Waste, Bill for the System Reform

The Regional Executive Board has approved the bill for the reorganization of the waste management system. This is a first step in the process of reorganization of the entire cycle, as it hands over the exclusive management competence of all the parts of the system to the Municipalities, from the collection and transportation of waste to the final disposal, as provided for by the national law.

Furthermore, the deliberation also represents a fundamental step for the protection of the occupational levels of the Consortia’s employees. The Bill calls for a partition of the regional territory into 7 Optimal Territorial Areas. Four of these ATOs correspond to the administrative borders of the provinces of Avellino, Benevento, Salerno and Caserta. For the province of Naples, whose user base is definitely wider, while awaiting the definition of the Metropolitan Area, it is has been provided for a partition of the territory into three Areas, each representing a user base of about a million inhabitants. Within each ATO it is has then made another partition into 35 Operational Territorial Systems (STO), geographical areas that are homogeneous as for quantity of waste produced, population density, morphological features and possibility to use the plants.

The municipalities, therefore, will have management functions for the services committed to them by the law, obligatorily in associated form: it will be up to the Territorial Conferences (Ato governmental bodies) to plan the service, realize it and estimate its price.

As for the staff, the law establishes the prohibition of new employments until the reemployment of the Basin Authorities’ units will be completed.

Also, the staff can also be employed for the duties of environmental protection, prevention of the uncontrolled abandonment of waste, control of the quality of the service and of management of the plants in support of the cycle, with special attention to collection centres, plants for the valorisation of the different product fractions, and for the treatment of organic waste.

This law needs the support of the national legislation also for making the extraordinary redundancy fund available to the employees who, because of the inefficiencies of the last ten years, today are not working permanently.

In addition, an intense dialogue with the Ministry for the Environment has been started to achieve this goal.

“It is a regional Bill that, according to the national legislation on competencies and local public services, gives the Municipalities maximum freedom in the organization of the cycle, without imposing top-down models and respecting the great territorial heterogeneity of the Region”, declared Giovanni Romano, Regional Minister for the Environment of Regione Campania. “It is necessary – he adds – to meet the schedule for the decisions and the conclusion of the administrative trials and, at the same time, respect the goals stated by the law about separate waste collection, reduction of waste, reuse and improvement of the collections quality in order to reduce the quantity to be disposed”. “From this point of view, the mayors’ autonomy in decision-making has to go together with the principle of institutional responsibility, considered that Municipalities, according to the law, are the only subjects in charge of the management of all the phases of the cycle”, the Regional Minister concludes.