It's quite interesting for southern Italians to claim that a bridge will be detrimental to the ecology of the region, when in Sicily people routinely burn their trash on the street because the mafia controls the garbage disposal apparently.
2025. In Europe. They burn. Their trash. On the street.
Huh interesting. I overheard a conversation in a bar around Kabukicho, Shinjuku, Tokyo a few years ago with similar story.
The bartender was talkingto a local bar owner, and he was explaining how he was trying to find another contractor for garbage disposal because he found the current rate ridiculous. Every contractor hung up on him after hearing his address, and he found out that yakuza had territories around Kabukicho and you'd get in trouble if you took a contract there.
Interesting to hear garbage disposal being a common business organized crime go for. I guess there's many utilities too to have garbage disposal infrastructure for other illegal activities
it is that, it is a fairly undesirable business for goody two shoes to go into and expose people, it is also not a sympathetic business type, and everybody needs it.
Garbage disposal is also remarkably hard in Japan, maybe understandable since they don't have anywhere to put it.
Instead of the famous Japanese customer service, residential garbage requires you to sort it, put it in transparent bags, put it out on specific days etc. so your neighbors can personally shame you if you do any of it wrong.
Commercial garbage in Tokyo gets left out on the street (like NYC up until this year) and occasionally attracts rats.
Japan burns 80% of their garbage compared to 35% of Germany or 12% of US. So disposal isn't very complex but does entail a lot of sorting.
The rest of Japan's garbage culture (small bins, poor/mafia organization etc.) is totally self inflicted and is more of a cultural phenomena rather than a technical one.
watch The Sopranos :)
or ghost in the shell
No, it's way worse than that. They not only control the garbage disposal business and regional administration, they physically stop you from keeping your street / neighbourhood / town clean...Guess how do I know.
It's their "service" or no service, with some extremely narrow exceptions, like a very small town named Aci Bonaccorsi, which fought that and now they're able to keep their streets on an amazing level of cleaniness compared to nearby municipalities.
Garbage disposal is the last remaining big business handled by the local mafia (drugs are handled by camorra nowadays) and they're absolutely doing anything to avoid losing that.
It was/is also that way in Athens, at least in the "anarchist" quarter of town. Every Friday the so-called anarchists (would) take dumpsters and light them on fire, to make a point, that the government is corrupt, or something. I'm not Greek so I can't speak for Greeks but other Greeks told me it's just part of life, so just look the other way. Also trash collection seems to often be an issue. They also have an island just for trash, but I heard it's already overflowing so they are looking for another island to use as a trash dump. Admittedly I haven't been there in a couple years, so maybe things have changed lately, but I do have a lot of photos of dumpsters on fire.
This is not really accurate. I have lived in Athens. There were some years where burned dumpsters were not a rare sight (after the big riots of 2008), but it is really, really uncommon, especially considering the size of Athens.
And I have never heard anything (or were able to find something on google) about an island full of trash. Islands are simply too valuable for that, and you'd also need to bring the trash there by boat.
When did you last live there? I was traveling/living in various parts of Greece for short periods of time over the last 30 years, the last time in 2018, where, due to EU economic sanctions, there were still regular fires happening in the anarchist district (Exarcheia). Googling shows that there are still regularly things burning there (as well as Zografou), though lately[0] it seems to be primarily vehicles. Just Google "Exarcheia fires" and you will find a lot of articles from almost every year going back to at least 2008.
Zakynthos is the island I was referring to. It's an illegal dumping ground, and even the EU has fined them for it. Also Kalymnos has a decades-old issue with burning trash - they even call it "trash volcano". Lots of other islands also have illegal dumping issues. Also many nature areas in mainland Greece are not in the most pristine state, often littered with junk, often junk that you can tell has been there for a long time. Whenever I went exploring by car, we would find the most beautiful areas but almost always trash everywhere :( Maybe it's gotten better though, I haven't been back since 2019, though I'm not sure I really want to.
[0] https://www.thenationalherald.com/arsonists-run-amok-in-athe...
Sort of interesting, yes. But it’s human nature to put more effort into something you might have some influence over rather than something you don’t. Possibly doing more of the former could lead to the latter being more feasible