Almost 6,000 tons of Italian waste shipped to Tunisia return to our home (by C.A. Mauceri)
Almost 6,000 tons of waste shipped to Tunisia and stored in 212 containers at the Tunisian port of Sousse return “home” to Italy. The remaining part of the lot, totaling 7,900 tons, would have been burned instead.
In the first half of 2020, with two managerial decrees, the Campania Region authorized a company to unload the problem of managing thousands of tons of waste on the shoulders of Tunisians. As a justification it was said that sending this waste to Tunisia would allow "greater cost-effectiveness of the recovery process compared to the country of origin". To protect the good intentions of the project, a surety of 3.3 million euros was signed in favor of the Ministry of the Environment.
A short time later, some "anomalies" emerged from the videos showing what arrived from Italy, broadcast on a television broadcast in Tunisia: the containers contained not only plastic waste (as provided for in the agreement), but waste all types, from differentiated to hospital waste. Types of waste which, according to the Basel convention and the Bamako convention, should never have been exported. Inspections by the Tunisian customs confirmed that the waste contained in the containers was not as foreseen in the agreements . An international scandal followed which, in a few months, led to the resignation (and arrest), in December 2020, of dozens of people. Among them, the former Tunisian Minister of the Environment, Mustapha Aroui. Also involved in the affair was the former minister Shukri Belhassen, Tunisian leaders and officials.
In Italy, little was said about all this. It was the question presented by the M5S regional councilor Maria Muscarà to highlight a serious lack of controls on the hundreds of containers left from Salerno for Tunisia. New complaints and new convictions. The appeal, however, was rejected by the Council of State in mid-2021, following the sentence of the TAR. Indeed, the Council of State ordered the Campania Region to bring the seized waste back to Italy (in the meantime placed under sequestration at a cost of 26 thousand euros a day! ).
In recent days, during a meeting between the Tunisian ambassador to Italy, Moez Sinaoui, and the governor Vincenzo De Luca , the final agreement seems to have been reached between the Campania Region and the Tunisian government: the Campania Region will pay the costs and will have to take charge also of the costs of returning the containers to their homeland. The note from the Tunisian embassy in Italy is very hard: "The case, as well as being a judicial matter in Tunisia, involves the Campania company Sviluppo Risorse Ambientali (SRA) and the Tunisian private company Soreplast and has – between May and July 2020 – the illegal export to Tunisia of 282 containers containing 7,900 tons of unsorted municipal waste collected in Italy, in violation of international legislation ". “Of these, 212 are stored at the port of Sousse, while another 70 were deposited in the Soreplast plant in Moureddine (Sousse), which burned down on December 29th, sending around 1,900 tons of waste up into smoke. On the judicial level, two investigations are underway, by the Tunisian and the Italian judiciary, to ascertain responsibility for the falsification of documents on which the related cross-border authorizations have been issued ".
A "dirty" business that of waste brought abroad from Italy. But not the only one. In 2019, an investigation by Greenpeace Italy and Greenpeace Turkey revealed that tons of plastic waste originating – it seems – from Italy had been dumped at an illegal site in the province of Izmir, Turkey.
On closer inspection, in Italy, the entire waste treatment system would appear to be "dirty". The European Court of Justice has condemned the Bel Paese for having continued to use, beyond the set deadline (October 2015), dozens and dozens of landfills that are not adequate to the provisions of Directive 1999/31 (which aims to " prevent, or reduce as much as possible , the negative effects on the environment or human health of landfill, introducing severe technical requirements "). For this reason, in 2012, Brussels had opened an infringement procedure at the end of which, in 2017, (how many governments have succeeded one another in all these years?) It proceeded to refer Italy to the Court of Justice.
A lesson, however, that did not help much. In recent years, the "open" infringement procedures against Italy have increased: from 62 at the end of 2017, they are now 82, with a cost for the tax authorities and taxpayers of over 750 million euros ( 152 for flat-rate penalties and 600 for penalties from 2012 to date). Virtually double the amount paid by countries such as Greece (350 million) or Spain (122 million) or France (91 million). The reasons are always the same: abusive landfills (almost 200 active), non-compliance of wastewater management and treatment infrastructures (11% of total infringements in the decade) and waste management not in line with European standards for waste recovery and disposal.
And while in Europe there is a lot of talk about the Green Economy and the Circular Economy Action Plan (recovery and reduction of the use of landfills, with an effective recycling target of urban waste of 65% and landfilling of less than 10% by 2035), Italy seems to live on another planet. Faced with a production of municipal solid waste of about 30 million tons (in 1974 it was less than half), the landfill rate of the Bel Paese is 30 times higher than that of countries such as Sweden, Germany, Belgium and Denmark. . In Italy, only 4 regions are positioned below the 10% set by the EU Plan. And – surprise among the surprises – one of these would be Campania.
It remains to be seen whether for having adopted innovative and functional policies or for having downloaded the problem to others. All the senses.
C. Alessandro Mauceri
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The article Almost 6,000 tons of Italian waste shipped to Tunisia (by CA Mauceri) return to our home comes from ScenariEconomici.it .
This is a machine translation of a post published on Scenari Economici at the URL https://scenarieconomici.it/tornano-a-casa-nostra-quasi-6-000-tonnellate-di-rifiuti-italiani-spediti-in-tunisia-di-c-a-mauceri/ on Wed, 02 Feb 2022 17:05:42 +0000.