nationalpost.com

by Robin Pomeroy

NAPLES — Police in Naples clashed early on Tuesday with protesters blocking access to a garbage dump, dashing hopes of a peaceful end to a crisis over waste disposal that has brought part of the Italian city to a standstill.

Trash has piled up across Naples after refuse collection ceased two weeks ago when almost all waste dumps in the region were declared full to capacity.

The re-opening of an old dump on the outskirts of Naples has been proposed as a stop-gap solution, but outraged residents of the suburb of Pianura have used metal fences, overturned dumpsters and piles of garbage to block access to the landfill.

The thousands of protesters appeared to have won on Monday evening when police withdrew and a spokesman for Prime Minister Romano Prodi said the government would announce a “radical” solution in the next 24 hours.

But police returned overnight, clashing with hundreds of protesters still on the streets. Protesters, most of them young men, threw missiles at police. Reuters witnesses saw some protesters taken away in an ambulance.

Prodi was due to hold an emergency cabinet meeting later on Tuesday.

The commission in charge of the waste emergency said the plan to re-open the landfill would go ahead. Environment Minister Alfonso Pecoraro Scanio, the head of the Green Party and a natural ally of the protestors, acknowledged the government did plan to use the dump, if only for a limited time.

Soldiers cleared some of the festering piles of waste from around Naples schools on Monday. Pecoraro Scanio suggested using the army for rubbish cleanup and emergency stockpiling.

The standoff is the latest episode in Naples’s long failure to deal with its pressing environmental problem.

Political inefficiency, corruption and the influence of organized crime are blamed for causing a 14-year public emergency during which the soil, water and air of large areas around the base of Mount Vesuvius have been contaminated by illegal waste disposal.

A massive incinerator which was supposed to open at the end of 2007 is not ready.

Original Article

Bookmark It

Hide Sites