In 2024, the Emilian city achieved a 75.1% separate waste collection rate, thanks in part to its smart bins.

The official list has yet to be released, but one thing is certain: Bologna is on it. For the first time, the United Nations has selected twenty cities as shining examples of waste management and circular economy, and the Emilian capital is among them. The project will be officially presented on 30 March 2026, on the occasion of the International Day of Zero Waste, during commemorative events in Nairobi and New York.

Zero-waste cities commit to recovering all discarded materials, diverting waste from incinerators and promoting reuse and recycling. They represent an immediate solution to two crucial climate variables: food waste and greenhouse gas emissions. Indeed, one third of all food produced for human consumption ends up in landfills, where it decomposes and produces methane — a gas eighty-seven times more potent than CO2 over a 20-year period. A zero-waste approach is therefore capable of reducing global greenhouse gas emissions by 10 to 15 per cent.

To become a zero-waste community, a range of measures can be adopted — for example: door-to-door separate waste collection, a pay-as-you-throw tariff system in which the fee is calculated based on the amount of unsorted waste each individual produces, or a ban on single-use plastics in supermarket bags and at public events.

Bologna has been recognised as one of the world's first twenty zero-waste cities thanks to its new waste strategy and its encouraging separate collection figures, which reached 75.1 per cent across the metropolitan area in 2024. But what has truly made the city a virtuous case study is above all one initiative: smart bins. Launched as a pilot project in 2013 and later rolled out across the city centre before the pandemic, Bologna's bins — known as "Smarty" — identify users via a card, measure what is being thrown away, and send notifications to operators when they are full or out of order. This achievement is, however, the result of a much broader project that, under the name "Bologna Missione Clima", aims to transform the city into a major hub for generating energy from renewable sources through 241 actions.

In Italy, Bologna is not the only city to have adopted a zero-waste policy. The Zero Waste Italy alliance encompasses the largest network of zero-waste municipalities in the world, totalling 340. Moreover, two particularly positive cases stand out from the past year, as reported in the latest Zero Waste Europe report. These are Livorno, where the local incinerator has been permanently shut down, and Calatafimi Segesta, in the province of Trapani, where separate waste collection has reached almost 90 per cent. But Italy abounds in recycling excellence. There is a municipality in the province of Lucca, Capannori, which in 2007 became one of the very first certified zero-waste communities, and the small town of Bitetto, near Bari, which has transformed the "pay-as-you-throw" system into a "know-what-you-throw" model, educating its citizens in real time about the quality and quantity of the waste they produce.