Greece's Festering Garbage Crisis

Greece’s surfeit of garbage has become one of the most visible — and pungent — symptoms of its debt crisis. A report commissioned by the European Commission last year ranked the country as the European Union’s least efficient in its implementation of European waste-management directives. It still buries 80% of its waste, while the E.U. average is 38% and some member states have deployed recycling and recovery to reduce the amount that ends up in the ground to less than 1%. Moreover, Greece’s landscape is still littered with hundreds of illegal dump sites. This doesn’t just threaten public health and the environment, but also the recovery prospects for its long-suffering public finances. The European Commission said in February that it is taking Greece back to court, proposing a daily penalty of €71,193 ($91,527) for each of the 396 illegal sites that are either still active or have not yet been cleaned and rehabilitated.