Italy’s Waste Scandal: Mafia, Business and Politics

For more than fifteen years, Italy’s Campania region lived under a state of emergency over waste. Mountains of rubbish accumulated in the streets of Naples, landfills overflowed, governments appointed extraordinary commissioners, private companies were brought in to build a new waste-treatment system, and the army eventually helped remove garbage.

Behind the visible crisis was another, darker story: the systematic illegal disposal of industrial and hazardous waste, much of it linked by investigators and parliamentary inquiries to the Camorra.

Together, the two stories became one of the most extraordinary environmental failures in modern Europe.

The Emergency Begins

The Campania waste emergency formally began on 11 February 1994, when the Italian government declared an environmental emergency and appointed extraordinary authorities to deal with the region’s dysfunctional waste system.

A regional waste-management plan followed in 1997. It envisaged a modern industrial system centred on seven plants producing refuse-derived fuel and two thermal-treatment plants.

In 2000, contracts were awarded to Fibe S.p.A. and Fibe Campania S.p.A., companies belonging to the Impregilo Group. The companies were supposed to construct and operate seven fuel-production plants and two thermal-recovery facilities, at Acerra and Santa Maria La Fossa.

The project was intended to end Campania’s reliance on landfills.

Instead, the system became bogged down in technical problems, delays, disputes, enormous quantities of stored waste and increasingly bitter political controversy.

The contracts with Fibe and Fibe Campania were eventually terminated by law in December 2005. Impregilo finally exited the Campania waste-disposal business in 2008.

Enter the Camorra

The failure of the official waste system was only part of the story.

Long before rubbish became internationally visible on the streets of Naples, organised crime had discovered that waste could be extremely profitable.

The most notorious organisation involved was the Casalesi clan, part of the Camorra and centred around Caserta.

Former Casalesi figure Carmine Schiavone, who became a justice collaborator, gave evidence in 1997 to Italy’s parliamentary commission investigating the waste cycle. His testimony remained secret for years and was declassified in 2013.

Schiavone described a business in which hazardous waste originating outside Campania was transported south and illegally buried or dumped in quarries and other sites controlled by criminal networks. His testimony referred to figures including Cipriano Chianese, Gaetano Cerci and Casalesi boss Francesco Bidognetti. Parliamentary records later documented how these names repeatedly appeared in investigations into illegal waste disposal.

This was not simply household rubbish dumped illegally.

Investigations concerned industrial waste, toxic material and other hazardous residues that legitimate disposal companies would have charged considerably more to treat properly.

For organised crime, waste had effectively become another commodity.

Business, Politics and the State

The Campania story became especially explosive because criminal waste trafficking existed alongside a publicly financed waste system involving politicians, civil servants, emergency commissioners and major industrial contractors.

That does not mean that all these actors were part of one criminal conspiracy.

Several major prosecutions ultimately ended in acquittals.

Former Campania governor Antonio Bassolino, who had also served as extraordinary commissioner for the waste emergency, was among 28 defendants tried over alleged irregularities in the management of the Campania waste cycle between roughly 2000 and 2005.

In November 2013, the Naples court acquitted all 28 defendants. The charges had included allegations of fraud, false accounting or documentation and irregularities connected with public waste contracts.

Bassolino and former police chief Alessandro Pansa were again acquitted in a separate proceeding in October 2015 concerning alleged failures in handling the emergency.

So the political dimension of the Campania scandal must be described carefully: politicians and senior officials were investigated and prosecuted, but major cases resulted in acquittals.

That does not erase the administrative failure.

In 2016, Italy’s Court of Auditors and financial police identified more than €27 million in alleged public financial damage connected with the failure to clean up or secure 48 Campania landfill sites. Notices were issued to politicians, officials and administrators, including former regional presidents Bassolino and Stefano Caldoro.

2008: Garbage Takes Over the Streets

The crisis reached its most spectacular point in 2007–2008.

Collection systems collapsed and tens of thousands of tonnes of rubbish accumulated in streets and public spaces.

At one point in 2008, around 40,000 tonnes of waste were estimated to be lying uncollected. The army was deployed, old dumping sites were reopened and waste was shipped or transported outside Campania.

The images travelled around the world.

But the European institutions concluded that the problem was structural rather than temporary.

On 4 March 2010, the Court of Justice of the European Union ruled that Italy had failed to establish an adequate network of waste-disposal installations in Campania and had failed to ensure disposal without endangering human health or the environment.

The extraordinary state of emergency had lasted until 31 December 2009.

Fifteen years.

The Land of Fires

Meanwhile another name entered the vocabulary of the crisis: Terra dei Fuochi — the Land of Fires.

The term refers principally to areas in the provinces of Naples and Caserta where waste had been illegally dumped, buried and frequently burned.

This was where the municipal-waste crisis and the history of organised environmental crime became impossible to separate in the public imagination.

For decades, residents reported fires, polluted land, contaminated groundwater and fears of unusually high cancer rates.

And eventually the issue reached the European Court of Human Rights.

On 30 January 2025, in Cannavacciuolo and Others v. Italy, the Strasbourg court unanimously found that Italy had violated Article 2 of the European Convention on Human Rights — the right to life.

The Court described widespread dumping, burying and burning of waste, often carried out by organised criminal groups, across an area covering 90 municipalities and approximately 2.9 million inhabitants.

Crucially, the judges concluded that the Italian authorities had known about the situation for many years but had failed to act with the necessary diligence and speed.

Italy was ordered to develop a comprehensive strategy, create an independent monitoring system and establish a public information platform.

A Crisis Bigger Than Garbage

Calling the Campania affair simply a “waste crisis” understates what happened.

It was simultaneously a failure of infrastructure, public administration, procurement, environmental enforcement and organised-crime control.

Private companies were contracted to build an industrial solution. Governments governed through emergency powers. Prosecutors investigated politicians and corporate executives. Courts later acquitted many of those accused. The Camorra, independently, turned illegal waste disposal into a lucrative criminal industry.

And local communities lived with the consequences.

The garbage that filled the streets of Naples in 2008 eventually disappeared.

The contamination buried underneath Campania proved considerably harder to remove.