Mardimago – Ceregnano

In the late 1990s a private operator set up at Mardimago, a hamlet of Rovigo, a depot for storing and processing fluff, the non-metallic residue of car shredding, together with other waste. According to the municipality it amounted to about 60,000 cubic metres of material containing heavy metals (cadmium, lead, chromium). Between 1996 and 1997 the heap caught fire and smouldered for a long time.

In 2001 the Mardimago site and its twin at the former sugar factory in via San Francesco at Lama Polesine, in the municipality of Ceregnano, were placed on the national remediation programme (ministerial decree 468/2001) and given a perimeter by decree of 8 July 2002. The Veneto Region gives an area of about 75,000 m²: the private part holds buried and heaped waste of various kinds (fluff, tannery salts, unsold newspapers), the public part waste disposed of without authorisation.

In July 2007 ARPAV and the Carabinieri environmental unit recorded the removal of 13,500 tonnes of hazardous waste from the former foundry at Lama Polesine. By decree of 11 January 2013 the site passed to the Region, which approved the securing and remediation project in 2014 and funded it at the end of 2018. The executive design dates from April 2021; the works, worth 1.36 million euro, began in summer 2022.