how would you translate "termovalorizzatore"?

back on the waste topic...
i have translated a WU MING article about the ambiguous use of words and euphemisms in information and mass communication media. especially about the word "termovalorizzatore", which cannot really be translated because i believe such a word, such an euphemism has only been used in Italy. In the rest of the world, the simple word "burning plant" or "incinerator" is used. Because the role of such plants is to get rid of waste, and a (pretty expensive and note very sustainable) by product is the production of energy. Makes sense, if we still agree that the name of something should define its (main) purpose.

Throughout Europe, burning plants are governed by laws about waste; in Italy, by laws about energy, and this energy is considered "clean". aha. which basically means you get state funding for doing that, funding which should go to solar energy and all the clean clean stuff (something called "Energia CIP 6"). That's why incinerators are not called by their real name, but a fictitious, distorted reality is created around them and around the fake name “termovalorizzatore”: could be translated as “producer of increased value (=energy) via thermal process”. How else would you translate it?? any help is welcome :)

I already mentioned this article a while ago, in one of my january posts, but what really pushed me to translate it is that, while electioneering, some italian party wrote on their program "we shall call things by their name: e.g. termovalorizzatori" and this really made me angry because the whole point of this name is just the opposite!


So if you accept the idea that the title is un-translatable (and if you're Italian, please help me!) then here's the article:


LET US… (TERMOVALORIZZIAMOCI)

“The B vocabulary consisted of words which had been deliberately constructed for political purposes: words, that is to say, which not only had in every case a political implication, but were intended to impose a desirable mental attitude upon the person using them […] The B words were in all cases compound words. They consisted of two or more words, or portions of words, welded together in an easily pronounceable form. The resulting amalgam was always a noun-verb, and inflected according to the ordinary rules. [...] No word in the B vocabulary was ideologically neutral. A great many were euphemisms. Such words, for instance, as joycamp (forced-labour camp) or Minipax (Ministry of Peace, i.e. Ministry of War) meant almost the exact opposite of what they appeared to mean.”
- “The Principles of Newspeak”, Appendix to 1984, George Orwell


Euphemisms kill people. They kill your mother, destroy your son, devour grownups and children. Euphemisms scrabble the inside of esophagus and lungs. Euphemisms are cancer, they spread metastases like spider webs, they grab words and strangle your intelligence until they make you die. Literally die.

Endlösung, “final solution”, was the masterpiece of all euphemisms. As time went by, it has lost its outer layer of prudence and hypocrisy, and melted into the vile reality it was intended to mask out. Euphemisms work pretty well on short-medium time scales, then they cease to be what they are. After a few years, nobody uses the term “humanitarian war”, nobody boasts “surgical bombings” using “smart bombs” anymore, even “collateral damage” fell into disuse. Those terms have now the negative meaning they were supposed to avoid with their creation.

“Thermo...” instead than “incinerator”. By coining the new term, the accent has been removed from the thing which certainly remains (toxic residual: 1/5 of waste, without taking into account the fumes produced by the combustion process) to that which is presumably produced (a value, energy, economic gain). Those who say “No to the thermo…!” have already lost, because they have accepted the euphemism, the frame. They argue on the opponent’s ground, and apparently they fight against a value, against something “good”.

“Thermo… are the solution”: they repeat it, sing it in choirs, iterate it as a hammer, they all agree while erecting the great wall of conformism on the waste topic. All the official voices coincide. One might wonder why, in the end, people don’t listen, why they don’t obey.

Incinerators. A process based on an obsolete principle, which goes back to a time when “mini-checks” (checks corresponding to small amounts of money, with the same value of coins, which were emitted by Italian banks at the end of the 70s) were circulating and Bill Gates was poor. A technology which is as old as the neural cells of this nation, old but still with stains of make up on the chin, as the mugs of the caste and the horrible intellectual class in Italy are.
Good broth is made with old technology. And allergies, breathing diseases, tumors. Social expenses. Health bills rising up to the sky. An energy devouring machine, karma wheel of vicious circles, which must always work, without rest, stimulating waste production with its own existence. Waste has become the means, the incinerator is the end.

There exist alternative solutions. Concrete. Feasible. Already used (elsewhere). Few people talk about them [*]. Not even these people represent the endlösung to the waste problem, though.
The “final solution” would be, simply, to produce less waste. To produce less disposable crap. Produce less, use more. We already wrote about that: link --> there is no “fair” way to produce useless stuff.

We are the problem, not the waste. We are the problem, not the Camorra. Or, we are the Camorra. The discussion about the ”ecomafie” (criminal activities and organizations against the environment) are true and necessary, but risk to turn into a diversion. We are all environmental criminals, some of us more and some other less. Our life style is environmentally criminal, consumption for its own sake is a crime against the environment. There is no Camorra able to get rid or to illegally dispose of non-produced waste, but we do produce waste, and always more. In Italy, we had an increase of +20% in urban waste per person, from 2003 to 2005.

And we find ourselves with more packaging, more plastic bags, more wrapping, more boxes and jars and bins and cartons, more flasks, more tubes, more senseless gadgets, more cell phones, video phones, tv-phones to be changed every six months, more instant-books written by comedians which become old in one month and they were not even funny in the first place, more paper tissues and paper napkins (use a handkerchief for god’s sake!), more mailboxes stuffed with tens of huge pamphlets of shopping centres, more bottles, huge bottles of mineral water even where the aqueduct performs a miracle and gold comes out of the tap, “well, but the water I buy is hyposodic!”, yes, and half hour later you’re drinking gatorade or energade or powerade, because you’re an idiot!
Everything comes back to you, you harvest what you seed. Consume, dissipate, waste, destroy, throw away. Your polymeric shit will burn (or better: it will be “thermo...”), while your beloved ones (or somebody else’s) will inhale, metastasis, metastasis, metastasis, tumor.

Let us "thermo…" ourselves, let us play with words, this is the way, the path of the future behind our backs.
Alternatively, there is another way: to "thermo…" those who govern us, who hypnotize us, who exploit, buy and sell us, those who consume us.

THE END
I am not sure if it was clear enough, anyway i repeat it: this is just the translation of an issue from wu ming's newsletter "Giap". here you can find the original version (for lazy italians...)