .
  2. ↑ a b c Mike Lingenfelser, Sandro Mattioli, Reinhard Weber: Deadly toxic waste in Italy. A Mafia key witness and the lead to Germany. In: Bayerischer Rundfunk. January 21, 2014, archived from the original on February 11, 2014 ; accessed on February 17, 2014 .
  3. ↑ a b c Toxic waste near Naples. (No longer available online.) In: ZDF today in Europe. January 14, 2014, archived from the original on February 28, 2014 ; accessed on February 17, 2014 . Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.zdf.de
  4. ↑ a b c d e f Von Mayr, Walter: Italy. In the forecourt of hell. In: Spiegel Online. January 13, 2014, accessed February 17, 2014 .
  5. ↑ a b c d e Naples: The Mafia and its toxic waste: Camorra buried radioactive waste for decades. In: RTL . January 31, 2014, accessed February 17, 2014 .
  6. ↑ Naples' dirty business with Germany. In: Spiegel Online. January 11, 2008, accessed February 17, 2014 .
  7. ^ A b Stefanie Kompatscher: Italy: The Mafia and its dirtiest business. In: DiePresse.com. October 19, 2012, accessed February 17, 2014 .
  8. ^ A b Alvise Armellini: Secret Protocol. Mafia dumps millions of tons of toxic waste in Italy. The protocol was kept secret for 16 years: as early as 1997, an ex-mafia boss testified that the Camorra in southern Italy was storing toxic waste from all over Europe. Today he says: You are still doing it. In: The world. November 7, 2013, accessed February 17, 2014 .
  9. ↑ a b c d e f g h i Italy: Deadly toxic waste. In: Europamagazin, ARD . February 15, 2014, archived from the original on January 20, 2015 ; accessed on February 17, 2014 .
  10. ↑ A. Basile, S. Sorbo et al. a .: Heavy metal deposition in the Italian "triangle of death" determined with the moss Scorpiurum circinatum. In: Environmental Pollution . Volume 157, Numbers 8-9, 2009 Aug-Sep, pp. 2255-2260, ISSN  1873-6424 . doi : 10.1016 / j.envpol.2009.04.001 . PMID 19446383 .
  11. ↑ a b c d e Regina Kerner: Italy. Vegetables from the toxic waste mountain. In: Frankfurter Rundschau, Panorama Current news from society. November 17, 2013, accessed February 17, 2014 .
  12. ↑ K. Senior, A. Mazza: Italian "Triangle of death" linked to waste crisis. In: The Lancet Oncology . Volume 5, Number 9, September 2004, pp. 525-527, ISSN  1470-2045 . PMID 15384216 .
  13. ↑ Jörg Bremer: Burning mountains of rubbish That stinks to heaven. In: Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. August 3, 2012, accessed February 17, 2014 .
  14. ↑ SHRO Press Release
  15. ↑ A. Crispo, M. Barba et al. a .: Cancer mortality trends between 1988 and 2009 in the metropolitan area of ​​Naples and Caserta, Southern Italy: Results from a joinpoint regression analysis. In: Cancer biology & therapy. Volume 14, Number 12, December 2013, pp. 1113-1122, ISSN  1555-8576 . doi : 10.4161 / cbt.26425 . PMID 24025410 . PMC 3912034 (free full text).
  16. ↑ M. Fusco, R. De Angelis et al. a .: Estimates of cancer burden in Campania. In: Tumori. Volume 99, Number 3, 2013 May-Jun, pp. 374-381, ISSN  2038-2529 . doi : 10.1700 / 1334.14802 (currently not available) . PMID 24158067 .
  17. ↑ M. Martuzzi, F. Mitis et al. a .: Cancer mortality and congenital anomalies in a region of Italy with intense environmental pressure due to waste. In: Occupational and Environmental Medicine . Volume 66, Number 11, November 2009, pp. 725-732, ISSN  1470-7926 . doi : 10.1136 / oem.2008.044115 . PMID 19416805 .
  18. ↑ L. Fazzo, S. Belli et al. a .: Cluster analysis of mortality and malformations in the Provinces of Naples and Caserta (Campania Region). In: Annali dell'Istituto superiore di sanità. Volume 44, Number 1, 2008, pp. 99-111, ISSN  0021-2571 . PMID 18469382 .
  19. ↑ P. Comba, F. Bianchi et al. a .: Cancer mortality in an area of ​​Campania (Italy) characterized by multiple toxic dumping sites. In: Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences . Volume 1076, September 2006, pp. 449-461, ISSN  0077-8923 . doi : 10.1196 / annals.1371.067 . PMID 17119224 .
  20. ↑ Death triangle around Naples. Illegal dumps make people sick. In: Spiegel Online. April 25, 2008, accessed February 17, 2014 .
  21. ↑ Tens of thousands demonstrate against Camorra toxic waste. In: Zeit.de. November 13, 2013, accessed February 17, 2014 .
  22. ^ Church in Italy's 'Triangle of Death' demands cleanup of mafia waste. In: Reuters.com. January 4, 2014, accessed August 29, 2014 .
  23. ↑ James Mackenzie: Pope Francis renews attack on mafia in region scarred by toxic waste. July 26, 2014, accessed August 29, 2014 .
  24. ^ Sandro Mattioli in memory of Roberto Mancini May 5, 2014
  25. ^ Ian Birrell: Mafia, toxic waste and a deadly cover up in an Italian paradise: 'They've poisoned our land and stolen our children'. In: Telegraph Media Group. June 24, 2016, accessed September 1, 2018 .