Samia Gharbi, the woman who exposed illegal waste trafficking between Italy and Tunisia

A daily battle not only against pollution and plastic waste, but also in defense of a poor country, Tunisia, illegally invaded by garbage from a rich country, Italy. Semia Gharbi, 58, is a Tunisian scientist, environmental educator, and activist who has been working in the fields of environmental education and ecological justice for years. She is the founder ofAssociation for Environmental Education for Future Generations (AEEFG), a non-governmental organization that works to raise public awareness of the risks of hazardous chemicals and to promote a more sustainable and healthy economy. But the heart of her fight, both scientifically and from the perspective of an environmental activist, is the trafficking of waste between Italy and Tunisia.

The process is well-oiled: Italian companies fill out documents presenting the waste as legitimate recyclable materials, so containers loaded with garbage, even hazardous ones, leave Italian ports with all the necessary paperwork, bound for Tunisian ports. There, local government officials, often corrupt or poorly informed, receive them without any real oversight, and from that moment on, the waste is abandoned in illegal landfills, burned or mixed with other local waste, causing soil, water and air pollution.

Just to give an example, linked to an investigation carried out by the Italian judiciary, in the months of May, June and July 2020, Between Italy and Tunisia they were sent 282 containers of waste labelled as recyclable plastic but which in reality contained mixed municipal waste and non-recyclable. These containers, which left from the port of Salerno and landed in Sousse, included approximately 7,900 tons of waste coming from the Campania region, fraudulently declared but prohibited from importation by Tunisian law and international conventions.

• Gharbi started by collecting official container documents imported into Tunisia, comparing them with local and international regulations (Basel Convention).
• He identified discrepancies between what was stated in the documents (“recyclable plastic”) and what the containers actually contained (mixed municipal waste, non-recyclable and hazardous materials); she documented all her meetings with the various stakeholders in the supply chain, showing photos of the waste and storage sites, and managed to force the Tunisian government to return over 6.000 tons of waste to Italy.

Thanks to this activity, Gharbi received the Goldman Environmental Prize, also known as the “Green Nobel”, in 2025.