The skyline of Monte Linas sees the horizon of the "Shadow Country" violated as never before by the wind turbines that stand out against the sky of Villacidro like a steel forest with no future. Rich land, luxuriant fields bathed by the Rio Leni which in winter becomes an impetuous stream of water to feed the island's finest citrus fruits. The smokestack of the San Gavino foundry contends for the primacy of the clouds with the disused ones of the state petrochemical which in that plain, snatched from agricultural fields, stopped producing when the nineties had not yet crossed the last decade of the last century.
In the middle ground
Yet in this middle ground, in the agricultural Campidano, a silent threat has long been facing, passed off as a "fertilizer" miracle for the countryside that stretches out at the foot of that mountain that separates olive and citrus groves from the jagged green coast. The data sometimes speaks louder than any comment. They are like a plow in those expanses of land: they leave deep furrows and unearth a truth that for too long has remained immersed in the drawers of a bureaucracy that does not control and if anything turns its attention elsewhere. The phenomenon that in recent years has been affecting these lands, in carelessness or irresponsibility, is the so-called reuse of sewage sludge in agricultural fields. An increasingly widespread and increasingly uncontrolled practice, left at the mercy of those who manage this market, with increasingly less clear laws and never certain interpretations. Chemical analyzes entrusted to those who produce those sludges and to those who throw them into agricultural lands.
Analysis & verb
The public, the state and regional ones, is limited to a few spot samples, limiting themselves to acquiring the manager's "verb". Then nothing more. It doesn't matter if those soils have reached the right chemical-physical balance, if the organoleptic qualities of those products are an exclusive Dop-branded good. Little is worried about the water tables ready to distribute those sewage substances captured by the violated ground everywhere. When you meet the interest in disposing of those sewage sludge without wasting too much time, at no cost, and the interest in “pumping” agricultural production to the maximum, the game is done. In theory, those who manage those sludge, on behalf of a public company, Abbanoa, earn a lot, and those who receive them in their own lands earn nothing. One fact, however, is certain: after all, only a few know what is really inside that mud. Moreover, the regulations in force, which are increasingly permissive, do not provide for a broad spectrum analysis. As if the state, even knowing of the danger, prefers not to know. The Minister of Ecological Transition, in recent days, suddenly caught by an insidious microphone, declared that the law must change, but you know, from words to deeds there is a mountain of interests involved. As many as have caused the sewage discharges in the fields of Sardinia to rise to the point of doubling the quantity of purification waste in the last 15 years. We have gone from 7,000 tons of sludge spilled on the agricultural lands of the island in 2005 to almost 14,000 in 2019. An exponential growth for which triumphant words were not lacking, as if filling the agricultural fields with that material was a conquest of civilization.
