Italians respond to Dutch Socialists

Italians respond to Dutch Socialists' report on scandal of waste transport

Spectrezine, April 20, 2010

A report written three years ago by two Dutch politicians of the radical left exposing the scandal of the EU 'market' in often dangerous waste products has been taken up by the Italian parliamentary committee charged with dealing with the country's major problem of waste disposal and its links to organised crime.

The report is available in English under the title Waste has a future: The failure of controls on the transport and processing of waste by Euro-MP Kartika Liotard and Remi Poppe, a member of the Dutch national parliament. It came to the attention of an official of the Italian Embassy in the Netherlands, who contacted Liotard and Poppe's party, the radical left Socialist Party (SP), to request a copy. The official has now informed the SP that the report will be brought before a parliamentary committee of enquiry into illegal waste processing and transport.

The Dutch-Italian connection first came to light when Remi Poppe discovered that Dutch waste processing firms were accepting waste from Italy which could not be processed there due to problems of capacity which had their roots in control of parts of the sector by organised crime.

"It's great that the Italian authorities are going to take a serious look into this,” says Poppe. “The situation in Naples shows that there's a great deal of work to be done. This applies, moreover, not only to Italy but to the whole of Europe, with the Netherlands being no exception. We function within Europe as a sort of huge transfer point for this trade in waste. European cooperation in surveillance and enforcement of the law is badly needed.”

Kartika Liotard, who is a member of the European Parliament's Environment Committee and, like Poppe, an environmental activist, adds that 'the transport of waste is now big business. That's fine when it's recycling that's at issue, because that generally provides added value for the environment compared to dumping or burning the stuff. In such cases transport is necessary and that means transport across borders can't always be avoided. The best solution is obviously to process the waste as close as possible to the source of the pollution, but in the case of some kinds of waste that can still mean a journey. But we also see cross-border transport in the negative sense, international international movement of waste because environmental rules elsewhere are not strictly enforced. That happens mostly when dangerous waste is exported to poor countries disguised as materials for aid."

There is also, she says, often evidence of what she calls "Mafia practices" which, in her view, demand action from a strong state. "I hope that Italy will return to being such a state. When I visited the Italian parliament a few years ago I left them a pile of examples of such things from our report. So it's gratifying to see that they're tackling the problem in Rome. I'm quite proud of myself and of our report!"