Too many small companies, few tenders and a shower of conflicts of interest: the Italian urban waste market is seriously inefficient and needs to be reformed. The alarm was sounded by the Antitrust, which this morning in Rome presented the results of a fact-finding survey on the sector launched in August 2014. "The waste market is blocked - said the president of the Authority, Giovanni Pitruzzella – and as always, the lack of competition facilitates the spread of malfeasance and behavior harmful to the environment”.
In Italy alone, 1.800 companies are active in collection, but 85% of the sector is managed by just 70 companies and of these, only 8 are private. This is possible because the Municipalities very often entrust the service directly (ie without a tender) to their own municipal companies, in many cases signing excessively long-term contracts (up to 20 years). This is a very common behaviour, in which the roles are confused and any principle of competition fails.
The Authority therefore believes that local authorities "must favor recourse to tenders", avoiding that "awarding exceeds the maximum duration of five years" established by law, but also by separating the two segments of the supply chain (collection and downstream stages) to archiving the so-called "integrated management" of the entire waste cycle, which has so far caused market imbalances and restrictions.
As far as legal references are concerned, the proliferation of local regulations has given rise to a "disciplinary framework characterized by strong heterogeneity of the different contexts, not only at the regional but even at the municipal level", therefore the Antitrust believes that the regulation must be centralised, for example by attributing specific responsibilities to the Energy Authority on efficiency parameters, tariffs and supervision.
Again from a regulatory point of view, the Antitrust states that "the very restrictive (mostly local) regulation of access to the mechanical-biological treatment and waste-to-energy markets" has led to an "excessive recourse to landfills", which in Italy it is the place where about a third of urban waste is disposed of, "while in Germany, Belgium, the Netherlands and Sweden percentages are lower than 1,5%". To discourage recourse to landfills, the Antitrust proposes better use of the eco-tax instrument (today highly variable: from around 25 euros in Friuli to around 5 in Sardinia), in order to make recourse to MBTs and TMVs more economically convenient .
Moreover, our country is also badly positioned in the recycling ranking: in 2013 we reached a share of 39% of waste (European rules require us to reach 50% by 2020), against 65% in Germany, the 58% from Austria and 55% from Belgium. The quota of separate waste collection and recycling, based on the indications contained in the Survey, could be further increased through "door-to-door" collection: this is currently the most expensive, but overall it achieves more economical waste management (because it produces value) and more ecological (because it promotes the use of recycled products).
“We will offer our analysis – concluded Pitruzzella – first of all to the parliamentary commission which is dealing with the subject, in view of the reform of the sector that we hope for”.
