Shadow Spaces… Territorial Reserve

The collection and disposal of waste is ancient, but has become a crucial issue in a relatively recent time, as far as quantity to recuperate, recovery of resources to deal with, novelty and variety of materials to destroy and disposal techniques at hand. It is known that a consumer society produces an extraordinary quantity of scrap and it is now clear there is urgency of change in disposal management. The entire path, from the production and the reuse, up to the elimination, should be subject to particular attention and considered as one only reality. Moreover we shouldn't throw anything away, because there is no one ‘way’, since materials can change form but not disappear. Each item has a story. Its life is linked to raw materials and energy used to design, produce, distribute, use and discard. Starting from its ‘end’ its 'adventure' of rejection begins. Waste is first collected, then according to the type; it can be recycled to recover materials or burned in incinerators to produce electricity and heat. Only residues, which cannot be otherwise recovered, go to the dumps. These are sites far from our common ‘wanting to see’, they give us back unpleasant images, hostile and sometimes even catastrophic... just think of the illicit trafficking of electronical waste that from industrialized countries reaches, for example, the African coasts where, every day, electronic waste is imported, accumulated in open-air landfills, and that are reason for sustenance for millions of dispossessed who, in a continuous rummaging, try to recycle the garbage of the opulent West. We could probably say that from scrap material we can retrieve construction elements not only of objects but of new urban landscapes as well and in this case of real ‘landfill cities’.

Moreover, waste appears to be like a river flooding our planet. Under the push of globalization, our planet is becoming a gigantic waste global dump with an enormous quantity and variety of slag. After all, despite our reluctance regarding this, in my opinion we are essentially what we are throwing away and what we don't want, and we can actually say ‘we refuse, therefore we are’, as a modern variant of the famous Cartesian phrase ‘cogito, ergo sum’ and to which we are called to respond.

Keywords: Waste; Landscape; Architecture; Recycling; Electronic Waste

We are surrounded. We find waste everywhere: along the city streets, the highways, the railways; in the industrial areas as well as in residential neighborhood’s; at the mountain peaks and in the woods; in space; in the fields and on the beaches; floating on the surface of the seas, of the lakes and settling on the bottom. It is not possible to overcome dense smog stretches of asphalt and cement, streams of cars, slurry, smelly swamps and much more separates us from uncontaminated lands. To go back to nature we have to look at this destruction even through a network of interests and investments involving which weights upon our lives no less than cement and steel. So, a mountain of waste which we have to absolutely get rid of hangs over our head. But how? Are we supposed to occupy all the space available? Concerning domestic waste the solution is quite easy because once we have moved the waste away from our houses, there is a pick up system, whether efficient or not, which has the official task of “taking the garbage away” and “recycling”. The solutions adopted for the disposal of waste are, however, tricks to escape our senses especially: from our sight and from our sense of smell. Therefore, waste is “buried” in landfill sites; it’s melted down in meteoric waters and in water courses going into the sea; it’s abandoned in external landfills; consigned to the catharsis of fire and by this sent to the sky or just simply left to external landfills to be taken care of by atmospheric agents and by this sent to the sky or just simply left to external landfills to be taken care of by atmospheric agents and when it comes to electronic waste, well the story is even more complex. In the near future every community will have to deal with the issue of waste more and more and at the same time communities will be less and less willing to become the garbage disposal of other people’s products leading to the Nimby syndrome (not in my backyard) and in parallel with the removal of waste, legal and often illegal, increasingly distant from the origin. But the problem of waste is not only relative to its disposal. Managing waste means the necessity of a funding plan and plant location. Actually the issue does not come from the lack of finances, not the lack of plants, not even by people opposing its location, however, mostly by the fact that waste is produced; too much waste is produced, even when it could be relatively easy to avoid doing it; plant disposals are planned as well as the site but the solution to the reduction of waste or easy recycling is not. The fact is that disposal plants or waste treatments continue to be necessary and locating it somewhere will be necessary. The question now remains, how and where? In principle, through a plan with the purpose of sharing in the fairest way possible, the polluting loads and so to distribute small plants on the territory uniformly by introducing financial and environmental compensations for the most-struck populations [1-3].

In 1992, Fast wrote: “The problem of waste basically comes from its material nature. Waste occupies space, it has volume and so it suffocates people besieging from close up. The first image that comes to mind by the concept of garbage is an incumbent mountain that continues to grow and that maybe the better even on the environment of the people”. Let’s try to climb this mountain! We need space: an “empty” space, whether land, water or sky, in order to deposit everything we no longer want to see. According to Heidegger describing emptiness: “The essence of the containing emptiness is collected when offered”. So, will we fill every empty space with our waste? Is this the path to follow? [4-6]

A mountain of waste which we have to absolutely get rid of hangs over our head, being waste a world apart, a complex one and symmetric to that of goods: behind the mirror, this world of consumerism reflects itself and becomes conscious of itself; giving us back the part of the products that is more real, the ones that populate our daily life. Waste is the “dark side” of a single reality, which indissolubly associates resource and waste. Today, the right to access rejected goods, destined to become waste, before ending up in the indistinct flow of cleansing department, in the American society, it has found a way to institutionalization through the so-called “garage sales” which consist in exhibiting in front of ones house, furniture and objects that one intends to get rid of. Even in Japan there is a sort of “free handover” of what can still be used by others: the people of Tokyo leave the “sodai gomi”, quality garbage, on side walks of some neighbourhoods which have become hunting ground for poor desperate people, intellectual snobs and organized bands. If we look at present and past reality surrounding us, we notice different attention turned to recycling material: the city of Prato, for example, since the thirteenth century has made its fortune by making clothing from rags; the Coliseum for years was subjected to sacking of material for construction of other monuments or the ARAR, presided by Ernesto Rossi, used to recuperate useful material from the American wartime waste giving us an important contribution to the industrial birth of our nation… Therefore we can say that we shouldn’t throw anything away, because there is no one “way”, since materials can change form but not disappear. Smog, garbage, sewage, slurry, waste, scraps and rubbish are the normal flow of urban waste but also buildings are abandoned, moved, demolished and entire areas are removed and rebuilt. Materials degrade and age, they are shattered and reused, some central areas of the city can be abandoned, first slowly then faster, uses that are escaped and not wanted are deviated towards marginal and areas and entire cities can suffer abandonment and decadence. Therefore the need to push away from our daily life what we don’t want or need any more is a usual and regular practice that often determines land devastation. The wastes cannot be “left” without blocking the physical and social space. Waste is nothing but a sensitive manifestation to sight, touch and smell. Goods go from one hand to another with an entire flow of waste. Therefore, waste represents the end of the economic process that goes from production to consumption, while resource represents the beginning. Nature does not produce waste, a certain circularity exists; what is waste for one process becomes food for the following processes or parallel. The advent of the industrial society marks a general metamorphosis of waste: first of all, the production of waste increases drastically, secondly the composition of waste changes and finally the habit of use and throw-away appears. Goods and waste are, therefore, aspects of one single reality, but at the same time they exclude themselves reciprocally, as temporarily distinct phases of a complex process or as representatives of two motions diametrically opposite of the human behaviour. The first directed toward buying and possessing, the second directed toward pushing away and oblivion. Therefore, this society careful only to consumption and made up of objects and images that pass without leaving any trace, will soon bring us to have no more “space”. In effect, we notice that in our daily life we are constantly put in front of our earthly attitudes with the associated risk of having to face the “end” of the natural environment, as highlighted by “the report of our living planet” presented at the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF (2020) Living Planet Report 2020 - Bending the curve of biodiversity loss. WWF, Gland, Switzerland), which states that our biological imprint, that is, the productive surface necessary for a population to sustain its own resource consumption and its needs for waste observation, in some countries it overcomes abundantly the capacity of the Earth. In other terms, if the whole world lived as a European, it would take more than two planets and if it consumed like an American, it would need at least five but this is purely from the ecological point of view because this report concerning the biological imprint talks about only the “productive surface”, therefore about space, and not space-time and therefore it does not consider the acceleration of technological progress that reduces the area taken up to nothing. In addition, the production is not the same in all countries and we usually export to other countries what cannot find space in the original one. In principle, this use of the environment follows a logical thought but as we have already said and as we will see later the attitude of waste exportation is not an acceptable practice and it is difficult to believe that anything can change in a near future. However properly this storm that transforms the past into a heap of debris, says Walter Benjamin, is “what we call progress” (W. Benjamin, ed.2014) [7-9].

In the past waste was something to have become harmless and invisible or to take far away. In recent times, instead, the idea has been that minimizing waste results being the best solution: reducing consumerism, making things become permanent, keeping them with care… It is time to say, that waste cannot be erased and we have to begin to consider them as complimentary elements to every reality that surrounds us. The entire path, from the production and the reuse, up to the elimination, should, however, be subject to particular attention and considered as one only reality. We live in effect in a world where the idea of reuse should be taken on even from the same industries that produce, and the Global Peace Container is an example for this. This industry, is aware of the difficulties of deterioration for a container not used and proposes reusing it as a housing unit and later be used for other more complicated matters. In Jamaica, for example, the population used the container as a simple module and built its own living units and created a series of accommodation for family units equipped with facilities and even open spaces. Industrial scraps can be a realistic target in recycling processes, but collection costs and scrap reproduction are too high. We can observe that the packaging that make up the greater part of our daily garbage have a very short life span, very often they cannot be directly reused while it would be interesting to think of a secondary use, for example as construction material. Martin Pawley demonstrated how this could be possible when he invited the Heineken beer factory to produce a bottle that can be used as a construction element in poor house. Evidently all these innovative proposals concentrate on technical aspects, neglecting the emotional consequences. We want order, stability, boundaries… while scraps appear chaotic, varied, disorderly… and it is mostly this sensation of uncontrollability that we most fear but at the same time seduce, attract, fascinate… ourselves. However the art could help that needed change we should be moving towards, careful to recycling of goods and far from the philosophy of “use and throw out” which would bring us to a scenario of disquieting heaps of waste very soon!. Many artist, infect, have taken conscious positions with respect to this topic, concentrating their works on the beauty and on the necessity of decline. Even if garbage often repel us and is often a cause of sickness, they have a power of suggestion of a sort of unknown continuity. In effect, discarding, should be just as important as producing and consuming. Collecting garbage and rubbish could, in effect be a process of learning instead of degradation, an opportunity to show ability or to acquire knowledge. Waste is full of information so much that even archaeologists base their research on them as Harvard Alfred Kidder demonstrates digging in the dump of Andover in Massachusetts or the waste project by Rathje and Hughes that examines samples of rubbish of Tucson every spring with the objective of verifying the level of consumption, eating habits, food waste and differences among different social groups. In fact, in numerous American cities exists the Garbage project that is the analysis of “fresh” garbage produced by a specific block of houses, will later become a stratigraphic research of some dumps and the study of the historical evolutions of the urban waste composition. Therefore we can notice an analogy between the systematic analysis of waste and archaeological research that after all, it is not so different from a dig of waste from another period. We could talk about a sort of treasure hung when we see that in the United States, where the short and simple national history makes it improbable to find historic finds, urban waste become the main protagonist of research, directed primarily to waste collection of famous people. Evidently, waste is an immense deposit of valuable information and so I think about the police investigations that find, in effect, answers through analysis of waste. Remember, for example, the arrest of Joseph Bonanno, a Mafia boss, was based on proof found from the waste of his studio in a three year period. Therefore these aspects are sufficient to foresee that the study of waste will be cultivated in ever more systematic ways. The reason is simple: garbage is direct documentation of habits and behaviour of those who have produced it [10-12].

What does waste represent in each of our daily life? How do we perceive waste in our imagination and how do we elaborate it through the languages of our creativity? This storm that transforms the past into a heap of debris, says Benjamin, is “what we call progress”. Waste and unusual objects have often gotten the attention of novelists, poets, directors ... We see that obsolete objects, waste, “take possession” of literary texts parallelly to their progressive settling in the real life partly starting from an “historical time” that coincides, roughly with the industrial revolutions. Remember, for example, the book “A too noisy solitude” by Bohumil Hrabal where the destiny of literature seems to have reached completions when the mountains of books, together with newspapers, magazines, packages and packaging of every type are thrown out and destroyed. A new world is coming forward, hygienist and rushed, impersonal and indifferent, monotonous and cruel that perceives books as simple scrap paper. Literature explores this topic by speaking of landfills, who works there, who lives there, for example, in the story “Tale of a hill of waste” from the Turkish author Tekin Latife or even speaking about the daily relationship we have with our garbage which sometimes even becomes a ritual, like in “La poubelle agréée” by Italo Calvino. The author grasps perfectly the common feeling of repugnance, whether aware or not, and describes the world of waste as a sort of social tabù. Moreover, Calvino gives us an image of the world where we live one hundred times with the description of the invisible city of Leonia: “the city of Leonia makes itself every day …”. Sometimes literature gives us surreal stories of a rare delicacy as “Junk Girl”, taken from “The melancholy death of oyster boy” by Tim Burton. Even in the stories of Charles Dickens waste have an invasive aspect of the urban landscape? It is in literature that the rejected object, abandoned, secondhand, obsolete, useless, seems to have taken revenge over the functional, useful, intrinsically valuable object because it allows us to designate and allude to an aspect of the human condition that the world of goods and functional relationships tend to remove or erase the places of waste, live and work with them, the “spirit of dead things”, these are aspects that often touch each other, they overlap, they live together and often, as we have seen they are described in literature but, not only because even cinema regarding the theme of garbage seems to renew itself in continuation, as the last production of Pixar shows in an animated feature film, it tells the story of WALL-E, a robot alone on the Earth in an apocalyptic scenario, where he gather objects found in the garbage. Going back more than half a century ago, Vittorio De Sica in “Miracle in Milan” (1915), at the end he shows an image of Duomo square crowded with garbage men where street people take their brooms away to fly away with them towards an imaginary world. Even Antonioni in the 1948 documentary “Garbage men” follows the life of garbage men in Rome. In an alteration of free and suggestive associations, the director tries to find again the relationship that ties the world with the urban environment. Finally, remember one of the six episodes “What are clouds?” of the film “Italian whim”, directed by Pier Paolo Pasolini in 1967, where the last scene takes place in a land-fill site where the “marionettes”, half-buried by the garbage, notice the skies for the first time and see light white clouds floating by. I think the director, through the overlapping of “world thrown out” and “world lived”, expresses the wish that life is the dream of a dream, that is, the representation of a representation. There are many examples of films, both Italian and international. What is surprising is that the theme has influenced authors and continues to do so with different productions ranging from comic to grotesque, dramatic to fantasy... [13-15].

Looking through the garbage in open-air dumps, whatever one can sell again, is a way to survive, a “normal” condition for thousands of people that have abandoned inhospitable countries in hope of finding fortune in the ever bigger metropolis of the world. The increase of production and of consumption has created enormous imbalances in managing urban waste. As a result real “dump cities” have risen. The African shanty town in Nairobi has been described many times by father Zanotelli, and the less known ones of Kigali in Rwanda but also in Zambia, where 90% of rubbish is not collected and is accumulated on the streets. In addition, we observe that in Brazil, open-air dumps are away from the touristic areas and concentrate on the outskirts of the cities where cartoneros are, that is, pioneers of recycling. In the third world, there are many “garbage-cities”, where mostly electronic waste is exported (as described below) and there are many desperate images reaching us and scaring us, maybe, in any case, our wish to consume remains always firm as we live in a culture that pays attention to production to “fashionable” goods far from caring about the problem of waste. So what are we to do? Maybe we should investigate, report this world submerged by waste, pointing out dramatic realities and re-called suggestive solutions [16-18].

We know quite clearly that since time past cities sat on their own waste that gradually grew all around. Daily life garbage was directly poured into the street to be rummaged by animals or accumulated until strong rain would sweep it away. Progressively we can see that waste started being pushed away from its origin and in our daily life scraps are brought as far away from our sight, possible not only from our senses but also from our thoughts, in effect, knowing they are close horrifies us. Waste is transported far from the city limits within bordering states and toxic waste is exported, quite often to Third World countries. Some extreme examples of this are: Coop City, a pile of garbage thrown out illegally along a kilometres and a half, two and a half meters high and six meters wide; Gaddami beach in Pakistan, about fifty kilometres from Karachi, which appears like a coast after the invasion of old ships routed from all over the world, to later cut up in pieces to recuperate the metal; or even the small islands such as Randall and Ward in the East river of New York are subject to uncontrolled waste deposits, becoming garbage disposals, cemeteries for the poor and charity hospice for the entire XVIII and XIX centuries [19-21].

So, waste is deposited on the edge of settlements, in areas where those without power live, where land rights are weak and controls insufficient [22-24].

An analysis of environmental racism A healthy and clean environment....is a legitimate aspiration of every advanced society. A developed society, one that produces to grow and consumes, also consumes resources obviously, and produces waste: organic, inorganic material from which energy can be drawn, and toxic material which no one wants. They end up confined to less “prestigious” lands from the touristic or housing point of view, or they are diverted towards places that are already bound to degradant, that's what happens in most industrialized countries. On a more global scale, however, this procedure is even more significant and often the drawing line between North and South of the world ends up to be defined as those producing wealth and those disposing it. More generally speaking, these mechanisms are clear: the law of analysis cost-benefit is in charge, therefore pollution takes place where it is cheaper to dispose, that is, not only where work is less expensive, but where it is also cheaper to pay people that undergo damage due to contamination. Hence we observe that the economist logic is hard, fast and flawless: polluting kills and is expensive, therefore virgin territories like the African ones can still afford to be polluted even more since local population does not have time to think about tumors seeing that they struggle not to die in the first few years of ife. It's an extremely functional and productive view point, although awful and inhumane, but it doesn't matter after all, once Africa will have become a saturated waste dump, then we will look for another place to pollute. This topic becomes always more delicate, just as talking about environmental justice, minor's rights which are often excluded in practice by this justice. This reminds me of the “NIMBY” syndrome, described as an attitude of fear and firm resistance in front of the risk that the area in which we live could be contaminated by waste disposal plant; in effect “NIMBY” stands for “Not In My Backyard”. In addition, we could observe a certain social line of demarcation: in effect one can suppose, for example, the average residence of Manhattan or Beverly Hills, white, educated with an mid-high income, to have an “ecological consciousness” that is more developed and a degree of less “blackmailing” with respect to the inhabitants of industrial territories of Lousiana or Missouri, mostly black or Hispanic, low education, annual income below the national average, therefore, in a paradoxical way, often the NIMBY movements involuntarily end up doing favoring industrial group and “lobbies” who decide to go pollute where it is easier to win local resistance. This social distinction is sarcastically labeled by the acronym “PIBBY”, that is, “Put it in the black's backyard”. We also observe that until the beginning of the 80's, most toxic waste, and not only, was dumped with no consideration of the risks and there was no specific care in the production processes, conservation and transportation of toxic elements. The clear lack of rules in waste management, had thusly determined a permissive dimension in the creation of waste dumps at economically more advantageous conditions. Therefore, l’EPA (Environmental Protection Agency: the equivalent of the Ministry of Environment) had recognized from 80 to 90% of waste was disposed without adequate safeguarding of human health and environment was located where there was a particular ethnic group. Therefore it is worth highlighting that with respect to other factors examined, race was a great predominant factor in the location of plants for disposing toxic waste. Therefore, if people discriminated for racial reasons are rejected, relegated at the margins, rejected by the dominant group it is almost legitimate for this same group, dump on them physically their own waste and even more so if an economic profit can be obtained. “Everything is connected to other things” says Barry Commoner with his first law on ecology, explaining that to continue inflicting damage to the global environment everyone ends up paying the consequences. I believe that the right to a non-polluted environment has to enter the constitutions of each country and among fundamental human rights, this with a very basic ideas: if we continue to behave with no respect, regarding ecological balances, then humanity will end in the waste dumps of history, in a more radical way with respect to what Foucault had to say.

When rubbish become mountains of poisons, of waste and of money Following this research on waste displacements, more or less lawful, I ask, in particular, where is technological waste coming from the Western world disposed? I so-called developing countries obviously, creating a neo-colonial system of land exploitation. Ships loaded with cellular phones, personal computer and other technological supports, already “obsolete” or in non-use, sail off continuously from American, Australian, European ports to attack Nigeria, India, Cina, Tailandia. These countries are beginning to look more and more like technological waste dumps, besides being full of chemical or nuclear waste. Ships loaded with electronics waste mostly departed from Europe and North America, with the aim, unfortunately, of exporting computers, mobile phones and much more that are no longer usable and that cannot therefore be recovered and, therefore, reinserted into the transport market. 'used but only left on the roadsides, close to the shanty towns, where they are then set on fire. In Nigeria, as in Tanzania and in Kenya, there is no internal waste management system and so the West takes advantage, pushing the problem back from their own areas. This is the umpteenth silent destruction, therefore, and it does not seem to impose any limits to the market. Naturally there are some norms that should control this technological waste traffic but they seem not be sufficient. Let us, for example, the “Basilea Convention” (of 1989) concerning moving dangerous waste beyond frontiers, that is eliminating waste. And this agreement prohibits dangerous waste toward so-called developing countries, but obviously it does not really bring out the results hoped for. In addition, the European Union has instituted different legislative devices to hold in the problem, introducing new limitations and restrictions on international technological traffic, disciplining recycling and forbidding exportation abroad for recycling. Despite this, countless hi-tech dumps are spread out in the world: India, China, Africa and many others. Maybe we are not aware of the enormous proportions of the problem but if we lend attention to our daily life, where even our supermarket trolleys are transformed in electronic equipment, then we cannot avoid noticing the kind of risk we are running. Infect, the increase in production and consumption has led, in fact, to imbalances in the management of RAEE (electronics waste), that is waste from electronic equipment (detected in constant increase: 3-5% per year) and whose disposal represents a problem for many rich countries which, in defiance of the laws, use the poor countries as an illegal landfill. It is estimated that more than 50 million tons of RAEE are exported every year of which, according to the 2020 Basel Action Network report: United Kingdom, Denmark, Ireland and Italy are among the largest exporters of RAEE to Africa and South East Asia and in in particular from the EU there are about 400 thousand tons of illegal exports to the South of the world. Overall, of all electronic waste, 47% of those produced each year find space, after articulated handovers, in developing countries, today above all, in Africa and in particular in: Benin, Ghana, Somalia, Costa d 'Ivory and in Nigeria where, according to an investigation by the DanWatch organization, again in 2009, through the monitoring of a spy TV, which first passed through a collection center in Hampshire, then at the port of the city of Tilbury, finally, embarked for Africa, and so over 500 containers loaded with electronic waste were imported monthly in the city of Lagos with the aim of being recovered and, therefore, reinserted in the second-hand market but in real in a minimal part and majority set on fire in the streets or deposited in open landfills, free from any environmental and social control and protection. On the other hand, in Nigeria, as, generally, in African territory, there is currently no internal waste management system and the West takes advantage of this by removing the RAEE disposal problem from its own borders. Then, ships loaded with poisons therefore outline a dense network of routes that from industrialized countries reaches the African coasts where, every day, electronic waste is imported, accumulated in open-air landfills, and that are reason for sustenance for millions of dispossessed who, in a continuous rummaging, try to recycle the garbage of the opulent West. The regulations for their administration across borders prove to be completely ineffective and inadequate since, annually, from 20 to 50 tons of electronic garbage: they fluctuate, exchange, get lost in legal operations and illegal trafficking. They are disposed of in more or less appropriate plants, they dissolve, among acids, in water courses or are dispersed almost everywhere. The same Greenpeace, was the first to reveal in 2008 a dense network of these illicit trafficking, of declared official ships of second-hand electronic goods, but, in truth, completely broken, useless and whose fate was revealed, in part, unknown and, in part (75% for those produced in Europe and 80% for those produced in the United States), wandering by sea, therefore destined to who knows which ports in Africa. In particular, one of these routes was made known, that from Antwerp, Belgium, where electronic waste from Holland, Germany, Italy, Denmark and Switzerland was collected, arrived on the African coasts, landing in the port of Tema. From there the inconvenient load went to be collected, at the beginning, in the Korforidua and Agbogbloshie towns, and then in the main disposal centers north of Accra, where these waste was gone invade the land even beyond the Densu River, today, nothing more than a compact slime of plastic, debris and objects of all kinds, and scattered both in Ghana and beyond the state borders. Ships with poisons waste outline a new network of routes that from the industrialized countries arrive, after articulated handovers, up to the African coasts. Many of the ships that, for years now, have been sailing towards Africa and pouring enormous quantities of material around the city of Abidjan, thus contaminating the Ivory Coast. Tons of toxic waste accumulate in the Akouédo landfill or in the industrial area of Vridi, Dokoui and also in Abobo always on the Ivory Coast where, among the measures taken, in response to the emergency, the construction of a plant of disposal is hypothesized and the first evacuation of the Maca penitentiary, located right in the proximity of a highly polluted area. Not only Greenpeace or DanWatch but also Amnesty, Consumers International and many others had denounced, in the early 21st century, the atrocious policy linked to the disposal of RAEE and of which, today, in particular Africa is a victim, co-responsible. A country that imports electronic waste every day by accumulating it in open-air landfills where hundreds of people extract anything that can be resold, especially precious metals: copper, lead and zinc. A small fortune, a way to survive for millions of dispossessed who, in this constant rummaging, try to recycle the remains of the opulent West. Ultimately, we can say landfill cities are the African ones in the slums of Kigali in Rwanda, Olososua in Nigeria, the lesser known ones in Zambia where 90% of garbage is not collected but burned in the streets or dispersed in the region and also in Korogocho in Kenya, in a past quarry and, currently, a hill of waste in which, still today, trucks loaded with garbage arrive and which, in 2006, was planned to be reclaimed and relocated elsewhere; however, this project proved to be impracticable due to such obscure and suspicious management in contracts, charges and various interests. Then, what can be hypothesized to avert a crisis of such proportions? Greenpeace, among others, from the very beginning had suggested, at least, a reasonable as well as necessary awareness with the consequent ordering of the principle of producer responsibility according to which companies should undertake to produce goods that are easy to recycle and dispose of in safety. Nonetheless, at the moment, the simplest, cheapest and, certainly shameful solution remains that of illegally exporting hazardous waste to the poorest countries where the laws protecting the environment and those regulating its disposal are irrelevant. Obviously, the scenario is less simple than summarized here. In any case, there are mysterious losses of hazardous waste, there are illegal landfills, there are illicit markets and unscrupulous people, there is all this and much more and if, as soon as possible, this havoc will not be put to an end it will be difficult to assume that humanity will not end up, in the sense more radical: “among the waste of history” as intended by Foucault [25].

We note that globalization and uniformity, as well as a certain devotion to hygiene or super cleaning of the western world, represents today the first causes of environmental dirt that re-emerges everywhere in an uncontrolled way. After all, in the main industrialized countries, as well as in developing countries, the problem of contaminated sites is often caused by illicit and uncontrolled disposal of waste and which leads to the widespread diffusion of illegal landfills, disused industries and, in particular in Third World countries, to real landfill cities. Therefore it is necessary to implement strategies for the remediation of these contaminated soils starting from interventions for eliminations or the control of immediate risks for man and/or the environment (so called temporary security measures) and that are needed to gain time in anticipation of the realization of a intervention of permanent or at least long term. Therefore, managing the areas contaminated by waste, their identification, the building strategies and the perspectives of reuse impose a synergy of different competencies and specific planning responses to every territorial condition found. In any case, it is important to assume that the dumps determine new landscapes that change with time, transform, and that it is necessary to implement territorial architectural plans useful for their recovery.