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The New York Times
Naples clears streets of trash but the bad odor lingers
Region Fouled by Trash Loses Faith in Berlusconi
Da libro di testo:
LASER 6
Unit 6: Nature pp 70-71
Naples clears streets of trash but the bad odor
lingers
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/25/world/europe/25iht-naples.4.11414025.html
2008/03/25
NAPLES — The
streets of Naples are cleaner than ever but there are few tourists to see them.
Images of head-high piles of trash have driven them away - and with them the
southern Italian city's biggest source of income.
With the rubbish dumps of
Naples declared full at the end of last year, household waste piled up in the
streets, forcing the government to appoint a "trash tsar" to take
control of a crisis blamed on years of weak governance and organized crime.
More than halfway through his
120-day mandate, Gianni De Gennaro, a former national
police chief, has cleared the streets by sending trash to other parts of Italy
and Europe and dumping it into temporary storage until new landfills or
incinerators are ready.
But skeptical locals dismiss the
cleanup as a cosmetic exercise ahead of an April 13-14 general election. And
hoteliers said it was too little, too late: The damage to the city's image has
been done, they say.
"This crisis has been
devastating," said Sergio Maione, chief
executive of three luxury hotels on the seafront. "You'd have to go back
to the time of cholera for something similar," he said, referring to an
outbreak of the water-borne disease that hit the city in 1973.
His Hotel Vesuvio
- where a room overlooking the Bay of Naples costs €220 a night, or $340, in
low season - closed one of its two restaurants, the well-known Caruso, as
business dried up.
The management of the hotel
expects occupancy of no more than 30 percent this year, compared with 50
percent in 2007 and a far cry from the years around 2002 when about 80 percent
of its rooms were full.
The trash crisis compounded
problems for Naples, which was already fighting a reputation of rampant street
and Mafia crime. In one countermeasure, the city gave away plastic watches to
tourists in the hope they would leave their tempting Rolexes and other
expensive timepieces in the hotel safe.
Add to those problems a
record-high euro-dollar exchange rate and the result is clear, Maione said.
"The city is empty,"
he said. "There are no tourists."
The solution?
"We need to get rid of the
waste."
On the streets, the few foreign
visitors are surprised not to see the great mounds of rotting trash that were
in the city center just a few weeks ago.
But while central Naples and the
sea front are remarkably clean, trash is still rotting on the outskirts and in
the countryside, poor areas not on most tourist itineraries.
"I saw a lot of garbage on
the way from Rome to here," said Tomoko Okura, a guide with a group of
Japanese tourists waiting to board a ferry to the Isle of Capri.
Her clients nodded in unison
when asked if they had heard about the Naples garbage crisis before coming to
Italy.
Also waiting to board the
hydrofoil was Claudio Velardi, a public-relations
specialist and former political adviser who was appointed head of tourism last
month by the center-left regional administration, which is also in charge of
waste policy.
Velardi
inaugurated a publicity campaign at a tourism fair in Germany at the end of
February, part of a global effort to counter bad publicity from the garbage
crisis.
"We are doing an immediate
communications campaign" Veldari said, to send
"a clear message that the information about Naples they have received over
recent months is only partially true, if not to say completely wrong," he
said before heading to a meeting with Capri hoteliers.
Velardi
conceded that the cleanup might be viewed by some residents with skepticism.
"You have to start with
the central areas and then expand out," he said. "That can seem a bit
cynical for people who live in areas that have been suffering for many months,
but we need to be practical and get a plan that proceeds day by day."
Among the skeptics is the
opposition leader Silvio Berlusconi. He has made the
Naples waste crisis a central theme of his election campaign, blaming the
center-left, which is in power at the local and national levels, for the
garbage piles that he says have tarnished the image of the entire country.
An opinion poll last week
suggested that the "trash effect" may cost the center-left its
10-year hold on power in the Campania region around Naples in the elections
next month.
"The first task of the
next government will be to liberate Naples and Campania from the mountain of
waste that the Democratic Party has buried it in," Berlusconi, who will
hold his final electoral rally in Naples, said in a campaign leaflet.
With the center-left regional
governor, Antonio Bassolino, under a criminal
investigation for his role in the garbage crisis, the national head of the
Democratic Party, Walter Veltroni, the mayor of Rome,
has rarely mentioned Naples while campaigning.
Veltroni's
camp retorts that Berlusconi, who was prime minister from 2001 to 2006, did
nothing then to resolve the garbage buildup, which was officially declared an
emergency in 1994.
"If everyone is guilty we
shouldn't be looking for a scapegoat," Velardi
said. "We need to renew the entire political class, and not just in
Naples."
While the politicians fight it
out, the city counts the cost. The garbage crisis not only scared away
tourists, it also was one reason Moody's credit-rating agency downgraded the
long-term debt of Naples this month.
Moody's said the crisis
highlighted "systematic challenges potentially weighing on Naples'
finances."
Region Fouled by Trash Loses Faith in Berlusconi
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/29/world/europe/29italy.html?_r=1
By RACHEL DONADIO
Published: October 28, 2010
Nadia Shira Cohen for The New York Times
The
carcasses of garbage trucks cluttered the main square in Terzigno,
a town near Mount Vesuvius, this week after a few radical protesters burned them.
TERZIGNO, Italy — In 2008,
Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi
won the national elections in large part by promising to clean up the garbage
that had been piling up on the streets of Naples. With much fanfare, he called
in the army, opened new dumping sites, built a waste treatment plant and
declared victory.
Discarded
trash littered an orchard in Terzigno. Residents are
fed up with the stench of a nearby dump.
Today, that victory is coming
undone. Garbage is once again piling up in Naples. The treatment plant does not
operate at capacity. And here in Terzigno, in the
foothills of Mount Vesuvius, residents who live downwind of a dump’s
overpowering stench are in revolt. In recent days, hundreds have taken to the
streets, blocking garbage trucks and violently skirmishing with the police.
Once again, Mr. Berlusconi has
said he will solve the problem. But this time around, something is different:
Few believe him.
For years, Mr. Berlusconi has
been able to survive with jokes and grandiose promises. But now, as he
struggles to keep a grip on his unruly center-right coalition, his popular
consensus is plummeting as Italians grow weary of government infighting that
seems at odds with their everyday concerns.
Here in Terzigno,
a grim town of concrete houses just miles from Pompeii, there may be the first
stirrings of a Nimby problem with national
ramifications: Not only do residents in the area not want garbage in their
backyard, but for the first time since they first helped elect him in 1994,
they also do not appear to want Mr. Berlusconi there.
“Yes, of course I voted for
him; I’m a southerner,” said Lucia Fabozzo, a home
health care aid from Boscoreale, in the shadow of the
dump. “But he won’t have my vote again. He turned his back on us. He only
brought trash here.”
In recent days, hundreds of
residents like Ms. Fabozzo have gathered by the road
leading to the dump, airing their grievances and holding protest signs. One
said, “There are some things you can’t buy, and for the rest, there’s
Berlusconi.”
Over the weekend, a radical
handful tossed Molotov cocktails, burning a row of garbage trucks whose
carcasses were being cleared from the main road this week. But most of the
protesters appeared to be peaceful, middle-class citizens fed up with the
stench and significant health problems that they believe come from living next
to a garbage dump.
The revolt began last week,
when the government started enlarging a dumping site near Terzigno.
It has temporarily stopped carting trash in, but once it starts again,
residents threaten all-out war.
They claim that Mr.
Berlusconi’s solution to the crisis in 2008 was largely to change Italian law
to open a vast dumping ground in a Unesco-protected park
on an active volcano — surely a unique phenomenon in Western Europe.
The park was created in 1995 to
help prevent illegal waste dumping in the rocky volcanic terrain of Mount
Vesuvius. Today, the dumping sites — the Terzigno
site and another nearby — are guarded by soldiers, who escort the garbage
trucks inside.
“Now that the state does the
same thing as the Camorra, what’s the difference?” asked Angelo Di Prisco, a schoolteacher in Terzigno
whose house overlooks the dump, referring to the region’s powerful organized
crime syndicates.
To its credit, the government
last year opened a new waste treatment plant outside Naples, but it can process
only trash that has been sorted first, a task that the region’s broken
waste-collection system has been largely incapable of doing.
In a news conference on
Thursday, a tired-looking Mr. Berlusconi insisted that he would work with local
authorities to fix the problem in the coming days. He added testily that news
media coverage of the trash crisis had damaged Italy’s image.
Few are surprised that Mr.
Berlusconi has not resolved a chronic problem that predates him and will
probably outlast him. The garbage crisis is the fruit of decades of local
government inaction and the activities of organized crime, which the
government’s point man for the trash crisis conceded had a “powerful role” in
the region.
But because Mr. Berlusconi
staked his image on solving the garbage crisis, his inability to do so has
become a metaphor for the once jovial prime minister’s growing unpopularity,
and the unseemly squalor that seems to lie just below the surface of his
scandal-racked government.
This week, Italian news outlets
reported that prosecutors were looking into allegations by a 17-year-old girl
who said she had taken part in wild parties hosted by Mr. Berlusconi, while the
government has been preoccupied with passing a law that would limit
the publication by journalists of wiretaps, a measure
widely seen as aimed at helping Mr. Berlusconi preserve his image.
Tensions have been boiling in
the governing coalition since July, when Mr. Berlusconi split
with a major ally, Gianfranco Fini,
the co-founder of his center-right party and the speaker of the lower house of
Parliament.
“People are disoriented because
they see that the government isn’t governing,” said Stefano Folli,
a political correspondent for Il Sole 24 Ore, a financial daily newspaper.
“They see a situation in which this solid majority does nothing but argue among
itself.”
Although Mr. Berlusconi was
once loved and then tolerated by many Italians, some are now beginning to lose
patience.
“He went into politics to solve
his own problems,” said Gianbattista De Angelis, an
artist who was protesting in Terzigno, echoing a
widely held sentiment among Italians. “But he doesn’t do anything.”
As Mr. De Angelis spoke, dump trucks
drove by, carting loads of dirt to place over the trash in the dump in an
effort to combat the stench. Even on a crisp fall day, the smell was
overpowering. For years, residents have complained of allergies, asthma and a
sharp burning in their throats. In the summer, they say, they cannot even open
their windows.
There are concerns about more
serious health issues. Residents and environmental activists say that the trash
carted in is not adequately monitored, and they fear that it could easily contain
toxic substances, polluting the soil and groundwater of an agricultural area
known for its mozzarella, produce and a wine named Lacryma
Christi, or tears of Christ.
(In the news conference on
Thursday, Mr. Berlusconi said state inspectors had not found anything out of
the ordinary in health and environmental inspections.)
In a telephone interview, the
government’s point man for the trash crisis, Guido Bertolaso,
the head of the Civil Protection Agency, said the state was carrying out the
necessary safety tests. “We will inspire trust by maintaining all our
commitments,” he added.
But many have lost faith in Mr.
Bertolaso, too. Once Italy’s most respected
technocrat, he has been tarnished by a series of bribery investigations. He has
denied all wrongdoing and has not been charged with any crimes.
On Tuesday night, hundreds of
protesters marched from Pompeii to Terzigno holding
protest signs and chanting, “Remember these jerks in the next election.”
Mr. Berlusconi’s mandate runs
out in 2013, but with so much infighting in the governing coalition, the
prospect of early elections is growing.
Mr. Folli,
the political analyst, said he still would not rule out a victory by Mr.
Berlusconi. “No one in the West has such an amazing ability to rehabilitate his
image, especially in an electoral campaign,” he said. “The majority has lost
consensus, but that does not mean that the opposition has gained it,” he added.
But abstentions could be high.
“I won’t vote,” said a woman in Terzigno who gave her
name only as Anna, for fear of reprisals from local authorities.
“This
isn’t a democracy,” she said, adding, “My political ideals went into that
dump.”
SOLAR
PANELS
A solar panel is a
packaged interconnected assembly of solar cells.
The solar panel can be used to generate and supply electricity in commercial
and residential applications.
Because a single solar panel
can only produce a limited amount of power, many installations contain several
panels. This is known as a photovoltaic
array.
The advantages of solar
power
Although solar power is a
relatively new energy source, it may easily become the most important energy
source of the future. This is because of the many advantages of solar power:
1 Solar power is a renewable
resource. This means that we are not in danger of depleting its reserves.
Though it may disappear behind clouds momentarily and is unavailable at night,
it generally returns in full force.
2 Solar power is non-polluting.
Unlike oil, solar power usage does not emit any greenhouse gases, nor does the
acquisition of it harm ecosystems through spills or dredging. This is probably
one of the primary advantages of solar power.
3 The energy and heat from the
sun is free. Once solar panels or solar thermal collectors are set up, there
are no electrical expenses necessary to power them.
4 Solar cells require very
little maintenance, greatly because there are no moving parts that must be
maintained.
5 Solar cells can last a
lifetime.
6 Solar power is incredibly
versatile. A variety of inventions may be powered by it, including cars, water
heaters, fountains, buildings, and satellites.
7 In remote locations, solar
power may be a more realistic energy option than running large lengths of
electrical wires to connect to a grid.
Overall, it seems that solar
power is simply a more harmonious energy resource. To obtain other energy
sources, there is a requirement of harvesting fossil fuels, animal matter, or
plant matter. Meanwhile, sunlight continually hits the earth in large amounts
regardless of whether it is being utilized as an energy resource or not.
Focusing solely on the application of solar power, instead of its application
in addition to seeking out and obtaining the raw resource, omits an unnecessary
step.
Solar power is also an
attractive investment due to the added
value it gives a home. With the housing market slowing down considerably a
solar power system definitely helps add to the desirability and resale value of
a home. A home with a fixed electric bill from solar is less expensive to live
in, and thus is very appealing to potential buyers.
Along with the advantages of
solar power, it is worth remarking upon the disadvantages. These include
sunlight not being a readily available resource in some areas of the world.
Also, solar cells are still not particularly cheap.
An example of a disadvantage
would be the initial cost (one of the very few disadvantages associated with
solar technology). The initial investment of solar panels is quickly seen as a small price to pay when you realize the savings
you could make over the coming months and years on your electricity bill.
Of
course, technology for this is improving, and it will continue to improve as
the cost of other forms of power increase.