Naples Garbage Opera – Act III

Images of the Day:

2½ years Later…

It’s NOT Our Problem!

Garbage is piling up in Naples‘ city center. Credit:  EPA/CIRO FUSCO. Image may be subject to copyright.

Police riot squads clash with demonstrators in Terzigno, near Naples, Italy. Demonstrators oppose plans to use a site near Naples as garbage dump . They clashed with the police and set vehicle alight. Credit: Salvatore Laporta /AP Photo. Image may be subject to copyright.

Related Links:

• Naples Garbage Opera – Act II
• Seeking Toxic Asylum (Act I)
  
• Naples Garbage: First Commercial Dividends
• Naples: The Triangle of Death

• Geneva ready to take Naples’ trash
• Nessun dorma (None Shall Sleep)

• Naples garbage is mafia gold
• Italy: Submerged in Floodwaters, Sinking in Garbage

Mafia Solves Nuclear Waste Problem

Nuclear Waste Disposal Doesn’t Have to Be So Expensive: Mafia

The enterprising corporate arm of Mafia has found an answer (!) to the age old problem of energy growth: Go Nuclear!

And don’t worry about the astronomical cost of “disposing” of the permanent waste. They will dump it in the ocean for you at premium prices.

Italian authorities have located the wreck of a vessel with 180 barrels of toxic waste on board, which they say was sunk by the mafia, off the south coast of Italy. The sunken ship  is reported to be one of more than 30 scuttled by Cosa Nostra.

Photo: ANSA.it. Image may be subject to copyright.

Italian officials say the 110-meter long sunken vessel, which lay in 500 meters of water in the Tyrrhenian sea,  may contain radioactive waste, a report said.

The ship’s location was revealed by Francesco Fonti, an ex-member of Calabria’s feared ‘Ndrangheta crime group, who confessed to using explosives to sink this vessel and two others.

The ship lay less than 28  km off the coast of Calabria in southwestern Italy, and was filmed by a remote-controlled submarine. A short video is available at:  toxic dump.

Video images show an empty barrel lay on the seabed, which appears to have fallen out of a gaping hole in the sunken vessel’s damaged hull.

“There could be problems of toxins and heavy metals … this is an issue for the whole international community,” Silvestro Greco, head of Calabria’s environment agency, was reported as saying..

Greco said investigators believed there were 32 ships carrying toxic waste sunk by the mafia since the introduction of tighter environmental legislation in the 1980s made illegal waste disposal a lucrative business for crime groups.

“The Mediterranean is 0.7 percent of the world’s seas. If in this tiny portion there are more than 30 (toxic waste) shipwrecks, imagine what there could be elsewhere,” he said.

Related News Links:

• Toxic shipwreck calls for action
• Mafia ‘sank nuclear waste ship’
• Italy finds wreck of toxic waste ship sunk by mafia

Related FEWW Links:

• STOP Killing Our Oceans!
• Back from the “Great Pacific Garbage Patch”
• The Garbage Patch [You Tube Video]
• Algalita Photo Gallery
• Pt. 1 “Plastic in the Ocean” Interview with Capt. Charles Moore [You Tube Video]
• Pt. 2 “Plastic in the Ocean” Interview with Dr. Marcus Eriksen

• WILD FACTS SERIES: Our Oceans Are Dying!

• Southern Ocean already losing ability to absorb CO₂
• Oceans, Where Life Started, Are Dying – Part IV :  Researchers found evidence of corrosive water about 20 miles off the west coast of North America from Canada to Mexico.
• Human carbon emissions make oceans corrosive : ‘Carbon dioxide spewed by human activities has made ocean water so acidic that it is eating away at the shells and skeletons of starfish, coral, clams and other sea creatures …’
• The Eight Steps that Help Kill More of Our Fish : How Your Car’s Exhaust Emissions Helps Create Dead Zones and Kill Our Fish.
• Global warming could starve oceans of oxygen: study : Areas of the eastern Atlantic and Pacific Oceans with low amounts of dissolved oxygen have expanded in the past 50 years, apparently in line with rising temperatures.
• The Floating Toxic Garbage Island : A patch of garbage twice as large as the continental United States and dubbed the Great Pacific Garbage Patch floats in the middle of the Pacific Ocean in North Pacific Gyre.
• Oceans, Where Life Started, Are Dying – Part III : Tourism: The Most Destructive Human Activity After Warfare
• Oceans, Where Life Started, Are Dying – Part II : Major Problems: Fertilizer Runoff; Tourism; Coastal Developments [and Ocean Warming due to climate change]
• Oceans, Where Life Started, Are Dying – Part I : Our Oceans Are Now Dying!

• “Climate Engineering” Best Option: Economists
• New Stars Are Born
• Seeking Toxic Asylum
• Naples Garbage Opera – Act II
• Naples Garbage: First Commercial Dividends
• Naples: The Triangle of Death

• Italy: Submerged in Floodwaters, Sinking in Garbage
• Collapsing Cities
• Nessun dorma (None Shall Sleep)
• The $500-a-barrel professors!
• Out of the Italian Mafia Frying Pan, Into the Swiss Mafia Fire

Seeking Toxic Asylum

submitted by a reader

Partenope: Naples Garbage Opera

Protagonists:

• Queen Partenope: Played by the entire population of Naples and Campania [and the estimated 1.2 million tons of rotting garbage]
• Prince Armindo of Rhodes: played by Il Duce [the leader] of Italy Silvio Berlusconi and his gang.
• Prince Arsace of Corinth: The garbage incinerators in Germany, Switzerland and elsewhere
• Prince Emilio of Cumae [who is at war with Naples and with Queen Partenope] : Played by the Camorra mafia

Full List of Actors:

• Il Duce [the leader] of Italy Silvio Berlusconi
• Environment Minister Stefania Prestigiacomo
• Camorra mafia
• Cardinal Angelo Bagnasco, head of the influential Italian Bishops Conference
• The corrupt regional governor, Antonio Bassolino, and 27 others under house arrest.
• City’s chief officer and special commissioner Alessandro Pansa (one of the 27)
• Rosanna Laraia, head of waste management in Italy’s Ministry for the Environment

• Billions of missing, misappropriated, or unaccounted for euros [ € billions ]

• Environmental campaigner Francesco Pascale
• Sergio Sedia and his wife Giulia
• President Giorgio Napolitano
• Just over 1 million Neapolitans (and a further 5 million people living in Campania region and the province of Naples.)
• Hundreds of police officers in riot gears
• Probably as many as 10 million “super-charged” rats and 100 million cockroaches living in the garbage piles throughout the city of Naples

Composer:

• Germany’s George Frideric Handel

Act I – Seeking Toxic Asylum

In Act I of the famous Naples Garbage Opera, Partenope, Sergio Sedia and his wife Giulia request “toxic asylum” in Switzerland.

Sergio and his wife Giulia live in the “Triangle of Death” near Naples where the mafia has illegally dumped tons of toxic waste. British medical journal, The Lancet, reported in 2004 on “considerably higher cancer and deformity rates” in the area compared with other parts of the Campania region near Naples.

[Other than rats and cockroaches, what sort of vermin would transform its place of habitat to this?] A woman wearing a filtered mask walks past piles of trash thrown into a street intersection in protest in Naples May 16, 2008. REUTERS/Ciro Messere/Agnfoto. Image may be subject to copyright. See FEWW Fair Use Notice!

“The (Italian) government has not protected my right to health, and in this area people are dying of cancers caused by tonnes of chemical and toxic waste illegally dumped here for more than 20 years,” said Sergio.

Camorra mafia has been secretly dumping thousands of tonnes of industrial waste since the 1980s in what is “the heart of some of Italy’s best farm land,” environmental groups said.

“This area is nearly entirely agricultural, there are no factories, but has mortality rates for cancers linked to pollution higher than the national average. Here one doesn’t die of a heart attack or an accident, but from tumors,” said Sedia, 34, who works in the finance industry.

Silvio Berlusconi Prime Minister of Italy (President of the Council of Ministers of Italy). Born 29 September 1936, he is an entrepreneur, media proprietor and Head of the

“What I eat and breathe every day makes me afraid because of the products — the asbestos, the lead, the dioxins that are there in the air, the soil, the ground water,” he told AFP.

Fearing also for the health of their unborn child, said Sedia, “we decided to demand protection abroad and our choice fell on Switzerland.”

“We want to save ourselves, and only another country can help us, because if waste is one enemy, the Italian state is another in continuing to deny there is a problem in this area.”

“The Italian authorities are trying to act as if the problem of contamination doesn’t exist,” he said.

“I am not very confident when I see the authorities test mozzarella (over dioxin poisoning) because it is a valuable product, but doesn’t conduct tests on us citizens because we don’t have any commercial value.”

Earlier this year samples of mozzarella cheese, made from buffalo milk, were found to have highlevels of the toxic compound dioxin. As a result, buffalo farms in the Campania region were quarantined.

Japan, Singapore and South Korea banned the import of Italian mozzarella, earlier this year. (Source)

continued …

Related Links:

• Naples Garbage Opera – Act II
• Naples Garbage: First Commercial Dividends
• Naples: The Triangle of Death