A government plan to resolve southern Italy's perennial trash disposal problems is homing in on refuse collection firms that fail to recycle rubbish. Three consortia in the Campania region have already been placed under direct government control because they failed to embrace the recycling philosophy, Environment Minister Alfonso Pecoraro Scanio said on Tuesday.
The same fate could await other such companies in the region, the minister said after meeting Premier Romano Prodi in Rome to discuss an ongoing trash crisis in the region. "The Environment Ministry believes that the south must recycle trash just as the rest of the country does," the
minister said.
"In Campania we are no longer willing to tolerate this sluggishness," he continued, adding that recycling in the south was now a "priority" for the government. Pecoraro Scanio, a Green, has long argued that one solution to the problems facing Campania and its southern neighbours is to develop a system in which rubbish is sorted into various types and recycled.
Recycling is impossible if paper, glass, plastic and metal are mixed up with food and left-overs. While sorting and recycling systems are already in place in many northern regions, little progress has been made further down the peninsula. Recent figures show that an average of about 10% of trash is sorted in the south compared to 30-40% in the north.
Last week, the government appointed Carabinieri general Roberto Jucci to head a task force charged with guiding four southern regions out of the current trash emergency. Part of his mission is to boost the level of rubbish recycling.
Gen.Jucci attended Monday's meeting with Prodi and regional government chiefs in Rome. He said afterwards that results should be visible within six months. According to Pecoraro Scanio, Prodi is ready to take further action if measures adopted so far fail to increase the level of rubbish recycling in the south.
In recent weeks mountains of refuse have piled up in the streets of southern towns as the overloaded trash disposal system broke down. The inhabitants of some towns in Campania staged angry protests, sometimes setting the rubbish on fire. For several years, the south's creaking rubbish disposal system has been unable to cope with the volume of trash produced.
The situation has been compounded by the protests that often break out among locals whenever authorities identify a new location for a rubbish treatment plant.
