What do you get when you have limited land mass, lots of people, and a mafia controlled trash industry? A heap of trouble, if you are Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi.
In October of this year, the trash started to pile up in the Campania region if Italy. The landfills near the town filled and the residents objected to placing a new landfill in nearby Mt. Vesuvius national park. Some residents even lit some of the 2,400 tons of trash on fire, blocked train stations, and rioted through the smell of flaming garbage. The Pope even began praying for the people of this region.
As the trash continued to pile up, the mafia controlled region became a massive headache for the Prime Minister, drawing EU sanctions and international attention to this tiny boot-shaped cradle of modern civilization. If this sanitary situation seems familiar it is because it happened in 2007, too. Then, the Germans came to the rescue. Although it was later discovered that the deal the German incinerator company cut with local Italian mob members to accept household waste untreated was a violation of EU laws. The Southern region of Italy was shipping untreated waste through the Alps and the trash coming into Southern Germany became the center piece of a joint investigation between German and Italian criminal investigators. After stopping the stream of trash to the incinerator in question, German officials found nearly 300 tons of Italian trash at a nearby Saxony-Anhalt landfill, proving that the stream had continued but the destination had changed. At nearly ninety euros a ton, trash is a lucrative business and garbage profiteering has taken off.
With elections pending, the seventy-four year old Prime Minister needs to get the mafia in line and create a workable sanitation infrastructure before the region becomes famous for more than a beautiful coast and historic landmarks.