Bonn, Germany  - Tens of thousands of tons of Neapolitan garbage are rotting in Italy because of bureaucratic delays in Germany, but an official insisted on Thursday that German authorities were still committed to burning the refuse to help Rome.

Some German states have already burned most of their quotas of rubbish from Campania, the Italian region that includes Naples, as part of a German promise to clear 160,000 tons of refuse. Italy, embarrassed by the crisis, is paying for the transport and disposal.

At the start of this month, several regions within North Rhine Westphalia state gave regulatory approval for five municipal incinerator companies in the state to burn 54,000 tons. But nothing has happened.

It may take weeks to complete all the "formalities," a spokesman for the Bonn municipal refuse department, Werner Schui, told Deutsche Presse-Agentur dpa. "There are strict European Union standards here and it must be done by the book," he said.

He denied Bonn was backing out of the contract with the Italian authorities, adding that there was also no indication that Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi was going to find any home-grown way to cure the crisis without German aid.

In other states the burning work has not been delayed.

The state of Hamburg has burned nearly half its allocation of 30,000 tons and a refuse department spokesman, Reinhard Fiedler, said the work was proceeding without a hitch, with trainloads of refuse regularly arriving in the northern port city.

He said the EU requirement was simply for a "notification" from Italy as exporter, Austria as transit country and Germany as importer that garbage was being exported. "It's just a formality and took a while to get," he said.

Campania's recurrent failure to build sufficient incinerators of its own has been variously blamed on corruption, underworld interference and protests by residents. The crisis erupted earlier this year when garbage collection ceased in many places. (dpa)