Nothing represents the decline of modern Rome like the garbage crisis. Every day, an unadapted fauna of wild boars, aggressive gulls and rats flock to the Eternal City to dine on overflowing garbage cans. In early summer, a series of suspicious fires at processing plants and sorting yards blackened the sky over the capital and made its air dangerous to humans.

Just when everything seemed to be deadlocked, a controversy broke out over the construction of an incinerator that led to the downfall of Prime Minister Draghi’s government in July. Rome’s mayor and veteran leftist, Roberto Galtieri, took advantage of the political situation by getting Draghi’s already provisional government to finance €600 million worth of waste-to-energy power generation facilities.

After the Malagrotta landfill, one of the largest in Europe, closed in 2013, the garbage problem proved insurmountable for Galtieri’s predecessor, Virginia Raggi of the Five Star Movement, whose rebellion led to the downfall of Draghi’s government. Although the landfill has stopped receiving large volumes of waste, the sorting plant located there continues to process 1,500 tons of waste per day. In the summer, the plant was completely destroyed by fire.

The Malagrota fire was not an isolated incident, but part of an “epidemic” of fires at recycling facilities this summer. Galtieri, while not a fan of conspiracy theories, recalls the ongoing involvement of organized crime in waste management. Today, Rome “exports” its waste at a high price, burdening the municipal budget and supporting the interests of the mafia.

Deterioration of the situation due to mismanagement and corruption of municipal services.

Individual responsibility

An important role in the waste crisis is played by the issue of individual responsibility of business and citizens. Even the Rome-born Galtieri admits that many of his fellow citizens are anti-social. Restaurants toss trash into residential trash cans, while members of the public respond by tossing their trash bags around already-full trash cans, creating an archipelago of trash around them and attracting interesting wildlife.

The municipality is now planning to take strong action against the widespread mismanagement of the cleaning department. Decades of hiring based on customer criteria has resulted in most cleaners being seconded to municipal agencies. Galtieri decided to continue consolidating the cleaning service, battling back wages and fake medical certificates that led to a widespread shortage of staff.

In the second phase, the mayor’s plan calls for the placement of new waste bins on the streets of the capital before the start of the third phase in 2025, when the new generation incinerator is expected to become operational, concurrently with the end of the mayor’s term. .

During his re-election campaign in the summer of 2021, Galtieri said that the garbage problem could be solved without an incinerator and that he would have found a long-term solution by Christmas. Today he admits that he did not realize the complexity of the waste crisis in Rome.