Waste separation must be a means as opposed to an end.” Walter Facciotto, the Director of Conai, is firm on this point: “In fact, it is not enough to simply ’collect’ waste, but also to ’recycle’, with the objective of reducing the need for raw materials used for packaging, promoting the use of recycled waste as a resource.”
These are the guidelines that drive the actions of Conai, and the objectives reached in over 15 years of work through the Consortium – which now includes 1,100,000 registered companies – testifying to the success of a commitment to promote the culture of environmental sustainability in businesses and citizens alike. “From the domestic waste collection standpoint, we have gone from about 900 thousand tons of packaging waste in 1998 to more than 3.5 million in 2013,” continues Facciotto, “without including the percentages of independent operators. Today at a national level, Conai guarantees recovery of 77.5% of packaging waste used by consumers: this means that about 3 out of 4 packages do not wind up in the landfill and instead become a resource, reintroduced into the productive cycle as ‘secondary raw material’.”
These elements all emerge in great clarity in the first “Conai Sustainability Report”, which presents a summary of the results obtained over the last 15 years of business, based on which the consortium system can affirm that from 1997 to the present it has prevented the building of at least one hundred landfills, the consumption of 350 billion kilowatts and 125 million tons of CO2 emissions into the atmosphere. In the single year 2012, 7.5 million tons of raw materials derived from packaging waste were reintroduced into the productive cycle, and the forecast for 2015 estimates an annual growth rate of approximately 1.5%, with the objective of recycling 7.7 million tons (reaching a rate of 67.4%).
Source: Sette – Corriere della Sera