Fourteen arrests, including 13 in prison and one under house arrest, ten suspects at large, three companies under seizure, the spectre of the Camorra and a large quantity of special waste that was disposed of illegally for a quantity of 22 thousand tons, a quantity sufficient to cover the entire Piazza San Marco in Venice or capable of forming a column of trucks 7 kilometers long.
These are the data from the 'Plastic Connection' operation, coordinated by the Anti-Mafia District Attorney's Office of Venice. The measures were carried out by the Investigative Unit of the Provincial Command of Belluno together with the forestry carabinieri of the NIPAAF, the Investigative Unit of the Environmental, Agri-food and Forestry Police, of Belluno at the end of an investigation that lasted two years and covered the entire national territory.
The military have dismantled a real organization dedicated to the illegal trafficking of waste, in exchange for false invoices. In addition to the measures described above, the military seized sites where waste was accumulated, bank accounts and company shares for a total value of one and a half million euros. The arrests and seizures involved the provinces of Belluno, Padua, Vicenza and Treviso, Naples and Avellino and Pisa.
According to the accusations, the traffic involved special waste "at the end of the line", that is, waste from industrial processes containing, in some cases, also dangerous substances that should have been destined for the incinerator and that instead traveled from South to North. This would have happened thanks to some intermediaries from Campania who loaded the waste of some large companies in the Caserta area onto trucks and distributed it to various compliant companies in Veneto, specialized in the treatment of urban waste of a plastic nature.
Here the waste, once it reached its destination, according to the investigation, was mixed with that already present at the companies in order to make it untraceable and then distributed elsewhere, where it was accumulated in warehouses in various areas of Italy or even resold for reuse without paying the costs for regular disposal.
Article published on 24 September 2021 - 14:42
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