Voices, Clues, Numbers: Roaming Among Waste in Campania

A Region in the Italian South, Campania comprises five provinces: Avellino, Benevento, Caserta, Salerno, and Naples, with a total population of almost 6 million people. This population however, is unevenly distributed-- with 80 percent inhabiting the region's capital of Naples and its metropolitan area (Smarrazzo 1999) which covers less than 20 percent of Campania's entire acreage. The metropolitan area is a complex urban-rural system, connecting Naples with three other towns (Figure 1), where more than 4 million inhabitants coexist in a network of agriculture, food production, several industries, waste treatment plants, and waste disposal activities.