The city is on the verge of collapse and is forced to ship its waste abroad. The Tari is the highest in Italy, and now there are fears ahead of the imminent Christmas holidays.
The fire at the plant on via Salaria has once again turned the spotlight on Rome's waste management situation. In the midst of the political controversy over waste-to-energy plants, the issue of the Tmb (mechanical-biological treatment) facility was, in a sense, a ticking time bomb — one that has now exploded, bringing back to the surface the eternal emergency gripping the capital, which is set to worsen with the arrival of the Christmas holidays.
We are, after all, in a metropolis that for years avoided crisis by relying on the Malagrotta landfill, the largest in Europe: the European Union ordered its closure as far back as 2007, but it was only the Marino administration — in 2013 — that wrote the final chapter of a story that had dragged on for 35 years through a succession of extensions. And which had served as a convenient alibi for failing to put together a waste management plan fit for the times. The problem, however, is that since that day no progress has been made, either in terms of treatment facilities or on the front of separate waste collection, which remains among the lowest in Italy, at a rate of 44 per cent.
The result is that for the past five years Rome has been forced to ship its waste elsewhere, with the added costs that come with transportation, and to rely on bio-mechanical treatment plants such as the one on via Salaria — strongly opposed by local residents and which caught fire on Monday night. A sort of legally compliant landfill that, obviously, represents only half a solution: it keeps rubbish off the streets in the short term, but the residual waste then has to be incinerated elsewhere. So much for closing the treatment cycle.
Giovanni Caudo, president of the III Municipio, explained that the Tmb on via Salaria began to cause problems in 2011, when the plant was granted an integrated environmental permit by the Region to process 750 tonnes of unsorted waste per day; from that moment on, life for residents of the nearby neighbourhood of Fidene, as well as for the businesses along the consular road, was certainly never the same again.
At the time of the fire, it was processing around 600 tonnes — 20 per cent of the total produced by Rome's residents — which now need to find another destination. The Tmb at Rocca Cencia, in the VI Municipio, processes 200,000 tonnes of waste a year, while nearby the shredder-screener belonging to Manlio Cerroni (the owner of the Malagrotta landfill) handles a further 400,000 tonnes.
The overall figures give a sense of the scale of the problem: Rome produces 1.7 million tonnes of waste a year, 1 million of which is unsorted and ends up in mechanical biological treatment plants; the capital alone produces 10 per cent of all unsorted waste in Italy. Residual waste that Lazio can no longer manage and which is transported out of the region (100,000 tonnes to Abruzzo alone) or even abroad: near Vienna, a waste-to-energy plant burns 70,000 tonnes of Roman waste — the transportation of which costs taxpayers 136 euros per tonne — and converts it into gas.
The result is that Romans not only pay the highest Tari in Italy (270 euros per person compared to 217 in Milan), but now find themselves facing the nightmare of Christmas: on top of the Tmb Salario fire, the seasonal surge in waste produced over the holiday period is fast approaching. The risk of mountains of rubbish piling up in the streets is very real indeed.
