The circular economy would be the solution to the energy crisis and climate change, but according to the Circular Economy Network report, Europe is slowing down
It would be the solution to all problems, or nearly all of them. To the scarcity of raw materials and their costs that have rocketed due to the war, for instance, but also to the climate crisis that is reducing ecosystems' capacity to provide resources, or to the pandemic that brought the global economy to a halt. And yet the circular economy in Europe has still not taken off: in Italy as in the rest of Europe, every time we hear that gross domestic product is rising, material consumption also rises, inexorably.
This is confirmed by the national report presented by the Circular Economy Network, promoted by the Fondazione per lo sviluppo sostenibile together with a group of companies and business associations, from which it emerges that between 2018 and 2020 — the years covered by the research — the circularity rate (that is, the share of material resources used that came from recycled waste materials) fell from 9.1 per cent to a dismal 8.6 per cent. And Italy, too, despite being ahead of the continental average on recycling, has failed to achieve the goal of decoupling economic growth from resource use.
The decline in the circularity rate, the report explains, is due to the fact that in recent years consumption has grown by more than 8 per cent, surpassing 100 billion tonnes of raw materials used in a single year, while reuse has been unable to keep pace, increasing by just 3 per cent (from 8.4 to 8.65 billion tonnes): in short, we are still wasting a large proportion of the materials extracted from ecosystems.
On average, in Europe in 2020 approximately 13 tonnes of materials per capita were consumed. A figure that is already telling in itself, but one that needs to be broken down to better understand the differences from country to country: among the five major economies at the centre of this report's analysis (Italy, France, Germany, Poland, Spain), it is difficult to find similarities, and fortunately Italy comes out among the most virtuous. The figures range from 7.4 tonnes per inhabitant in Italy to 17.5 in Poland.
Germany stands at 13.4 tonnes, France at 8.1, Spain at 10.3. Italy also ranks first for resource productivity (every kilogram of resources consumed generates €3.5 of gross domestic product, against a European average of €2.1), and second only to France for the rate of use of materials from recycling (21.6 per cent; Germany, for example, is at just 13.4).
Positive news for Italy on the waste front as well: the recycling rate for all waste has reached nearly 68 per cent — the highest figure in the European Union. Among the five economies studied, Italy is the one that, as of 2018, sent the largest share of special waste (waste from industry and businesses) to recycling: approximately 75 per cent. In 2020, less than half of municipal waste was recycled across the European Union — 48.4 per cent; in Italy more than half, at 54.4 per cent.
There are, however, sectors in which Italy is in serious difficulty. One is land consumption: in 2018, 4.2 per cent of the territory of the EU-27 was covered by artificial surfaces, but for Italy alone that figure rose to 7.1 per cent. Italy also ranks near the bottom on sustainable innovation: in 2021, in terms of investment in this sector, Italy placed only thirteenth in Europe. On this point, Minister of Labour Andrea Orlando sought to dispel the idea that has been quietly gaining ground in Italian politics in recent weeks — namely "that the ecological transition is a luxury for peacetime, and that the objectives we set ourselves with the Recovery Plan were, after all, excessively ambitious". In Orlando's words, "some have said that Putin has cancelled Greta Thunberg", but it is precisely innovation that must be the lever to accelerate the transition.
Finally, the repair of goods: in Italy in 2019, more than 23,000 companies were engaged in repairing electronic goods and other personal items (clothing, footwear, watches, jewellery, furniture) — placing Italy behind France (more than 33,700 businesses) and Spain (just over 28,300). In this sector, Italy has lost almost 5,000 companies compared with 2010.
According to Edo Ronchi, president of the Fondazione per lo sviluppo sostenibile, "the climate crisis and the dramatic events of the past two years, with the surge in prices of many raw materials, show that the time for waiting is over. The moment has come to get European policies in support of the circular economy off the ground without further hesitation."
The reference here, too, is of course to the war in Ukraine, which has sent gas prices soaring, but also to climate change and the pandemic, which are making territories and national economies more fragile. In Italy, the targets set by the 2020 Waste Decree have been aligned with those established by the European Union, setting a minimum recycling rate of 55 per cent by 2025, 60 per cent by 2030 and 70 per cent by 2035. According to the report by the Consorzio nazionale imballaggi, Italy had already met the 2025 target as early as 2019, with one major exception: plastic waste.
