Every year in Italy they are wasted 76 kg of food each: in total, 1,3 billion tons of food end up in the bin and their disposal costs the environment 170 million tons of CO2 (Last Minute Market data). Not only that: 14 million square kilometers of agricultural land are used to grow the food we waste. If this area were a country, it would be the third largest in the world after Russia and Canada.
To put a stop to all this, Italy has just equipped itself with a new law on food waste. After the first yes arrived from the Chamber last March, on Tuesday 2 August the provision was definitively approved by the Senate.
The text, which was passed over in silence and overtaken by other measures approved at the same time, nonetheless establishes important innovations: it defines for the first time in the Italian legal system the terms of food "surplus" and "waste" and focuses on incentives and simplification bureaucratic process for food donations, obviously in compliance with hygiene and health standards and traceability.
Here are the main changes from a practical point of view:
1) It will be possible to download the VAT of the donated goods.
2) There is a reduction in the waste tax in proportion to the amount of food collected by the associations.
3) The summary of donations will have to be done every month, at the final balance, and up to 15 thousand euros of donated food can be avoided (until now, however, a declaration was required for the health authorities to be completed five days before the transfer).
4) The bread can be donated within 24 hours of production.
5) In the catering sector, customers are allowed to take their leftovers home with the "family bag".
6) Two million have been allocated for 2 to the Indigent Table and one million each to two funds that will deal with innovative and anti-waste packaging and the promotion of "family bags" in restaurants.
7) Not only non-profit organizations may be considered "donors", but also public bodies, school, company and hospital canteens, shops, supermarkets, restaurants and businesses.
8) Food and medicines with wrong labels may be donated (in addition to food, the law also refers to medicines and clothes), but only if the irregularities do not concern the expiry date or the indication of substances that cause allergies or intolerances.
9) To reduce waste, zero kilometer productions will be promoted by the Ministry of Agricultural Policies.
10) Volunteer associations will be able to recover and transfer free of charge the products that remain on the ground during the agricultural harvest. There is also the possibility of distributing confiscated foodstuffs (which exists today but is at the discretion of the magistrates).
"We want the donation to be structural, daily, every time a surplus is generated - explains Pd deputy Maria Chiara Gadda, first signatory of the law - and the main road is to remove unnecessary bureaucracy, such as prior declaration 5 days before delivery. Now a transport document, or an equivalent document, capable of allowing the traceability of the product or a summary declaration at the end of the month will suffice, only if the amount of the donation exceeds 15 thousand euros”.
According to Gregorio Fogliani, of the non-profit organization Qui Fondation, which has been active since 2007 with the Pasto Buono project for the recovery of food surpluses, “this law could halve the volume of waste within ten years: it has been calculated that if all Italian public establishments made their surpluses available, with an average of 20 meals a day, 7 million meals could even be distributed every day".
However, unlike the similar provision launched six months ago in France, the new Italian law does not include any penalties for those who fail to recover the food in the commercial and distribution network. And this could greatly limit the effectiveness of the fight against waste.
