Italian police on Wednesday rounded up an alleged waste trafficking gang in southern Italy.
It was the second such operation in two days.
On Wednesday 13 people including a leading Bari businessman and a member of the Communist Refoundation Party were arrested for tampering with pollution gauges and dumping into a plant near Bari twice the amount of waste it was designed to process.
As a result, police said, the local water table was contaminated and toxic substances as well as dangerously high levels of metals were found in a local river. On Monday police arrested 16 people for dumping toxic waste into the seas off Taranto, Puglia, and a further 80 people from all over Italy were placed under investigation in the probe.
Environment Minister Altero Matteoli said on Wednesday that waste disposal - both toxic and domestic - was the biggest environmental problem facing the south of Italy. There has been a string of protests against waste incinerators in the south in recent years while rubbish has built up to dangerous levels in cities from Naples to Palermo.
Police and environmental organisations such as the World Wide Fund for Nature say much of the waste disposal market is controlled by various southern mafias.
