Every year, European citizens produce about five hundred kilos of rubbish each. A figure that demonstrates that there is "a parallel path between waste management and modernity: that is, waste management seen as a litmus test of a society's ability (or otherwise) to access the modern world". It is on this assumption that “Self-Portrait of Garbage” is based, the latest book written by Lorenzo Pinna and published by Bollati Boringhieri. The author is a careful observer of ecosystem dynamics as he has been dealing with them for decades both as a journalist ("La Stampa", "Limes", "Focus") and as a collaborator on the television programs "Quark" and "SuperQuark". .
The volume offers a journey through the great cities of the past, to document how the development of a civilization is closely linked to the issue of waste. Rome, for example, also dominated the world because it managed to organize an avant-garde water and sewage network. London and Paris, in the XNUMXth century, reached a top level of development for the time thanks to an enormous work of modernization of the water and disposal systems. We then arrive at the analysis of Naples, whose relationship with garbage is now an atavistic problem. In the Campania capital, the Camorra manages the garbage "business", with the result that some areas of the region are now more risky than the immediate vicinity of Chernobyl. According to Pinna, however, the situation is clearer than one might think. “The laws and technology are the right ones, but for proper waste disposal you need money and political will”.
