Milan and Food Waste
The City of Milan has a population of 1.3 million and is served by a public-private company AMSA, who also service 12 neighbouring municipalities with a combined population of 260,000. In the Italian region of Lombardy there are 1,700 municipalities and Milan was one of the last places in the region to adopt a food waste separation system.
In 2011 Milan had reached a 35% separate collection rate but the Italian legislation requires a separation rate by municipalities of 65% and recycling rate of 50%. The decision was taken by the mayor to have food waste collected on a door-to-door basis paralleling what was already the position for dry recyclables: a yellow bag for plastics and metals, a white bin for paper and board and a green bin for glass. The first step was to go over to the use of a transparent bag for residual waste rather than a black bag city-wide. This change increased the separation of recyclables by 2%.
In November 2012 the south west quadrant of the city was provided with the equipment and information to start recovery of food waste from households. Both were delivered by the operative staff undertaking the service. Most properties have 120 litre brown bin(s) (35 litre bins for smaller properties) and a 20 litre kitchen caddy and 25 bio-plastic bin liners for each household. A wide range of communication media was used to promote the system and encourage full participation, which is in any case mandatory. Thereafter, every six months a further quadrant was provided with the organics collection service.
The food waste bin and the residual waste bags are collected twice weekly on the same day. Previously there had been a residual waste collection at least twice a week to all parts of the city. Analysis has shown that there is little contamination of the bio-bins with 95% food waste on average. The main contaminants are plastics and disposable nappies. Discussions are currently on-going within Milan to reduce the residual waste collections to only once a week, mainly to stimulate people to undertake even greater separation.
Courtyards
The great advantage that properties in Milan have is that they have courtyards for the storage of bins and concierge services so that the bins can be put out on the pavement just before the collection time and move empty bins immediately after collection. New buildings have to have specific space allocated for waste bins and arrangements for setting out the bins. The bins are checked by operative staff and fines issued if contamination found in any of the source separated containers. However, the main checking mechanism is really the social control that is exercised by neighbours within the block and the concierge inspecting the bins before setting out the bins.
Obviously the position in London is very different. Few buildings have space and facilities for waste storage, especially multiple bins, and even fewer have concierge services. Therefore setting up a food waste service for most of central London would be extremely problematic. Islington is still trying to determine whether a system using on-street large containers would be viable. Obviously the degree of social control with such containers would be much more limited and the potential for contamination much greater.
The significance of collection of the organic fraction can be demonstrated from the statistics for Milan’s waste for 2015 when a 53% separation rate was achieved, as shown by the following tonnage statistics:
134,000 organics | 81,000 paper and board | 65,000 glass | 43,000 plastics and metals |
28,000 other recyclables | 352,292 total recyclables | 315,866 residual waste | 668,158 total municipal waste |
Commercial
Commercial premises generate 30% of the total organic waste with the most difficult sources being open markets, which are provided with free bags for collection.
As for the cost of the system, Simone Orsi, the Marketing Manager for AMSA stated that there was no greater cost to residents from the introduction of the food waste collection. There were the €8m initial costs of investment for trucks, bins and promotional costs. However, there have been reductions in the residual waste collections, consolidation of collection rounds and the costs of treating food waste by AD are no higher than for incineration. Both systems are aided by the fact that there is an Italian landfill tax.
From Bio-gas to Bio-methane
The 130,000 tpa of organic waste from Milan currently goes to an AD plant well away from the city with a total treatment capacity of 320,000tpa, which after processing and composting of the digestate yields 40,000tpa of compost which goes to farmland up to 20km from the plant. This plant plans to increase its capacity to 500,000 tpa. But AMSA is also planning to build two 100,000tpa anaerobic digestion (AD) facilities to serve Milan and neighbouring municipalities closer to Milan plus two further plants elsewhere in Lombardy.
There are two important trends in the Italian composting and AD sector at present, one is the increasing size of facilities and the other is the focus on upgrading bio-gas for the generation of electricity to production of bio-methane for grid and especially transportation fuel. Therefore it was valuable to see the ECOPOL composting facility 80 km east of Milan near Brescia. This 40,000tpa composting plant has been operational since 2001 undertaking in-vessel composting of a mixture of food waste and green waste but there are ambitious plans to convert the facility to a 100,000 tpa AD plant. In Italian terms the ECOPOL plant is a small facility because there a three composting and AD plants with over 300,000tpa capacity and many with more than 100,000 tpa throughput. The reason is that it is far easier to extend a permit for an existing treatment site rather than obtain a permit for a new site.
The ECOPOL plant currently receives up to 15,000 tpa of bio-bagged food waste and around 25,000 tpa of green waste. The two streams are first mixed and shredded together with any oversize material from the refining of the composting process and deposited in static piles where the material remains for 15-18 days. Air is blown through pipes embedded in the concrete floor with nozzles that come up to the surface of the concrete both to blow air through the piles and also act as drainage channels for any excess moisture that percolates through the pile. The partially composted material is then kept in internal windrows for a further 30 days. After that the compost is ready for refining using a rotary screen with 10mm holes, with the oversize fraction going back through the whole process again. Unfortunately, despite the extensive use of bio-bags in Italy the compost is quite contaminated with small pieces of plastic which has to be air blown off from the remaining compost. This 4% fraction with its attached compost then goes for incineration in a nearby plant.
The plant managers are now planning to change the plant to a 100,000 tpa AD facility due to the recently introduced significant incentives for bio-methane production in Italy. However, the plant would still take a mix of both compostable green waste material as well as food waste as the carbon content of the green waste will add significantly to the amount of bio-methane that can be generated by the waste. However, the amount of green waste would be limited to around 20-30% of the input with the remainder being food waste. The bio-gas from the plant would need to upgraded to remove CO2, moisture and contaminants, such as hydrogen sulphide, in order to be acceptable for grid injection or for use in buses and trucks. The Italian Government has provided considerable incentive for use of bio-methane for transport in particular in order to meet the EU 2020 target of 10% non-fossil fuel for the transport sector. The digestate would be composted in order to provide a recognised product that can be used in agriculture. While compost quality in Italy has been set by the Italian Composting Association (CIC) there is no recognised standard for digestate.
The Italian EPR system for Packaging
In October 2016 the Environmental Services Association (ESA) produced a discussion of the UK PRN/PERN system for packaging waste and possible alternatives to examine whether the existing system for proving compliance with the Packaging Regulations will need to be modified in order to meet higher targets that might be imposed either through EU requirements or domestic legislation. The EU Commission’s Circular Economy package of December 2015 has a set of proposals for EPR (extended producer responsibility) schemes which would require extensive changes to the packaging waste recovery system currently operated in the UK. One of the four options proposed was essentially that based on the Italian packaging waste recovery system, which would need little modification in order to conform to the EU’s EPR requirements.
In ItalyCONAi (Consorzio Nazionale imballaggi) is a not-for profit private consortium that brings together a million packaging producers and users (the vast majority small and paying a nominal fee) to achieve the recovery and recycling targets set by the EU Packaging and Packaging Waste Directive as adopted by the implementing Italian legislation (Legislative Decree 22/1997 originally, now 152/2006). CONAi co-ordinates the activities of 6 consortia for producers of packaging materials: steel, aluminium, paper, wood, plastic and glass.
As required by the EU and Italian legislation EPR is implemented through two basic principles: polluter pays and shared responsibility. CONAi and the consortia for packaging materials set an environmental contribution for each packaging material in order to share out the costs that are incurred in achieving the targets for recovery and recycling of packaging waste, such as higher costs of separate collection. The environmental contribution for materials varies from €188 per tonne for plastics down to €4 for paper. For 2017/18 plastics producers have agreed to adjust the payment to reflect the recyclability of their products with the lowest for C&I packaging products, through a middle band for household packaging products such as plastic bottles and the highest payments for non-recyclable domestic plastic packaging items.
Platform
Although CONAi co-ordinates the Italian packaging waste system and focuses on household packaging waste it also provides a platform for secondary and tertiary packaging from commercial and industrial sources to deliver packaging waste to appropriate sorting or reprocessing facilities. However, there are two other schemes not linked to CONAi: one dealing with plastic crates and pallets and also HDPE films, both from C&I sources.
The system has to be endorsed every five years by the Italian Government and significantly the scheme includes the municipalities as key stakeholders in the system. However, as municipalities have a statutory obligation to collect recyclable waste separately and report the results to the Italian Environment Protection Agency there is everything to gain from this sharing of responsibilities. Therefore, although there are more than 8,000 municipalities in Italy 7,340 have joined the system, covering 57m of Italy’s population of just under 60 million.
Municipalities have the initial ownership of their separated packaging waste but have the choice of signing an agreement with CONAi for all or specific material streams and thereby to have CONAi manage the material after collection. Therefore 97% of municipalities have signed up for plastics down to a still respectable 65% for wood packaging. Municipalities can opt out of the system or a stream by giving three months’ notice to CONAi.
The great advantage for municipalities is that they receive payments from CONAi acting on behalf of the 6 consortia for the additional costs related to the packaging waste that is separated by them. This compensation fee is based on an agreed scale set at the beginning of each financial year and naturally varies by material with highest payments for plastics and the lowest for glass. The compensation fee varies with both the quality and quantity of the material collected with the plastics fee being between €80.23 and €395.14 in the 2016/17 period. While non-packaging materials are collected with the packaging waste the system pays only for the packaging content. Nevertheless it is better for all parties to have all paper products collected with the paper and board packaging and metals with the steel packaging. The plastics packaging content to get maximum payment must be at least 90% packaging waste. Any greater percentage of non-packaging reduces payment proportionally.
Italian Plastics Packaging Waste and the work of COREPLA
COREPLA is the co-ordinating association for plastic packaging and deals with the administration of the sector reverse logistics system for plastic packaging waste and undertakes considerable R&D effort to ensure more plastics packaging is recycled. The Italian system for plastics packaging waste is comprehensive in that since 2003 COREPLA deals with all plastics packaging waste, whether recyclable or not. The non-recyclable fraction is sent to energy recovery facilities, mainly in Italy, such as cement kilns as well as incineration plants.
In 2015 an average of 15kg/pp/pa of plastics packaging waste were separated by Italian households with the north separating more than 20kg and the south less than 8kg on average. However, the power of public education and promotional programmes can be shown by the results now being achieved in Naples and Rome, up from 10.6kg in 2011 to 16.9kg in 2015 and 6.6kg to 12.9kg respectively.
Once collected by the municipalities the plastic packaging waste is taken to the nearest plastics sorting plant of which there are 30 in Italy. The sorting plants can sort up to 15 fractions of both hard plastic and film, including colours of PET. COREPLA arranges the sale of the material from the sorting plants to reprocessors by holding quarterly auctions of the material. The products can only be sold to reprocessors within the EU and the sales to individual reprocessors are capped according to their capacity in order to avoid leakage outside the EU. Of the total 80% is sold to Italian reprocessors, which is not surprising because the cost of shipping the material from the sorting plant falls to the reprocessor.
Of the 900,000 tonnes of plastic packaging waste recovered in Italy in 2015 61.2% was recycled and 38% recycled with the small residue landfilled. Of the 520,000 tonnes from households the following tonnage of packaging products were reclaimed:
- 210,000 tonnes of PET
- 65,000 tonnes of HDPE
- 54 tonnes of plastic film
- 190,000 tonnes of other products
The tonnage, however, disguises the fact that due to waste prevention measures, mainly light-weighting, there are now more packaging items in every tonne of plastics packaging waste. Therefore, while in 2003 there were 25,000 PET bottles in each tonne, by 2015 this was 40,000.
There are a number of advantages from the Italian system of collecting all plastic packaging waste which is why the Belgium Fost Plus system on 21 November 2016 changed from collection of just bottles to all plastic packaging waste. For COREPLA it meant, for example, that a Spanish reprocessing company that had a need for PET trays could approach COREPLA and be supplied with 50 tonnes through COREPLA requested suitably equipped sorting plants to segregate these items. Also polypropylene containers have been separated by a small number of sorting plants in 2016 so that in 2017 all plants will be required to add this polymer to their sorting programme.
Overall one of the advantages of COREPLA is that it acts as an active co-ordinating body that can link the whole of the plastics packaging production system with municipalities, sorting plants and reprocessing companies in order to ensure that there is good appreciation of the whole system to ensure greater recovery and recycling. The sorting plants are constantly being upgraded with fewer people hand sorting and those people now deployed to do quality control of the final product streams. Therefore the sorting plants since 2014 are capable of sorting different types of polymer film, thereby increasing the overall value from plastic film. Also sorting plants are being encouraged to upgrade the recovery material to RDF so that it can be utilised more productively and used by more outlets other than incineration plants.
Author
Jeff Cooper is a former president of the Chartered Institution of Wastes Management and worked for the Environment Agency as head of producer responsibility. In recent years he has played an active part within the International Solid Waste Association (ISWA).
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