ROME, Dec. 11 (Xinhua) -- Italy continues to trail the European Union (EU) as a whole on waste treatment, though the country is closing the gap with its European neighbors, according to a recent key report released by the technical and research branch of Italy's Ministry of Environment.
The Italian Institute for Environmental Protection and Research -- best known by its Italian initials, ISPRA -- told lawmakers on Monday that while Italy has made strides toward what is known as the "circular economy", there was still much to do.
The "circular economy" seeks reducing the amount of waste products create, making products last longer before being discarded, and then recycling the waste that is created to produce new goods or energy without extracting new natural resources.
Italy has been among the European Union's laggards when it came to effectiveness in reducing and effectively disposing of waste. The ISPRA report indicated that is beginning to change.
ISPRA's 27th annual report on urban waste was its most comprehensive yet, measuring waste production and disposal in urban areas in all 20 Italian regions all set out in a report totaling more than 600 pages.
Overall, urban waste production in Italy has more or less plateaued in recent years: oscillating over the last five years from a low of 29.52 million metric tons of waste to a high of 30.11 million tons. The total for 2017 -- the latest year covered by the report -- was 29.59 million, a decline of 1.7 percent compared to the previous year and virtually identical as in 2013.
That decline was more or less consistent across the country, with just four of 20 regions showing an increase in waste production between 2016 and 2017.
On a per-capita basis, Italy produced a total of 497 kilograms of waste per resident per year, only slightly higher than the average for the European Union as a whole.
But when it comes to disposing of that waste in low- impact ways, the data told a different tale: 55.5 percent of the waste in Italy is separated by categories, up slightly compared to the previous year, well below EU averages.
"All the regions have taken a step forward and for the first time the amount of differentiated waste totals more than 55 percent," Stefano Laporta, ISPRA president, said Monday. "But there is no room to be complacent."
Salvatore Micillo, undersecretary with the Ministry of Environment, and Stefano Vignaroli, president of parliament's Commission on the Circular Economy, also spoke at the presentation of the ISPRA report, making similar remarks.
Organic waste in Italy totaled 6.6 million tons, an increase of just 1.6 percent compared to 2016, the smallest year-on-year increase since 2010. The amount of incinerated waste totaled 5.3 million tons, down around 2.5 percent compared to the previous year, but also higher than European averages. The recovery of packaging waste was around 78 percent in 2017, stable compared to 2016.
