The Mayor of Bari, Antonio Decaro, has signed a Memorandum of Understanding with Roberto De Santis, President of Conai, the National Packaging Consortium. The objective is to draw up a business plan for waste management to identify new services and methods for the separate collection of packaging waste aimed at the recovery and recycling of materials across the municipality. Waste collection services will be improved by the municipality of Bari and by Amiu, which manages waste collection, also thanks to the support given by Conai in the start-up phase, with the objective to increase the percentage of separate waste collection in the city. CONAI will ensure, in addition to the removal of the material collected, the purchase of the equipment necessary to carry out the separate collection of packaging waste and the creation of informational campaigns to increase public awareness, designed to improve the quantity and quality of the materials collected and sent to be recycled. The waste tracking system ‘Mysir’ will also be made available to the municipality of Bari, to allow the monitoring of waste subject to separate collection.. “The Consortium will make available to the city of Bari, in the coming months, its own know-how to draft a feasibility plan to guide us through the interventions on the collection of separate waste which, together with Amiu, we will decide to put into place across the city,” said Mayor Antonio Decaro. “We have taken the decision to keep, the phase of study and planning separate from the management phase, today in favour of the municipal company, to avoid the internal reasoning of the latter, with regard to the costs of collection or other factors, prejudicing the choices made relating to the methods of collection that are seen as the most suitable. CONAI and Amiu will therefore work together over the coming months with the opportunity to evaluate and implement, already during the planning phase, some recycling in areas of the city to be identified in the plans drawn up by the Consortium. The goal on which we are focused today is, without doubt, to introduce systems of separate waste collection which are suitable and adaptable to our territory, then try to use he same model across the metropolitan area in order to have a plan and a system for separate waste collection, which is as uniform as possible, across all 41 Municipalities “. Mayor Decaro is considering whether to issue an Ordinance sanctioning those businesses that do not comply with the rules of separate waste collection and dispose of waste, regardless of type, in the street bins, “setting an unworthy example,” said Decaro, “for citizens and tourists. The Ordinance, already adopted in other Italian cities, provides for the closure of a business for 1 or 2 days, upon receiving the third sanction for the incorrect disposal of waste. As in other cases, I want to make an appeal to business owners, asking for greater cooperation; if nothing happens in this regard, I will issue the Ordinance “. At the signing of the Protocol, the President of Conai, Roberto De Santis added, “With the recent signing of the framework agreement with region of Puglia, we have laid the foundations of cooperation between Conai and the Municipalities for the development of recycling of packaging waste. The signing of this memorandum of understanding with the municipal administration of Bari is in line with this goal, ensuring our support for the creation of a model of separate waste collection for purpose of recycling”.