Living in Italy #17: Letter to the owner of the Italian Trash Company

When I landed in Rome, finally home after five months, there were three things I noticed on the way back from the airport:

1. A beautiful sunset, the kind you only see in Italy;
2. I had no mobile phone signal most of the way;
3. Trash piled up everywhere next to the waste bins.

Sunsets, we always cover extensively here on The Road. The paleolithic Italian mobile phone coverage, is a subject I will bitch about later. But the garbage problem, I have to revisit now. After all, it was the UN World Environment Day yesterday.

First, let me get this clear: I love living in Italy. But I never got my head around the fact why garbage is such a problem here. I mean, I don't live in a slum area, but in a village close to the capital, known as a weekend resort for the rich and famous - how much I fall out of that category. Still, trash piles up as if we lived in a slum...
And it is not as if people don't mind: People stopped I was walking around to take pictures of the three trash bins around my house. They looked at me, and at the rubble, only to sigh "A disgrace, isn't it?". One elder woman says: "Yes, young man, take pictures, document it, and do something about this scandal!".

So I will. Problem is, where to start? Luckily, one of the trash skips had a man's picture on it:


With my limited Italian, I understand this Mister Armeni must be the proud owner of the trash company called "Forza Italia". I guess the mother company is called "Il Popolo della Liberta - Berlusconi". Probably "Berlusconi" must be the overall umbrella of all Italian trash companies, then. At least that was the old lady's claim: "Berlusconi: Rifiuti! Rigiuti!"

As this Mister Armeni kindly displayed his picture on his company's trash cans, I gather he was asking for feedback. So I wrote him a letter:

To:
Mister Armeni
Owner
Regional Trash company "Forze Ragione Regione"
Member of National Trash company "Forza Italia"

Dear Mister Armeni,

Thank you for soliciting feedback on the services of your trash company. I would like to tell you how much I appreciate you must be owning a lot of wastage, and as part of the national trash conglomerate "Forza Italia", I am sure it must be a real challenge to daily hide garbage from the public eye.

Still, I would like to tell you that despite your best efforts, garbage seems to pile up more and more since you took over the company.

I hope you will soon deal with the situation, or speed up selling out your company to the well-known South Italian alliance specializing in the disposal of (radio active) trash (in the Mediterranean). I heard that company is already part of the National Trash company "Forza Italia" anyways...

Looking forward to see progress in your national programme "Trash Italy Fast"!

Kindly,
Peter

Post Scriptum: I googled the chairman of the Italian Trash company, and found this video, in which he explained his views on emancipation:

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Living in Italy - Part 8: Living with garbage

While I love living in Italy, one of the things that intrigued and bothered me is the lax attitude versus waste management, recycling and garbage collection.

Sure enough, there are many "parts" in Italy, each with their own habits, procedures, administration, and culture, so I can not speak for the parts I have not lived in, or travelled through, but it seems in many parts the garbage collection is done in the same way: People dump their waste in garbage skips scattered along the streets, both in town centers and along the roads in rural areas. A garbage truck comes along every so often to empty the skips.

There seems to be no limit as to what people can dump in these skips. You can find anything from normal household garbage, the contents of entire file cabinets, chemicals like paint, engine oil and cleaning products, leaves and branches from the garden, bicycles, fridges, microwaves and computer screens. Just about anything goes. And if it is too big to put inside, people just leave it next to the skip.

Often these collection points, separated by only a few hundred meters in the towns, become a concentric area of scattered broken glass, plastic bags, tins and cans that were either spilled while throwing them in the skip, pulled out by street dogs, or just dumped on the spot, next to the skip.

There are mainly three types of skips: one for generic waste, one for paper and cardboard and one for plastic and glass. In many cases, though, you can only find the one for generic waste, so "recycling" is often only a remote thought in Italy. A thought confirmed if you look what people actually dump in the recycling bins. It seems like they are used as an overflow for the general waste skip.

Most of the time, the skips are not emptied fast enough. What is the "well-intended waste generator" to do? He or she put his stinking and leaking garbage bags in the car (guaranteed to leave a smell for the next two months) early in the morning (what else do you need to start off a nice day), drives to the skip only to find it full... Of course people will not drive to the next one, or come back the next day. They will dump it right there.

I was glad to finally see some recycling bins in my neighbourhood. Previously I had to drive 3 km to the nearest place where I could conscientiously dump carefully separated paper, plastic and glass.
Unhappy I was to find the "glass and plastic"-skip is never emptied. It just stands there, full. And has been for the past four months..



More on The Road about living in Italy.

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News: November 19 - World Toilet Day

Did you know today was World Toilet Day?

60% of all rural diseases are caused by poor hygiene and sanitation condition. At any one time, half of the world's hospital beds are filled with people from water-borne diseases caused mostly by water polluted with untreated sewage. Proper sanitation is the best preventive medicine in the world.

Yet, 2.6 billion or 40% of mankind still do not have access to proper sanitation and toilets. And 2 million children die every year from diarrhea. Do we need more reasons to convince us that sanitation is so important?

And yet, sanitation is a problem that people are often shy to discuss. But a reluctance to talk about sanitation is part of the reason why an estimated 2.5 billion people worldwide do not have access to sanitation. Under the motto "DON'T BLUSH, SPONSOR A FLUSH!", the World Toilet Day wants to break the taboo and improve sanitation globally. (Read more)



More on The Road about sanitation, water, poverty and environment.

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Rumble: If pollution statistics were art...

Chris Jordan is a photographer/artist with a strong social message. His work visualizes statistics we read almost every day. Through the medium of intricately detailed prints, assembled from thousands of smaller photographs, he makes political statements. (Full)

Here are two million plastic beverage bottles,
used in the US every five minutes:


partial zoom:


actual size:


60,000 plastic bags used in the US every five seconds:


partial zoom:


actual size:


410,000 paper cups, used in the US every fifteen minutes:


partial zoom:


actual size:


106,000 aluminum cans used in the US every thirty seconds.


partial zoom:


actual size:


More on The Road about waste management, pollution and the environment

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News: Military takes over Naples garbage

Living in Italy, I am always interested in the local news. Not only for the contents, but also to get a feel of how people over here think and live their lives...

I reported in an earlier post about the garbage problem in Naples which left piles of stinking rubbish uncollected since December, due to incompetent governance and interests of the Comorra, the Mafia's local variant.

In January, the army started clearing up the piles of waste. Local waste dumps, however, were not able to handle the amounts of garbage people generated, and train loads of Napolitana trash went all over Europe. Germany is taking 200,000 tonnes of rubbish from Naples. Every day of the week a 56-wagon freight train full of rotting tomatoes and stinking nappies makes its way across the Alps to Hamburg, in northern Germany.

That was not a permanent neither a cost efficient solution. In a new phase to the Naples waste saga, the Italian army has now opened up its own waste dump near the city. 2,500 armed soldiers are sent in the further clean up the garbage and control the 'public order'. (Full)

If one would by cynical, the question could be asked: the lack of local waste dumps made "waste management" a lucrative income for the local Mafia. Is the army now found a new potential source of income? Smart move! :-)


More posts on The Road about Italy.

Picture courtesy Ciro de Luca (Reuters) and EPA (Al Jazeera)

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Rumble: A Lot of Crab -eh Crap?- !

1. A lot of Crab!
While editing my Dutch eBook, Addicted to the horizon , a lot of memories are coming back. Tine and I were scanning through some old pictures when she reminded me how intriguing some of this stuff was. [there is a lesson here: one gets easily used to the extra-ordinary].
I guess I got used to all of it, having gone over these pictures so many times already. And having been there. Things like the shot above, taken during our expedition to Clipperton, a deserted island in the Pacific. The land crabs were piling up trying to devour the bone of a spare rib. That is a lot of crab! They would eat anything. Plastic, cardboard, sleeping bags, ropes,... This made the island pretty clean!
Human waste was considered a delicacy. While squatting 'au naturel' on the island, shorts around our ankles, we had to scuffle forward as dozens of crabs would be fighting for your waste, piled on top of each other. If you were not scuffling fast enough, they would grab hold of your private parts... Tell ya, there are more pleasant things in life.

2. A lot of Crap!
Read an article today about the amount of garbage the world produces.. As an example, every day, the US [not trying to pick on the US, but it was the only figure I found!] produces enough non-recycable waste to fill the New Orleans Superdome twice. That is 230 million tons of solid waste per year. The amount of pollution and toxic leaching produced by a landfill receiving 1,000 tons per day of waste is 22,000 lbs. After a landfill closes, it is estimated that emissions could remain constant for as long as 30 years.

3. Let's launch "Crabs for Crap"!
I think I will run for prime minister, with only one single programme item: I will introduce the use of Clipperton land crabs in the processing of our waste in 'developed countries'. Think I stand a chance?

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