In Italy there are over 700 thousand companies that risk being overwhelmed by the proposal for a European regulation on packaging management that the Commission will have to present shortly. A new regulation, already drafted in Brussels, which freezes the packaging recycling strategy to focus on reuse. There is general alarm in the industry and service sector in Italy. The change of strategy in fact affects the country system which has a European primacy in the recycling industry. Among producers, industrial users and traders, the European turning point has in fact a possible impact on 6.3 million employees and on a production world that has a turnover of 1,850 billion euros. This is practically all the companies associated with Conai, the national packaging consortium, to which should be added those in the agricultural, logistics and Horeca sectors that also work with packaging, and manufacturers of packaging machines.
The industrial chain
It is the entire industrial recycling chain developed around the selective waste collection and recovery model born with the Ronchi Decree, together with Conai itself, a private body with public purposes that has made the system work in recent years. By asking for a contribution (Cac) from packaging producers and users and using it to implement separate collection.
A few numbers: in 2021 Conai awarded Italian local administrations almost 727 million euros (70 million more than in 2020) while 445 million were allocated to the financing of treatment, recycling and recovery activities.
At the moment, only a draft of the new regulation has been circulating: a document almost 200 pages long, which touches on different areas and aspects of the management of the life cycle of packaging, starting from their placing on the market. This was enough to alert the business world, because the proposal «calls into question in Italy the well-established recycling model in which our country ranks first in Europe. Furthermore, recycling will be further strengthened thanks to the investments of the NRP, while this regulation risks undermining the efforts and objectives achieved so far, creating far from negligible economic damage along the entire waste management chain “, underlines Confindustria.
The results are certified by Conai: in 2021 Italy recycled 73.3% of the packaging placed on the market: 10 million and 550 thousand tons. A result that far exceeds 65% of total recycling requested by Europe by 2025. And that reaches 82% if we add up the waste used to produce energy.