Where waste meets disadvantage: a spatial approach to environmental injustice in Campania, Italy

Environmental justice (EJ) research has long demonstrated that environmental burdens disproportionately affect marginalised communities. However, quantitative EJ studies remain largely U.S.-centric, and often methodologically and theoretically narrow. This paper examines environmental injustice in Campania, Italy, historically marked by waste crises, weak governance, and socio-economic marginalisation. It conceptualises sacrifice zones as the spatial manifestation of broader socio-political processes through which certain territories are rendered expendable. The study applies an index of environmental contamination burden and examines its relationships with a set of demographic, socio-economic, and contextual indicators, using multiple spatial techniques. A mixed-scale approach combines municipal-level data across Campania with postcode-level data for its capital city, Naples. Results confirm the concentration of environmental burdens along the Naples–Caserta corridor and reveal marked distributive inequalities within eastern Naples. These areas combine higher environmental contamination burdens with multiple dimensions of disadvantage, although the strength and direction of these relationships vary across space. The analysis also uncovers unexpected relationships with conventional EJ indicators such as low income and unemployment. This highlights the limitations of official statistics in contexts shaped by widespread informal economies. The study contributes to EJ scholarship with a multi-stage and mixed-scale methodology for analysing socio-environmental inequalities, while arguing for moving beyond merely identifying unequal distributions. It shows how quantitative analysis, when critically and historically contextualised, can provide an empirical basis for formulating and examining hypotheses about the structural processes associated with environmental injustice.