Disinformation campaigns and hoaxes have proliferated digital media. In Potenza, capital of the region Basilicata, Italy, this has led to a cultural distrust toward decentralized composting in small towns.
Donatella Caniani, PhD, is one of several voices acting as change agents to the social and cultural mindset of people, debunking their rationale for trust issues, and working to overcome multiple challenges to enact a community composting program in Potenza.
Caniani, an associate professor of environmental engineering at the Universitá della Basilicata, was an invited guest for “Science in Action in the Community: An Italian Perspective,” a recent Arts and Humanities Colloquium at Colgate, co-sponsored by Entrepreneurship and Innovation.
One of the major environmental challenges for the Mediterranean area is municipal waste management. While Italy has a well-structured waste management framework with quite a number of centralized composting facilities, Caniani shared, decentralized community composting is nonexistent in most of its local communities.
In a paper1 co-authored by Caniani and colleagues at the Universitá della Basilicata, the Marche Polytechnic University in Ancona, Italy, and the Universitat de Vic-Universitat Central de Catalunya in Barcelona, Spain, the eight authors note that, “Although decentralized community composting is common in some countries, there is still a lack of information on the operative environment together with its potential logistical, environmental, economic, and social impacts. Italy can set a model, especially for Mediterranean countries that intend to build decentralized composting programs.”
But only if some entity champions a movement. Enter: DECOST.
DECOST, or Decentralized Composting in Small Towns, is a project of ENI CBC MED, a cross-border cooperative of 14 coastal countries developing community composting pilots. Caniani is the scientific director of the DECOST project in Italy. She is the driving force behind the Italian partners (Crtec, the Italian Composting Association and Legambiente Potenza, and the Universitá della Basilicata) who are working to raise awareness about this new organic waste management approach that will be first implemented in the city of Potenza; additional locations around central Italy are in the planning stages. Other countries rolling out community composting pilots include Spain, Palestine, Jordan, Israel, and Greece.
“There is a huge difference in the number of composting plants between the regions (in Italy), and the lack of centralized facilities in the central and southern regions can be supported by decentralized solutions,” Caniani and her colleagues note. “Decentralizing waste treatment facilities and thus creating local solutions to urban waste management strategies will help to achieve the resource recovery and valorization targets in line with the circular economy.”
This is a vital step because, according to the United Nations, food waste represents one of the greatest concerns facing mankind today. The UN adopted as part of its 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development — approved at its meeting Sept. 25–27, 2015, in New York City — a new global sustainable development goal to halve food waste by 2030. European Union legislators have moved this agenda forward by publishing Directive 2018/851 to monitor its food waste–reduction goals. Further, Waste Directive (WD) 2008/98/EC established a set of priorities — prevention, preparing for reuse, recycling, other recovery (e.g., energy recovery), and disposal — for managing waste reduction, encouraging member nations to develop specific programs to this end. To date, Italy and France are the only two countries with national regulations for food waste reduction, but they only address the prevention of food waste and emphasize human reuse (e.g., leftovers, canned food, etc.). They do not address material recycling, nutrient recovery (such as aerobic digestion), or energy recovery (such as biofuel production).
DECOST’s closed-loop system transforms organic waste through community composting, which could convert an estimated 1,500 tons of the organic fraction of municipal solid waste into compost. Initial participants in this pilot program benefit in two ways: they now have a space to manage the organic fraction of their household-generated waste, and the compost generated in situ at the end of the process will bolster a set of urban gardens to which they have access.
When asked with what techniques are opponents to decentralized community composting campaigning, Caniani said most are using a “not in my backyard” attitude, arguing that the collection of organic waste in containers results in uncontrolled degradation of organic matter, leading to odor problems and leachate generation. But, she said, new composting technologies will address these issues and provide abundant advantages to centralized waste management: lower transportation and maintenance costs, low-level skills required, smaller facilities, high-quality compost production, and lower greenhouse gas emissions.
“This is a win-win situation for all stakeholders,” she said. It will just take time getting the word out.
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1Bruni, Cecilia, et al. “Decentralized Community Composting: Past, Present and Future Aspects of Italy.” Sustainability, vol. 12, no. 8. doi:10.3390/su12083319.