 | DrumBeat: August 14, 2008 | The Oil Drum | Geopolitical Disruptions #1: Theory of Disruptions to Oil & Resource Supply |  |
53 comments on Italy like Ryanair: can it exist with oil over $ 100 per barrel?
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53 comments on Italy like Ryanair: can it exist with oil over $ 100 per barrel?
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Yes, but mafia does not control the waste incinerators :)
And no, I'm not kidding.
Landfills and waste disposal is often controlled by controlled crime syndicates in many parts of Italy.
This means that they control where and how the waste is handled.
As long as there isn't direct subsidies for waste burning and building waste incinerators, it makes more economic sense to:
- dump the waste on a football field during nighttime
- bury it under cement in a new construction site
- dump it in rivers or lakes
- just leave it on the streets
So, until indirect subsidies to mafia in form of waste disposal subsidies are started, I don't see very high hopes for waste incineration in Italy.
That or breaking up the mafia and getting non-corrupt officials to handle the business better (good luck with that considering the Italian history in this area).
NIMBY is not the biggest problem in regards to waste incinerators in Italy.
PS Very good suggestions. I agree on all of them. My point was just to show that always the 'sane' option does not get chosen. At least not immediately :)
You made some very good points, SamuM. Indeed, Mafia (or, better said, its Neapolitan incarnation, Camorra) does not control waste incineration. One correction, though: there WAS a subsidy for waste incineration in Italy until last year. It was called CIP6; it was money that should have gone to renewable energy, but with a creative sleight of hand it went mostly to incineration. It was a huge amount of money that went mainly to the North. Mafia is an universal concept, but the real thing - southern Italian - never seemed to be interested in controlling incineration. Apparently, they much preferred to import toxic waste from Northern Europe and dump it in the countryside. I suppose that it gave them higher profits. Mafia or Camorra are very efficient in their own ways. The story is more complex than this and I myself wouldn't be able to unravel all the details. It is an unsolved problem that will need a long time to be solved.
Thank you for the comment. I was not aware of the subsidy. Sigh, there goes that too.
It's not that we don't have our own peculiar problems about waste incineration here in Finland, it's just that being an outsider I have trouble understanding those of Italy.
However, all this doesn't seem to change the fact that regardless of the causes, we are throwing away energy and not necessarily helping the GHG situation that much overall, by burying waste into landfills (methane emissions) when not burning it, but instead buying electricity made from coal :(
Such is the depth of human folly.
Well, incineration is only somewhat more efficient than landfilling with gas recovery. But the available studies clearly show that recycling is much better and re-using is even more. But we tend to choose always the worst available path. The depth of human folly, indeed.