
Toxic: Napoli
Naples sits atop decades of illegally dumped and burned waste, and this VICE report traces who put it there: the Camorra, which has run the region's waste-management business since at least the early 1990s, trucking garbage into the countryside north of the city and torching it in fields between vineyards. The European Union declared the area an official environmental emergency in 1994, and the film finds the crisis has only deepened since. Farmers describe sheep born with missing limbs, and dairy producers show milk and mozzarella too contaminated to sell, some of it still reaching markets anyway. Correspondents talk to residents about spiking cancer rates in towns downwind of the burn sites and to farmers who have lost herds and land to soil poisoned by dumped chemicals. Local activists and small landowners describe pushing back against a crime syndicate that operates with little interference from a government several interviewees accuse of looking the other way. The film stays close to the ground, tracking specific farms and families rather than the wider politics, and ends with the toxins already inside the food chain.