An extraordinary plan to promote and increase separate waste collection in the large cities of Central and Southern Italy is the new challenge of Conai, the National Packaging Consortium. An investment of almost one million euros, in the first year alone, for a project that will also involve Bari, as well as Rome, Naples, Palermo, Messina, Catania and Reggio Calabria.
The analysis
According to the numbers extrapolated from the studies, 30 percent of the inhabitants of the five regions involved (Lazio, Campania, Puglia, Calabria and Sicily) live in the seven cities involved in the Conai plan, equal to approximately 6 million inhabitants out of 18 million. «30 percent of the waste produced in the five Regions is produced in these seven municipalities – explained Ignazio Capuano, president of Conai – and therefore intervening in these cities can mean an improvement in the interception rates of packaging waste and its recycling. at a national level.”
The project comes as a sort of response to the increasingly demanding and rigid objectives set by Europe, but above all following requests for help from the planet, which seems to ask for “a serious and concrete commitment to further improve our circularity results”.
The objectives of the plan
The final objective would be to reduce the gap in the percentages relating to separate waste collection in the regions involved in the project, currently between 51 and 58 percent, to those in the Central-Northern regions. In the first year the Conai plan will involve more than one million two hundred thousand inhabitants and, shared with Anci, also involves all the system’s supply chain consortia and is supervised by the Ministry of the Environment. «The economic investment is important – highlighted Fabio Costarella, deputy director of Conai – and will serve both for the planning and training of operators, as well as for the product analyzes and communication campaigns necessary to inform and involve citizens».
Phases
The first step will be to develop a mapping of the critical issues with timely product analyzes and assessments of the performance of the territory. Subsequently, an analysis of costs and needs will be carried out for each Municipality, planning implementation models and sizing of services based on specific needs. Among the municipalities involved, the objective for Bari is to go from the current 40 to 45.5 percent.
