RESEARCH ARTICLE
Analysis of the Effect of Separate Collection on the Composition of Mixed Municipal Solid Waste in Italy
Paolo S. Calabrò1, *, Domenica Pangallo1
Article Information
Identifiers and Pagination:
Year: 2020Volume: 14
First Page: 63
Last Page: 70
Publisher ID: TOCENGJ-14-63
DOI: 10.2174/1874123102014010063
Article History:
Received Date: 24/4/2020Revision Received Date: 15/6/2020
Acceptance Date: 16/6/2020
Electronic publication date: 18/08/2020
Collection year: 2020
open-access license: This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International Public License (CC-BY 4.0), a copy of which is available at: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode. This license permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
Abstract
Separate collection of municipal solid waste (MSW) is mandatory in Italy, and an increasingly higher standard of efficiency is applied; in fact, the target value set by regulation is 65%.
In the last 20 years, separate collection efficiency increased from 9.4% with 80% national MSW landfilled, and only one region was over 25% separate collection to 58.1% with 22% national MSW landfilled and 12 of 20 regions over 55% separate collection. However, significant differences are present in the three Italian macro regions (North, Center and South).
This paper analyzes the composition of waste carried in most Italian regions to evaluate the effect of separate collection on the composition of mixed municipal solid waste (unsorted). Moreover, a regression analysis on the same data allows to assess this latter as a function of separate collection efficiency.