Ecomafia is an Italian neologism for criminal activities related to organized crime which cause damage to the environment. The term was coined by the Italian environmentalist organization Legambiente in 1994 and has since seen widespread use. In Italy, environmental crime is one of the fastest-growing and most profitable forms of criminal activity. As of 2012, an estimated 30% of Italy's waste is disposed of illegally by organized crime syndicates. The United Nations Environment Programme estimated that criminal organizations earned approximately $20–30 billion USD from environmental crimes. A
Ecomafia is an Italian neologism for criminal activities related to organized crime which cause damage to the environment. The term was coined by the Italian environmentalist organization Legambiente in 1994 and has since seen widespread use. In Italy, environmental crime is one of the fastest-growing and most profitable forms of criminal activity. As of 2012, an estimated 30% of Italy's waste is disposed of illegally by organized crime syndicates. The United Nations Environment Programme estimated that criminal organizations earned approximately $20–30 billion USD from environmental crimes. According to a 2024 report by Legambiente, the entire illegal waste disposal market in Italy was worth €8.8 billion in 2023 and was dominated by more than 300 mafia clans.
==Activities== The primary activities in which the ecomafia is involved are the illegal trafficking and disposal of waste, illegal construction, and the trafficking of exotic animals and stolen art. The Italian ecomafia is closely connected.
Discovered by embedding cosine similarity (sentence-transformers MiniLM, 384-dim).