Valico dei Giovi, geological crossroads between the Ligurian Apennines and the Alps, the crucial junction between what was once the decapitated Morandi bridge in Genoa and the Po valley. From the third railway crossing, the largest Italian infrastructural work, in the heart of northern Italy, to Serra Scirieddus, the extreme periphery of Sulcis looted by everyone, the step, according to some, is short. A thousand kilometers, passing through the new viaduct over the Polcevera up to the embarkation point for Porto Torres, then a marching column of trucks with the emblem of the yellow R of waste, subtitled with the A of asbestos, printed in red on those big bags, big white bags, full of the most dangerous and lethal of dust.
Variable geometry
It takes a lot of imagination, not a little familiarity with geometry, to argue that those mountains full of asbestos, with frightening tenors, close to Genoa, are exactly around the corner from Gonnesa or Carbonia. Instead, in the papers that we publish on this page, attached to the dossier of Riverso spa, the company of the Colucci family from Campania, filed with the regional environmental councilorship in recent days, exactly this is claimed: the Serra Scirieddus landfill is in " proximity” of the Giovi pass, exactly the Cravasco construction site, the last advancement of the large underground tunnel intended to connect Genoa with the current desert Po Valley.
Gold business
A statement as peremptory as it is surreal, making it clear that the waste business is boundless to the point of imagining being able to load ships with asbestos, together with the rocks dug in the heart of those mountains, and ship them to no less than the south-western side of Sardinia . Truck on truck, ship on ship, for a devastating journey, to transfer huge quantities of asbestos extracted with explosives and mechanical moles from the bowels of the Ligurian Apennines to the Carbonia landfill, close to Gonnesa. For the lords of asbestos, moreover, that hill of poisons in Sardinia is the closest of those available for unloading that gigantic quantity of substances defined as carcinogenic to all intents and purposes. They argue it as if the statement raises no more than a doubt. To state, as the companies that manage the disposal of the asbestos waste extracted from the tunnels of the third pass of the Giovi do, that in Italy there would be no other landfills available to receive that type of poison says a lot about how procurement works in Italy. In fact, before awarding the tender, the contracting station, the administration that proceeds with the tender, should first of all verify the calculation of the excavations, i.e. how much earth, in this case rock, is extracted from the construction site and where it is relocated .
Rock balance sheet
A sort of obligatory balance of the lands from which no one can escape, in advance and before the assignment of the work itself. Declaring where that waste will end up is an essential and undeferrable condition, a preventive obligation. Basically if you don't know where to put those excavated rocks, you can't win that contract. Without a site where to dispose of that waste it would be impossible to carry out the main task of that contract on a regular basis: digging tunnels for tens and tens of kilometres, extracting millions of cubic meters of materials, as in the case of the Giovi pass, full of asbestos.
The asbestos triangle
Despite this, the triangle between the two companies that claim to manage the disposal of asbestos waste from the Ligurian Apennines, in the "Genoa hub" construction site, has planned everything down to the smallest detail. The "Htr Reclamation" company of Rome and the "Recovery for Ecology" company wrote to Riverso in no uncertain terms: request for the transfer of waste containing asbestos. Some passages of the two letters, which we publish in excerpts, sent to Riverso, are literally the same: one copied from the other.
Extra-regional direction
If it was not a prescient who wrote those letters, it is equally evident that directing the orchestra of asbestos to be sent to Sardinia is a real direction with one goal above all: to raise cash. Or rather, fill every corner of that landfill at any cost, immediately and without limits. This is the only way to explain the request forwarded by Riverso to the Sardinian Region at the end of last month, with which it asks for the derogation to be able to "welcome" that extra-regional waste from Genoa.
Judges & Noe
A request that ignores two fundamental aspects of the affair: the sentences of the courts and the minutes of the Noe, the Carabinieri's Ecological Operations Unit, on the management of the Serra Scirieuddus landfill. First of all, the pronouncements of the administrative judges: several times the officials of the Tar have affirmed the ban on transferring waste to Sardinia with the excuse that there would be no other landfills in Italy ready to welcome them. To mark the border of the principle of proximity was the sentence of the Tar Sardegna n. 706, of 15 October 2021. Opposing the rejection decreed by the Region and the Municipality for the use of the Serdiana landfill to dispose of Apulian sewage sludge were the lawyers of the Ecoserdiana company, supported "ad adiuvàndum" precisely by those of Riverso di Carbonia. On that occasion, the judges expressed themselves clearly: even special waste, such as sludge and asbestos, must be disposed of in landfills that are "close" to the places where that waste is produced. A strong and clear judicial provision that Riverso and above all the environmental department know very well. The attempt by the company of the Colucci family, which manages the Carbonia landfill, to "pre-establish", through these communications from the companies involved in the construction of the Third Giovi pass, a sort of principle of "proximity" of Sardinia with respect to the "junction of Genoa ” is not only daring, but appears decidedly beyond any logic. If this assumption passed, according to which no region has landfills for special waste, Sardinia would become, even more so, the only landfill authorized to receive waste from beyond the Tyrrhenian Sea. A hypothesis clearly unthinkable on a substantial level, aberrant on a legal one. The second issue that the regional environmental councilorship still seems to ignore, together with the Province of Southern Sardinia, is the Noe's report on the management of the Carbonia landfill. Yet the carabinieri of the ecological unit had issued a real sentence without appeal. They wrote: «The pumps installed inside the three spy wells under the canvas were blocked. From the operations of removal and reinsertion of the same inside the wells aimed at their correct functioning, it was ascertained that these equipments were anchored at a height above the well bottom. In this regard, due consideration must be given to the fact that the pumps, with the attached liquid transport system, were removed and repositioned inside the holes used as wells by Riverso spa personnel at the request of the Judicial Police operating and that, in such phases, no obstructions were encountered or represented on the way to the downhole. This means that the previous height could not have been the result of random situations deriving from a potential erroneous evaluation of the heights connected to interference external to the hole, but, on the contrary, an expression of the manager's will». In practice, the carabinieri had argued that the operator had deliberately blocked the pumps before they reached the bottom with the result that it could not have been found in any way if the landfill "leaked" poisons in the groundwater.
The forgotten notice
The Province of Southern Sardinia, following Noe's complaint, had issued a provision with which it «warns the Riverso company from exercising the landfill activity». Out of the blue, as if nothing had happened, the Region, without a preliminary examination of the admissibility of Riverso's request, last March 31st, oppositions deadline on April 30th, published the plan to fill the Serra Scirieddus landfill precisely with asbestos from the third pass of the Giovi. And after all, that it is a real marching column of asbestos is demonstrated by the communication of one of the two companies that have asked to activate a derogation "reserved" only for the work of the Third Pass of Genoa.
Caravan of asbestos
The Htr Bonifiche company writes: «Today, the site in question requires a large number of deliveries in the order of 50 trips/week». It would therefore be a question of an impressive flow of asbestos, such as to fill the Carbonia landfill in a short time, de facto exhausting the availability on the one hand for the reclamation to be done in the Sulcis and on the other for the needs of Sardinia. The result, probably already planned by someone, is to obtain new authorizations for new hills-dumps of poisons. In all of Italy these refusals are rejected without reservations. In Sardinia, on the other hand, new authorization procedures are being opened. The asbestos business, the one to be shipped from Genoa to the Nuraghi Island, is only just beginning.
