In Italy there are 698 recycling municipalities.And the south is catching up in waste management

More than 4 million Italians live in one of the recycling municipalities surveyed by Legambiente, i.e. those that stand out for their efficiency in waste management.

• Legambiente rewards recycling municipalities every year, in which the production of undifferentiated waste is below 75 kilos per inhabitant per year.
• There will be 698 "waste free" municipalities in 2023, 11 percent more than the previous year.
• Veneto remains in first place with 173 municipalities, but southern Italy is making visible progress with 23.8 percent more municipalities than in 2022.

In 2023, more than four million Italians they lived in a common in which the Waste management service is excellent:they may seem few in a population of almost 59 million inhabitants, but they are still almost 540 thousand more than in 2023.This is what emerges from the new edition of Recycling municipalities, The dossier of the environmentalist organisation Legambiente which symbolically rewards those local administrations that encourage the waste sorting and they manage it so well that the production of unsorted waste falls below 75 kilos per inhabitant per year.THE “free waste” municipalities in 2023 there are 698, 11 percent more than the previous year.

The geography of recycling municipalities

The geography of the recycling municipalities is strongly skewed towards northern Italy, with 434 virtuous municipalities out of 698.Only in Veneto, on the other hand, there are 173;and another 101, 27 more than the last edition, are in Lombardy.In third place in the ranking, however, we find the Campania with 83 municipalities:and in fact the most visible data is the run-up of southern Italy with 231 virtuous municipalities, a leap forward of 23.8 percent compared to 2022.You also make progress Sardinia, with 18 more municipalities than the previous edition.Very few, however, are the virtuous municipalities in the central Italy: there were thirty in 2022, they will be 33 in 2023.

Waste management is more efficient in small towns

These over 4 million "waste free" citizens live mainly in the small towns:23 percent in municipalities of less than 5 thousand inhabitants, 40 percent in municipalities between 5 and 15 thousand inhabitants and another 29 percent in municipalities of over 15 thousand inhabitants.Very rare for them to be capitals to be able to bring the share of unsorted waste below the "psychological threshold" of 75 kilos per capita per year.The only ones are Treviso and Belluno (both around 85 percent of separate waste collection), Pordenone (83.2 percent) and Trento (the only city with more than 100 thousand inhabitants, whose percentage of separate waste collection is equal to 81.2 percent).

“The new data reconfirms how essential it is to focus on large cities, where collection systems (such as door-to-door) that combine quality and prevention of waste sent for disposal are struggling to spread.And strengthen the organization at consortium level for an adequate and widespread plant network for the recycling and treatment of waste", confirms the general director of Legambiente Giorgio Zampetti.