The Re-Urbanization of Waste. How to bring the waste cycle closer to users and improve its results.

Our current era is sleepwalking. Most of us, who live in Western societies, have practically everything our parents and grandparents have ever dreamed of except for one thing: sustainability. We would need at least two planets if the world population were given the model of European consumption and of four other planets if everyone consumed as a typical American. We are simply living on this planet as if we had another one on which we can go. Something has to change and the best place to make that change is through waste, because we all produce waste - every day. Every time we produce waste, we are part of an unsustainable way of life on the planet, but with the right leadership we could all be part of an important first step towards sustainability. We can no longer support “a disposable society” on a finite planet. I started to approach the topic of waste when in my city, Turin, we began to discuss whether or not to build the waste-to-energy plant. The construction of these large plants brings with it many controversies related to their social, environmental and health impacts on the population. Those are mainly political discussions: on the one hand who says that burning waste is an obsolete technique and the result of combustion, exhaust fumes, are carcinogenic to the population surrounding the plant. For this faction, data on the production of harmful agents - which are transparent and public, easily accessible on a daily basis on the site of each waste-to-energy plant and are always below the limits permitted by law - are not true and in the case of bad maintenance of the plant, these harmful agents could turn into an ecological bomb. On the other side of the political arena there are those who say that the high levels of consumption of the current society no longer allow burying waste in saturated landfills. The best solution is to burn them and the heat produced by combustion uses it to heat the houses with thermo heating. This movement affirms that filters to purify exhaust fumes always comply with the law, and since these rules are imposed at European level they can not harm the citizen. All these discussions, in my opinion, are more influenced by politics than by scientific data. To get a concrete idea on which of the two choices was correct I had to ask myself a few questions: - How many methods do we know to dispose of waste? - Are there any concrete alternatives to waste-to-energy? - What degree of consciousness does our society have on the subject of waste?