To its credit, the government last year opened a new waste treatment plant outside Naples, but it can process only trash that has been sorted first, a task that the region's broken waste-collection system has been largely incapable of doing.
The city's water infrastructure was over 100 years old, and after the end of each winter, once-frozen pipes thawed out, water mains would break, wasting hundreds of thousands of gallons of water.
As in many natural settings including the human body wastewater treatment plants maintain a careful balance of microbes, with many desirable species breaking down wastes and controlling odors at the plants.
Moreover, deep within the center of a landfill waste mound, there is often little or no oxygen to support the microbes that break down waste aerobically.
Waste removal - breaking down of wastes and recycling nutrients; this is important for growing food.
Cure De Grey proposes inserting genes from soil bacteria, which break down waste, into the lysosomes.
Ecological toilets that use natural composting to break down waste are simple to construct, waterless and are easy to fix.
To make matters worse, when people illegally connect their homes to makeshift pipelines they tend to break and waste resources.
Despite EU laws against it, European countries are passing off broken electronic waste on Africa as "second hand goods".
The romantic idyll culminates in a walk though the plant's egg-shaped digesters, which break down waste into harmless sludge and gas.
In the past year the council has broken household waste recycling targets and led Scotland in introducing free childcare.
