Italy pays less money to EU coffers for illegal dumping. Finally some good news, adopted and circulated by the Government, as soon as the list of illegal landfills owned by the Union was corrected.
In a nutshell, from the first six-monthly fine of 39 million and 800 thousand euros, Italy for the fifth successive semester, must credit the EU with 16 million euros. The story concerns the list of landfills contained in the sentence of the European Court of Justice in 2014. Checks, meetings and checks have certified that in Brussels there were 25 more landfills. Not up to standard, of course, but at least the number is exact.
The governors of the Regions concerned – Campania, Calabria, Lazio, Abruzzo – they had declared it several times. They bore an excessive cross mostly inheritance from their predecessors. But it took some time to get the approval of the European Commission and consequently reduce the economic burden of the sanctions. The issue remains very open and no one is yet able to say when the territories will actually be cleaned up of these hateful waste remittances. In any case, from the initial 200 there are 77 left.
The Minister of the Environment Gianluca Galletti he announced the good result achieved between the Italian and European authorities, while General Giuseppe Vadalà, government commissioner for site management, continues his work. Both the Minister and the commissioner do not deny that the number is still high and that one will never be completely safe from sanctions, as long as the waste remains stored in the temporary sites identified by him.
The trend seems positive, it is useless to deny it, but attention in Rome as in the Regions must remain high. A context in which the voice of citizens and committees is periodically heard. The 25 landfills for which the Italian State no longer owes any penalty are: fourteen in Campania, four in Abruzzo, three in Lazio, one each between Sicily, Umbria, Veneto and Tuscany. The 77, however, the source of sanctions are: 23 in Calabria, 14 in Abruzzo, 11 in Campania, 10 in Sicily, six in Lazio, Puglia and Veneto, one in the Marche. An unpleasant map, an outlier in environmental politics, but a real one.
