Waste management in Turin

municipal shareholders and a large part had to remain in the company to finance investment was a positive development, the Turin Water Movement was still not satisfied[43].

The Turin City Council

Change came with the 2016 local elections in Turin. The PD coalition was defeated, and the 5Stars Movement obtained an absolute majority in the City Council.

Despite some unpleasant incidents, misunderstandings and political frictions at the start of the new administration, the 5Stars Movement and the Turin Water Committee are trying to forge a good relationship. At the beginning of 2017, several of the council members of 5Stars Movement produced a draft resolution for the remunicipalisation of Turin’s water system, which was signed and endorsed by two other councillors (Torino In Comune and Direzione Italia). It was finally approved by the absolute majority of the Turin City Council on 9 October 2017.

The new phase of water remunicipalisation now starting in Turin requires the attention and commitment of the entire Metropolitan Area. Up to now, only 40 municipalities (out of a total of 306) have taken the decision to restore water management under public law. The next step is to persuade all of the other munic-ipalities to adopt a resolution so that the rule of public law over the ownership and management of our water can be restored[43].

Figure 4.13: Benchmarking data-waste information [10]

Currently, City’s public waste management agency operates two types of waste collection services: streetside bins (inner city areas) and door-to-door collection (outside city areas). Door-to-door collection is now rolling out to central districts to achieve higher waste separation rates (from 28-33% for the street-side method to 58-65% for the door-to-door method). The average of the two systems is currently 47.5%. Waste is classified according to the following categories: non-recyclable, biological waste, paper/cardboard, glass/aluminum and plastic. To help residents sort correctly, the City of Turin has subscribed to the Junker application service, an application that allows users to scan the barcode of products to determine how to properly sort the item according to the local system[10].

All unsorted/non-recyclable waste is processed at the local waste-to-energy in-cineration plant, generating 367,656 MW/h of energy per year. Once door-to-door is operational in 100% of the city in 2021, the Administration will begin testing Pay-As-You-Go plans to further encourage good sequencing practices. Currently, segregated waste is processed at specific facilities recommended by the Italian National Packaging Waste Consortium as follows:

- Plastic: AMIAT

- Paper/cardboard: CMT, CARTAMACERO, ITALMACERI, BENASSI, ECOPIEMONTE - Glass/can: ECOGLASS, EUROVETRO

- Organic: ACEA, AMIAT - Unsorted: TRM [10]

Turin towards zero waste

The Livable City is a clean and healthy city, but also circular and innovative.

Turin Towards zero waste is an overall strategy to achieve these goals, consisting of a series of actions aimed at reducing the waste of raw materials and material resources and aimed at improving the efficiency of urban metabolism.

From waste, these resources become raw material again, thus creating new economic chains. This strategy contributes to building a cleaner city, where waste is managed more effectively and without affecting public space, alleviating related problems.

The first and fundamental pillar of the strategy is to complete the extension of the door-to-door waste collection service: from about 50% of the population served today to the whole city[9].

This transition, which has already started and is expected to be completed by 2023, will bring a significant increase, both quantitatively and in terms of quality, to achieve the European targets set at 65% of material destined for recovery.

To accompany citizens to the correct management and differentiation of waste, the Administration implements a series of awareness campaigns and provides tools, such as the Junker application, launched throughout the city to allow citizens to be protagonists. of this transition.

The second pillar of the strategy is to translate this transition into an oppor-tunity for economic development, i.e. the creation of new supply chains and jobs generated by the recovery, reconditioning, conversion and reuse of recovered ma-terials, closing the circle of urban metabolism. To achieve these objectives, the creation of a circular economy pole is being planned, a sort of reuse factory, where

various local players can carry out multiple activities, a pole that also wants to become a national innovation hub[9].

At the same time we intend to develop a local economic chain based on the ecological treatment of the organic fraction of waste and the consequent energy production, thus activating a virtuous circle of valorisation of compostable ma-terial and energy recovery. This supply chain also includes initiatives aimed at reducing food waste through projects in the markets and tools to access surplus food.

Finally, the strategy includes a series of actions aimed at making the munici-pal machine itself more virtuous, through the revision of public contracts with increasingly sustainable criteria and the reduction of single-use plastics in the municipal structure[9].

Sustainability laboratory

The Livable City is a city open to innovation, which favors the experimentation of new ideas and projects, to find solutions capable of improving and making the urban environment more liveable. In this direction, the Administration sets up experiments and initiatives aimed at introducing new tools, methods and rais-ing awareness citizenship towards more sustainable lifestyles. Among the initiatives:

-ISO 20121 certification for sustainable events: the Administration launches an ISO certification process to encourage the organization of events by reducing environ-mental impacts, including the production of waste and food waste, and promoting good practices to maximize collective mobility and sustainable, energy efficiency and support for local supply chains.

-Big Belly: in 2019 an experiment will be launched, in the context of waste cycle management, with the Big Belly smart bins. The Big Bellys have an inter-nal capacity up to five times that of a typical street bin thanks to the interinter-nal compaction with solar energy which, consequently, reduces the frequency of inter-vention. Animal welfare: initiatives aimed at raising public awareness of animal welfare, virtuous behavior towards them, giving visibility to municipal kennels, opportunities for adoption and the carrying out of awareness raising events.

-Clean air: a series of initiatives aimed at increasing awareness of air pollution, knowledge of the impacts on health and virtuous behaviors to be adopted to reduce exposure, such as the publication of information materials, the launch of pilot research on exposure, the production of recommendations to reduce their effects

on health, information and public debate events, capillary analysis using innova-tive tools. These are complementary actions to emergency measures to combat pollution[9].