Every day of the week a 56-wagon freight train full of rotting tomatoes and stinking nappies makes its way across the Alps to northern Germany in an attempt to save the city of Naples from drowning in its own detritus. It is a strange, 44-hour journey, rattling through the night - the wagons scanned en route for signs of radioactivity or toxic substances — that says much about Europe today and the failure of cities to deal with a central problem of our time: rubbish.

“This can't carry on for ever,” says Rüdiger Siechau, head of waste disposal in Hamburg. “A better solution for Naples would be if it set up an environmentally friendly incinerator plant, as we have here.”

Hamburg is the final destination for the Garbage Train and though the locals are happy enough at the moment — each tonne of incinerated or recycled rubbish brings in €250 (£200) and 700 tonnes are coming in a day — there is an uncomfortable feeling, too.

Naples is a prime holiday destination for the Germans. Italian products — the Tuscan oil, the glamorous sports cars, the well-cut suits — are coveted here, tokens of a relaxed southern lifestyle. Now, from the bunker in a Hamburg suburb, there is no sign of la dolce vita, only an overpowering stench.

The train containers are unloaded in a goods station, shoved on to trucks, emptied into a vast concrete container and then hoisted by crane, bit by bit, into an incinerator heated to temperatures of 1,000C (1,830F). “No rats so far,” says Reinhard Fiedler, of Hamburg Waste Disposal Services, “and no suspicious substances.” Hartmut Timm, a biologist involved in the vetting of the Garbage Train, said: “If the rubbish is sub-standard or irregular, the waste disposal plant has the right to send it back to Italy.”

The scale of this operation is huge. Germany is taking 200,000 tonnes of rubbish from Naples and, in doing so, is helping Silvio Berlusconi, the newly elected Italian Prime Minister. One of his first pledges on taking office was to clean up Naples and to appoint what one newspaper called a “trash czar”.

His plans, say the Germans, were sensible enough: to build the city's first incinerator, to set up more landfill dumps, to get the Army involved. Italy, though, has been hit by a classic example of nimbyism and few communes have been willing to help. The Camorra, the Naples mafia, which has infiltrated the waste management business, is still blocking progress.

According to latest estimates, more than 2,000 tonnes of rubbish has piled up in the centre of Naples and another 23,000 tonnes in the surrounding countryside. Mr Berlusconi vowed yesterday to clean up the city by the end of next month, despite protests against the opening of landfill sites that he said “border on anarchy”.

He is prepared to use the Army to clear a path to the rubbish tips. Mr Berlusconi said that a task force of thousands of volunteers — whom he dubbed “angels of rubbish” — was being set up to teach Naples residents how to sort rubbish for recycling. The promised new incinerator will not be ready until the end of the year.

So Germany has become Naples's dumping ground. How much the Garbage Train will end up costing Italy is unclear, but it could be as much as €70million.

For well over a decade, encouraged by a Social Democrat-Green Government between 1998 and 2005, Germany has been refining its recycling and disposal techniques — to the point of madness, some might say. A ritual is the washing of plastic yoghurt containers before dumping them in the appropriate bin.

Letters columns earnestly discuss in which of four colour-coded bins a used condom should go. Householders are given a 60-page booklet to help them to recycle correctly. In some districts dustbin lorries have scales to weigh what they collect: if the waste is over the allowance it remains rotting outside the house for another week or fortnight. Rather than risk rejection, householders pour food leftovers down the lavatory. This has fed and bred a new generation of super-rats in the sewers.

On paper the results are good. Before German reunification Hamburg was ferrying its rubbish across the East-West border to bury its rubbish in landfills supplied by the Communist authorities for hard currency.

Ten years ago Hamburg was still not recycling much — barely 50,000 tonnes out of 1.6million tonnes of rubbish produced by 1.8million people. Now the population is larger, but it discards only 1.4 million tonnes. About 600,000 tonnes of that is incinerated and 800,000 tonnes is recycled. In short, there has been a rubbish revolution in Germany. It has 70 city incinerators and another 90 are planned by 2015. The most modern are state of the art, with filters to reduce greenhouse gases. In Hamburg's case the incinerated waste will produce water vapour to heat households.

This, though, is more than a clash between the unregulated south and the neurotic north. It is about how to solve the problem across Europe of shrinking space, of wasteful consumer behaviour and of the environmental damage wrought by landfills.

The European Union wants its members to slash landfill rubbish to 35 per cent of what it was in 1995. This is a dilemma not only for Italy, Spain and Greece but also for Britain. Waste in Britain is increasing by 3 per cent a year. It is predicted that present landfill space will be full in nine years.

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