The Municipality of Tivoli, located on the outskirts of Rome in the Rome East quadrant, has about 60,000 inhabitants. It is the Municipality of Villa d’Este, Villa Gregoriana, Villa Adriana and other archaeological, historical-artistic and UNESCO heritage sites of global importance. In 2014 the city started a small sweet revolution called “separate collection”. Tivoli in those years was still besieged by a truly worrying waste emergency, with a very low percentage of separate collection, which stood at around 10%. The company then in charge of waste management in the Municipality collected little and badly differentiated waste, replenishing the landfills and incinerators of the Lazio region and also of the Emilia-Romagna region. Since 2015 we have started a new course, involving all the inhabitants of Tivoli and the approximately 3000 non-commercial domestic users, a collaboration thanks to which today, Tivoli is on the threshold of 80% of separate waste collection, slightly exceeding this in the summer months percentage, and reducing the disbursement of the Tari by about 20%. Thanks to all this we have managed to obtain around 1 million euros a year from the resale of all differentiated waste, demonstrating how waste can be a great economic resource. We have made many investments in new innovative machines, such as the 5 sweepers and 10 electric vacuum cleaners that can be seen passing through the city every day cleaning the streets up to twice a day.

Francesco Girardi