Hell is fenced off, a stone's throw from the flamingo pond. On the horizon stands the skyline of ancient Karalis, as a decoy. The iron bars are driven into a perimeter wall that delimits the alcove of the Swiss multinational in Sardinia, close to the slopes of Monte Arcosu. Rust corrodes joints and locks, crosses gaps and obstacles. It is no longer impossible to enter that undisputed realm of the perpetual deal consummated on the Sardinians' heads. Touching one of the most impressive speculative operations on the environment ever carried out on the axis between Macchiareddu and Portovesme is not a difficult undertaking. Only when the tiny human silhouette stands out against those imposing piles of poisons do you understand the dimensions of the disaster.
Money & poisons
A corner of the industrial desert that was to remain closed to most, transformed in less than five years into a factory of money and waste. The hope that that shed would die there, closed forever, without anyone noticing what was happening inside, overwhelmed by a suspicious bankruptcy, collapsed in an instant under the deep blows of a state bucket. When the bulldozer, sent there by the prosecutor's office, sank the first deep blows on that material, it was understood that the "game" was over. The plan to pass off that waste as "plaster" to be recycled in "good works" faltered as soon as the "coring" stuck in the trench opened by the mechanical means.
Multinational greed
The gentlemen of Glencore, the very powerful Swiss multinational in Sardinia, have tried. The greedy ambition to save a mountain of millions of euros by "giving away" that waste to a cheap company, born a few days ago, and "miraculously" failed at the right time, crashed like a torpedo of shame on the blackened discovery on white by the Prosecutor of the Republic of Cagliari. To tell the truth, twenty-four hours after the news of the closure of investigations by Rita Cariello and Rossella Spano, the prosecutors of this disturbing affair, the multinational's lawyers even tried to support the thesis that it was simple waste material an industrial process, that of Portovesme srl. A by-product, they also argued. The notes of the Forestry and Environmental Supervision Corps, of the territorial service of the divisional inspectorate of Cagliari, however, drawn up in the name and on behalf of the Public Prosecutor's Office, claimed something else. That enclave in fifth avenue , the extreme periphery of the industrial area of Macchiareddu, transformed for some time into a receptacle for dangerous and malodorous waste, was much more than a simple storage center for industrial materials to be recycled, as the "imaginative" managers had declared of this environmental disaster at the gates of Cagliari. They didn't believe it either, actually. The owners of the company established with one hundred euros of capital knew perfectly well why those heaps were destined to remain there awaiting bankruptcy.
Waste Everest
Since they started building Everest out of waste, inside and outside that shed the size of two football fields, they haven't sold even a wheelbarrow of that "good thing". The trucks, now poured into the barred entrance of the massacre, worn out by time, have traveled like madmen, from Portovesme to Macchiareddu. They had the foresight to use covered vehicles, aware that they could not cross half of Sardinia spreading their miraculous "chalk" on the roads. When you cross the first mound outside, on the right side of that shed exploding with waste, you immediately realize that the arm of the bulldozer has inflicted a wound on that now petrified wall of industrial material. The cut is clean, almost a door to the bowels of those mountains of waste that until then no one knew what they could really contain. The Public Prosecutor's Office has appointed a technician who knows his stuff to assist in the operation.
The chemist's verdict
Alessio Ceccarini, professor of Analytical Chemistry in the Department of Industrial Chemistry of the University of Pisa, has clear ideas. The state bucket sent to the spot by the Public Prosecutor's Office eight times cuts deeply into those cyclopean piles, opening the way for a coring probe, the only one capable of insinuating itself deeply into that mountain of waste. Macchiareddu's multinational alcove was definitively violated, complete with samples to be analysed, one by one, until revealing what those poisons passed off as "gypsum" really contained. The result is devastating. The overall picture that the investigating magistrates line up could go well beyond the charge configured in the closing investigations of last May 17th. The provision that Rita Cariello and Rossella Spano, the prosecutors of an investigation that is making the multinational Glencore tremble, signed on May 25 last year, eight days after the circle came full circle, cannot be explained otherwise.
Fiery missive
The letter on headed paper from the Cagliari prosecutor's office that ended up in our hands is much more than an environmental alarm at the gates of the metropolitan city. The recipients of the communication are basically three, the Ministry of the Environment and Energy Security, the Metropolitan City of Cagliari and the Mayor of the Municipality of Assemini. For information, the diktat of the Public Prosecutors also reaches the Regional Department of the Environment and Ispra, the Higher Institute for Environmental Research, the operational branch of the State in matters of pollution. The premise is an observation that leaves no way out: "the alarming conditions of the area located in the industrial area of Macchiareddu, 5th street, a site of national interest, currently subject to preventive seizure" have been proven. The continuation is a sentence without appeal: «we note the outcome of the chemical analyzes carried out by the technical consultant of the Public Prosecutor's Office, prof. A. Ceccarini, on the samples taken on 15 and 16 March 2022 from the piles of calcium subject to seizure: it concerns calcium sulphate dihydrate contaminated by heavy metals (zinc, lead, aluminium, cadmium and copper) and, as regards the zinc, in a concentration such as to classify the product as dangerous with hazard characteristics HP14 (ecotoxic)».
Environmental stab
The finding is an environmental stab: «The transfer tests have shown that the material is not suitable for transfer to landfills for non-hazardous waste and, since five out of eight samples do not even meet the parameters for transfer to a landfill for hazardous waste , for correct disposal, the material must undergo an inerting process to chemically block the soluble fraction of inorganic contaminants". A real carcinogenic bomb, which cannot be disposed of even in a hazardous waste landfill. The gravity of the poisons contained in those heaps goes far beyond the danger. According to the professor appointed by the Public Prosecutor's Office, those 120,000 tons of waste must be inerted with very expensive chemical processes before being transferred to a high-risk landfill. It's not over, though.
Carcinogenic substances
The pollution chapter of the letter puts the disaster outside the shed and the sediment area on paper: «Following these results, the chemical investigation was extended to the sediments present in the rainwater collection sewer system and in the external gutter to the site where the sewage system discharges, always after sampling carried out on 10.07.2022. The chemical analyzes on the sediments taken from inside the manholes have highlighted significantly high concentration values of the metals zinc, lead and cadmium and this due to the entrainment of the dihydrate calcium sulphate inside the white water discharge pipes. In particular, a cadmium concentration value (heavy metal classified as carcinogenic) was found in the soil samples taken upstream and downstream of the drainage point of the sewage system which exceeds the contamination threshold concentration».
24 hour time
It is the Public Prosecutor's Office that establishes the gravity of the case on the basis of environmental regulations: "When an event occurs which is potentially capable of contaminating the site, the person in charge of the pollution shall implement the necessary prevention measures within twenty-four hours and give immediate communication". In practice, the owner of the property or whoever will be identified as responsible will have to act in record time to reclaim the area, with all that it entails, i.e. an expense that will go well over 40 million euros, as much as it actually had spared the Swiss multinational. If the private sector does not intervene in a very short time, the law speaks of 24 hours, the Ministry of the Environment, having consulted the Ministry of Economic Development, will manage the reclamation procedure relating to sites of national interest. The risk now is that the owner of the property, a financial fund that bought it from the bankruptcy procedure, will be held accountable for that crime. If it doesn't, the state will take care of it. For the umpteenth time. The multinationals pollute, they wash their hands of it, the Sardinians pay a lot.
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