The afternoon of June 6 in Piacenza already feels like midsummer, the sweat is sticking clothes to skin, the mugginess is stifling. But that doesn’t stop us from preparing for the event we’ve organized at the Unbreakable Social Cooperative; a public interview with Assemblyman Matteo Bongiorni and engineer Caterina Pagani, followed by a world cafe, where viewers will gather in groups to discuss environmental issues. We, the Piacenza-based team of the Erasmus+ Responsive Youth for Climate Action project, are in the hall of this historic venue to sort out the final details. Elisa, who has been in charge of organising the event, is running around arranging the last details; Riccardo, who will conduct the interview, is checking his notes; Matteo is taking care of the speakers while Laura is preparing the refreshments. 

Soon the hall begins to fill with people. Among them are the subjects of our interview: the first is Matteo Bongiorni, alderman for public works and public green. Matteo has done many jobs in his life, and for many years he has been involved in waste management; the experience he has accumulated has given him an in-depth knowledge of the Piacenza area, and his position as alderman makes him all the more interesting for our interview, as he is the one who makes key decisions for our city.

The second is Caterina Pagani, a city councilor and talented environmental engineer. Caterina has worked for more than 20 years in the health and safety field, and has extensive experience on environmental issues, combined with advanced technical knowledge-she will be able to help us understand what challenges our area faces. With these two experts, we are going to discuss the environmental situation of our territory, its challenges and what the citizens can do about it.

The room filled up. Riccardo, Matteo Bongiorni, and Caterina Pagani take their places on three chairs placed in front of the audience. It is time to begin the interview.

Riccardo: What are the challenges and emergencies in the Piacenza area regarding environmental sustainability?

Matteo Bongiorni: We’re in a bad place, but first a premise of method: the issue of sustainability today, which tends to be declined in environmental terms, actually has to take into account social sustainability as well, and social sustainability is a node that transversally should ensure greater access. I say this also because of economic and practical issues. If I have a car, to help improve air quality I have to change it, but if I don’t have the money to change it, the cases are two: either I walk, or I pollute. We have to realize that any kind of action, from the highest in European politics to the lowest always has to do with people in a given social and economic context. 

The other issue that I think is fundamental is legislation, where we have world conferences, European legislation, national transposition and regional declination-we have 20 environmental laws in Italy of application on what state gets from Europe. And so today we would not even be able to compose an Ecoguide, if we do not take into account the context, knowing that environmental sustainability works by that principle whereby a beating of wings in Tokyo can generate a hurricane in New York; because in globalisation, the demographic effect is scarcely considered in terms of sustainability. On whatever the issue is, I think an effort of awareness is needed today, because if we cannot embrace complexity we cannot balance our actions either. There is no free sustainability. To be better and more mindful we have to either try harder or give something up. 

Then there are issues that do not depend on the individual, for example, geographic conditions of our own that have conditioned the development of this city.  The so-called logistics vocation of Piacenza was born out of military issues: the arsenal is a logistics hub, there are a series of military distribution hubs that are now decommissioned, but which already in the past indicated the logistics vocation of this city, which in a somewhat uncontrolled development has generated a series of problems concerning land occupation: one only has to look at a map of Piacenza to see that logistics takes up the same amount of space as the urban center of Piacenza. And it also affects air quality, because vehicle transit conditions the influx and concentration of polluting vehicles. Which on the city of Piacenza, however, have not yet come to pollute as much as the boilers in the city; because we are very focused on certain aspects and data, then when an apartment building has to change the oil boiler, all it takes is two that don’t want to and the boiler is not changed.

This is to say that putting all this data together and trying to set positive incentive policies might help. The issue we have to ask ourselves about Piacenza is, “What is the thing that can be redistributed in terms of compensation?‘’ Because a series of correctives from this point of view have to be proposed and promoted from the highest to the lowest levels in a logic of autonomy: if each territory would take care in its own small way to be the most faithful to energy self-sufficiency, water purification. This whole chain of arguments, how does it manage to synthesize and produce an active demand and policy for compensation?

Caterina Pagani: I think it is appropriate to distinguish two levels: there are generalized environmental issues that affect the whole planet and then those that strictly affect our territory: that of air pollution is an emergency specific to our territory. That is, it affects us and it affects us most closely: we need to know that certain actions have an effect on the most fragile people who sit near us. Whereas on other things, such as climate-change, we are equally participants in series of upheavals that have effects elsewhere. 

Air pollution is a somewhat invisible problem: we hardly see and measure a tangible effect of fine particulate matter that exceeds thresholds deemed acceptable by the World Health Organization, or ozone, because these cause health deteriorations in people that are then measured over decades, like reduced life expectancy, so it’s not visible but it’s important to know it’s there.

The question is: Is there a middle ground, what is the use to say: if everyone behaved this way it would be okay? We have become accustomed to standards of services and living that if everyone on the planet had, so much for climate change! If all developing countries had the same standard of living that we have, doing the same things, that’s where we all have to question ourselves: figuring out what we can really afford as humanity. I have to think that what I can afford can be afforded by the other 9 billion people on the planet, so that means giving something up. We should question all our consumption choices.

Then clearly there are a whole series of political choices: I would like politics to give rules so that everyone necessarily makes the right choice. It cannot work that way because it would not be fair, because what for me is a small sacrifice for someone might be an untenable sacrifice. Policy has to mediate between all these needs: even the economic one-some people cannot make green choices: the ecological transition is costly for individuals, it is costly for the business world behind it, because they have to convert certain production, consumption and they don’t want to do it. This has to be accompanied with consumer choices upstream. It’s going to be a long thing because to be fair it will have to balance the needs of so many people, and there’s not just politics that can contribute to that balancing. 

Riccardo: You have both understood the direction we want to take, which is to grasp the complexity of combating climate change by linking the individual to the global. 

That said, we focus more on the local level. Our eco-guide looks at the city with the firm understanding that the individual and the global are not separate things. 

In addition, especially among us young people, I think there is a very widespread feeling of powerlessness in the face of climate change, because often looking at the universal we feel like a drop in the ocean, our choices seem irrelevant, so we would like to show that however by acting at least locally a difference can be made, if not as individuals, then as a community. 

That said, let’s move on to the second question: waste. How virtuous is Piacenza in waste collection? What are the challenges? Are there more efficient waste collection models that could be brought to Piacenza? 

Matteo Bongiorni: I have a visceral passion for waste. I’ve always been intrigued by the dynamics. Waste is basically a mirror of our consumption; it is a direct waste that we generate through our behaviors. This concerns everything that is solid-urban waste, that is, all the waste that is treated in our domestic sphere, but waste in Piacenza also crosses other types of waste, considering that today we have an index of separation of waste of around 70%.

Until a few years ago, the incinerator was a large boiler that burned waste and prevented it from being treated and sent elsewhere to other plants or landfills. Today part of this facility has been converted into a waste-to-energy plant because it returns some of the energy needed for waste disposal in terms of district heating. From an economic and energy valorization point of view it has a good advantage, not yet in my opinion economically recognized, but also from an environmental point of view, for example it is something that does not produce dusts of any kind. I am a supporter of local incinerators and I say this for this reason: if we go to a 70% separation quota, 30% has to be managed differently; if we don’t manage it territorially we should take it to the nearest incinerator:  Parma, which has a much newer, much better performing and also much larger plant. This would result in the operational projections potentially more land occupation in storage because it’s not like you then pick up the waste and take it away directly-you need some sort of metering and treatment, and the way to go to Parma, burn the waste, come back.

Actually, this incinerator does not only burn solid and municipal waste: it burns 3 other types of waste: 

– Non-hazardous industrial waste; 

– Hospital waste which is in a category of its own because it also contains indices of radioactivity (x-rays, chemo…), hazardous but falls under a more important public utility on the community 

– Sludge treatment

In 2022 we produced around 59,000 tons of such waste. Add to that another 43,000 of assimilated, i.e., non-hazardous, 1,958 tons of hospital waste and about 2,000 tons of “sludge” waste. These are important figures out of a maximum of 120 thousand tons, which is the capacity of the Piacenza incinerator.

On recycling collection, however, a transformation phase of the door-to-door collection mode will start in July. That is, we today have our bins for undifferentiated and organic waste. The transition that we have to prepare to make is instead always a type of collection that remains door-to-door, so we will always expose the bins outside the house, in a punctual mode, however, that is, it will be measured (only for undifferentiated) the number of times the ecological operator will empty your bin, through a distribution of bins equipped with a microchip linked to the household and that will count how many times it is exposed in a year: why? Because since the undifferentiated part is the most expensive and polluting part, we have to provide an economic incentive to produce as little of it as possible. Being that the garbage tax is composed of a fixed part and a variable part, the variable part, on the other hand, is about the behavior of the user: the collection of undifferentiated is weekly, so 52 services, 12 are included in the fixed part of the garbage fees; the other 40 times you can potentially expose are counted one at a time with your own tariff. 

I have experienced the transformation in some municipalities-this mode is already active in some municipalities in the province: Cortemaggiore, San Pietro, San Giorgio, Podenzano, Sarmato and Carpaneto. I experienced the transformation of Carpaneto professionally: we did monitoring after the change of system, and the undifferentiated waste had decreased by almost 30%. And the other fractions of waste had increased tremendously: especially organic.

This is one of those actions that you can put in an ecoguide: trying to incentivize and explain them, because it is the classic concrete and clear action that one can do to improve the situation of a collective service like garbage collection. 

Caterina Pagani: I would add one thing, he talked about the macrosystem, on a more micro level other things we can do to move towards this direction: everything that ends up in the public bins goes in the undifferentiated, so if I have a plastic bottle and I can take it home and I throw it in the plastic also this helps. Often in events, festivals, festivals, at some point the collection goes into chaos: you are good in the first few hours then you go into chaos. Don’t contribute to this chaos, look for the right container even when they are not in the places where they are most useful. 

Another thing, your generation has learned to re-value the things we no longer need on various platforms that allow reuse. On the territory there are these possibilities of exchange of objects that are still functional, various voluntary associations that pass things on to those most in need.

Matteo Bongiorni: I am skeptical about this dynamic. There is a market today that also moves some household waste, appliances, etc. to poorer countries.

Caterina Pagani: But, if they are reused, they are not waste. 

Matteo Bongiorni: the risk is that they end up in waste in Africa. There are container hubs that depart in a very targeted way to another series of markets. 

Caterina Pagani: I understand. However, the invitation was: instead of throwing stuff away, find a way to pass it to someone who will reuse it, maybe I’ll take a little longer to go and look for someone who can reuse the things that you’re going to dispose of, but this is also useful in individual behaviors. 

Laura Chiappa (Legambiente representative): the concept of reuse is fundamental, we must think globally but act locally and many small gestures are possible: 

During festivals, it is possible to use compostable plates (and then obviously put them in the compost, otherwise they just become trash). But those are waste too. If instead you use hard plastic and wash it, this becomes an absolutely positive thing. We in Piacenza have a ‘reusing center’ and we provide hard plastic plates and glasses free of charge. It’s a drop in the ocean, but we also do it now on local parties of a few thousand people and the amount of waste is reduced. 

There are many positive attitudes to avoid living in eco-anxiety or to get caught up in a system that overwhelms us. Unity is strength, it will take time, but we must still maintain hope. This is beauty of the complexity of environmental issues. But it is also the beauty of the bet we want to make: it is that each of us does what we can, we put it together with others, we see it globally and we say “well, I’m committed, I’ll do this little piece but I’ll do it ”. And if we all do that, it’s those small changes at the local level that then ripple out to the national level. Then we must also have the ability to ask, however: this is the political part that must give answers. The citizen does his part, politics must do it in the same way. Only in this way can we change things, if we do things together. 

Matteo Bongiorni: I am for scientific environmentalism. Find your way, but contextualise and try to attribute data to the things you say. Let’s think in terms of balance. Go beyond the scientific and humanistic approach. Support yourself with the data produced.

Take charge of a perception, because the environmental theme is a perceptive theme. For example, for me this echo anxiety, I have never had it. Maybe I don’t have this sensitivity. 

Riccardo: In this regard, let’s move towards the next phase: the wold café. The idea is to collect a series of ideas from the public on environmental issues, which we would then include in our eco-guide. I thank Matteo Bongiorni and Caterina Pagani for being with us and helping us understand the environmental challenges of our territory.