According to the report realized by The European House – Ambrosetti for A2A and presented the 5th of september at Villa d’Este in Cernobbio (Como), the waste disposal plants present in our country will exhaust their reception capacity within three years. Obviously, this data is an estimated general average of the totality of the country, seeing this depletion as much more incumbent in some southern regions (like Sicily and Sardinia).
The European Union stated that within 2035 the 65% of the total waste should be recycled (the 65% of the differentiated collection it is a target that had to be achieved 10 years ago) and the delivery in the landfill must not exceed the 10%. According to this report, in order to face this disposal necessity of indifferentiated waste, Italy should need 6 or 7 additional plants of waste-to-energy with an investment between 2.2 and 2.5 billions of euros.
The same analysis states that, if this implant gap will be filled at a faster rate than the current rate of landfill filling, it would be generated a total yield equal to 11.8 billions of euros with just a total investment of 4,4 billions, resulting in a tax revenue for the state equal to 1,8 billions of euros and also in a reduction of the waste tax for families over 550 millions of euros, with the result to consistently cut CO2 emissions (around 4 millions of tons, equal to all the produced emissions by the metals industry in our country).
The Ambrosetti report underlines how this goal will be very difficult to achieve: in these two years the NIMBY (Not In My Backyard) committees all over the italian country had consistently slowed the process of realization concerning this kind of waste-treatment plants. This kind of committees had exerted a certain pressure on local institutions and local decision makers in the interested territories, significantly slowing down the bureaucratic process to authorise the construction of this kind of plants. A relevant data on how much this phenomenon is slowing down the process of plant transition is represented by a 60% of the total time implied in the construction of waste-to-energy plants is dedicated in the obtaining of the due authorizations. This portion of time is mainly constituted by dead times due to the referral of the technical advices between institutions, lack of compulsory time terms and superpositioning of tasks between local bodies (city councils, provinces and regions).
In order to fight this anti-waste infrastructures trend that is causing the slow down of plants construction, another kind of committee has born: PIMBY (Please In My Backyard) with the purpose to support the realization of this kind of infrastructures.
The necessary realization of modern waste-treatment plants must go together with necessary interventions of waste-production reduction (enxtension of products’life, radical reduction of throw-away packaging products, …) and interventions toward products design (ecodesign), with the purpose to globally minimize waste production, in particular for non-reausable waste.
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