The deal is a millionaire, all played out in the silence and dim light of the great waste business. An intertwining of contracts and subcontracts for an uncontrolled mountain of sewage sludge which, in the end, willy-nilly, is all part of the very delicate food chain. From 2018 to 2020, in the fragrant island of Sardinia, the already impressive quantities declared by the exclusive Sardinian purification managers were even added to the sewage waste sent with impunity to the land of the Nuraghi from distant Puglia. Thousands of tons shamelessly dumped in some landfill ready for anything, or scattered here and there, once in the Malvasia land, sometimes buried in the fields of the fodder or olive groves of the Campidano. A discreet vortex, were it not for that nauseating stench that from time to time bursts like a slap in the open on the most untouched prosceniums of the island. Tar and the State Council, prosecutors and courts, in recent months have definitively swept that continental traffic of sewage sludge destined to "fertilize" the agricultural fields of the ancient land of Sardinia. It is illegal to introduce extraregional waste on the island, sentences have now been sanctioned without appeal. The chapter, however, is far from closed. To keep it open are the sewage residues produced by Sardinian purifiers, not a few, according to the data that the latest official report makes available from the Region.
An avalanche
In 2019, the production of sewage sludge destined for agricultural reuse amounted to 85,000 tons, which translated into dry matter became 18,572. All data that have a premise: reliability. The report of the Region does not hide it: "It must be premised that to the measurement errors possibly made by the interested parties, attributable to statistical concepts, those deriving from possible non-uniformities in the measurement methods (tons transformed into cubic meters or vice versa) must be added, in moment of the measurement (at the time of withdrawal from the plants or in the drying phase more or less advanced), in the possible conversions (measurement carried out on the sludge as it is and the dry substance obtained) ". In some cases they may be mere errors, in others, however, they become systematic and suspicious. The criminal investigations, from north to south of Italy, have revealed methods and dangers that have been lurking for some time in the management of this very delicate environmental, health and other issues. The reality that emerges every day is disturbing: there is a lack of real, constant controls and superpartes, with so many looming subterfuges. The risk is that those muds, a nauseating synthesis of the sewers of the island's municipalities, end up directly in agricultural lands. The consequences are easily imaginable. In those wastewater, to be theoretically transformed into "fertilizer", there is a concentrate of all kinds of waste. The latest criminal investigation on the subject is that of the Court of Brescia on a frightening round of sludge abruptly stopped in northern Italy. The investigating judge Elena Stefana writes in her ordinance of last July: "In the samples leaving the company and which were scattered on the land, the polluting substances (fluorides, sulphates, chlorides, nickel, copper, selenium, arsenic, hydrocarbons, zinc, phenols) were tens, if not hundreds of times higher than the legal parameters ".
