Paper and Board Collection, Recycling, and Recovery in Italy in 2023

The numbers you are going to read in this paper are a measure of a record struck by our paper and board collection and recycling system, and display the results of a vision that started almost half a century ago.

Next year, in fact, Comieco will celebrate its fortieth anniversary as the creation of people that, at a time when landfill disposal was indeed the only urban waste management approach, believed that an alternative model could be adopted.

They believed that the waste paper and board collected from each individual citizen, in co-operation with municipal services and public sanitization companies, could provide valuable materials for reprocessing by the industry of a country that was constantly hungry for resources, bringing together the environment and the economy, sustainability and competitiveness. Four decades later, the power of that vision helped raise Italy to the top of the list of virtuous European countries in terms of paper and board collection and recycling.

The numbers in this report give us confidence about the great challenges of the near future. Our model comes from far away, but is constantly ahead of time. More specifically, Italy surpassed the 90% paper and board recycling rate in 2023, thus hitting the target set by the European Union for 2030 seven years ahead of time. While this excellent result confirms the strength of the system, it should be considered more closely and according to the general context.

An analysis of the recycling rate in the 2021-2023 period highlights a reversal from the sharp decline of 2022 (-5%) to the rebound of 2023 (+7.7%). These figures almost offset one another, thus raising the recycling rate for both years to almost 86%, in line with the figures of the two previous years and, anyway, beyond the EU 2030 target (85%). It should be noted, in fact, that the separate collection and recycling performance is directly influenced by industrial strategies and consumer choices that, in turn, depend on a variety of economic and social factors. The clear difference between these two years is partly accounted for by fluctuating trends on the raw material and packaging consumption markets in the past period, heavily affected by the cost of energy and the increase of inflation. In 2023, these factors resulted into a faster turnover of the stocks collected (and officially provided for consumption) during 2022.

In short, recycling amounts were somewhat higher last year, however based on much lower apparent consumptions compared to the previous year. These were partly responsible for the 2023 achievement and invite to celebrate our domestic primacy, though being no reason to rest on laurels.

What data irrefutably confirms is that, since the creation of the consortium-based system in the late 1990s, separate collection has continued to grow, and its amount increased threefold in 2023. This demonstrates that recovering paper and board packaging from mixed waste is by now a customary activity of most of the population in Italy. However, there is still much more, and better, we can do, but we will soon get there.

Right now let us just acknowledge that, compared to last year’s estimates, separate paper and board collection grew up to a global volume of more than 3.7 million tons (+107 thousand tons) with a yield per inhabitant/year of 63.8 kg. And this is quite noteworthy, particularly if we consider that, as you will read in this report, improvements are mostly the result of the input of sensitive areas on which the Consortium keeps a constant focus, such as Sicily and Rome, the latter hosting, not by chance, to the official disclosure of the report this year.

Remember that Comieco plays a subsidiary role vs. the market of recyclable waste and secondary raw materials, and offers support (in accordance with the technical agreement with ANCI) to the Cities and the operators even at times when the law of supply and demand, alone, could not be sufficient to ensure appropriate collection and processing of the post-consumption paper and board packaging provided by the population to the public collection system. For several years this market has been characterized by significant turbulence, also due to the impact of geopolitical instability on the macro and socioeconomic scenario.

This explains why in 2023 Comieco managed a total of 2.3 million tons of end-of-life paper and board materials, 17.7% more compared to the 2022 volumes. Overall, the contracts in force allowed to ensure collection for the Italian Cities against a resource investment by the Consortium of more than 190 million EUR, plus 54 million EUR for in-plant services in integrated contracts. This confirms, once again, the strength of the system in bringing together the environment and the economy, while ensuring the continuity of separate collection and providing economic support to local entities even at most turbulent times, such as those the paper industry went through last year, when it was forced to continue to endure the impact of the energy shock in the months between 2021 and 2022, with packaging production (5 million tons) declining in parallel with domestic paper for recycling consumption (3 million tons). Meanwhile, exports to non-EU countries continued to grow (+0.7 million tons vs. 2022), particularly towards India.

These dynamics clearly and univocally invite to hold on and remain alert, not least because the complexity of our future challenges is proportional to the successes that characterized our forty-year life. One of these is the quality of recycled materials, which is crucial to ensure the cost-effectiveness and sustainability of waste paper and board transformation into new paper. In this respect, 2023 is a true turning point, particularly for household collection, traditionally the most critical; even if the national average is improving, with the rate of contaminants declining from 2.00% to 1.55%, data shows that collection still faces quality issues in one case out of four, and as much as one out of three in the South. Business collection performs better, but 15% still fails to meet optimal standards. Collection quality is thus a strategic field of action for the entire system, a match that Comieco, local entities, and public service companies can play in the near future with the support of the tools provided by the new ANCI-CONAI agreement, closing its 5th cycle this year and preparing to start its 6th cycle (2025/2029).

Beside quality improvement, the main priorities for the players in the consortium-based system include the need to capture the amounts of post-consumption paper and board that remain to be collected across the national territory. This is a true urban reservoir, an unexplored area of at least 700thousand tons, mostly concealed in the mixed waste discarded by the population in southern regions and big cities. As we have been doing for almost four decades, we will strive to keep such valuable resources away from landfills by strengthening our commitment and increasing our efforts. We are already doing so with the Extraordinary Plan for support to the Cities in the development and strengthening of collection (the Plan for the South), and will continue to do so by also expanding our projects for the development of separate collection in fast-food restaurants, in the high-content bag sector, and in major events, and to improve the collection and recycling of a more and more strategic part of paper and board packaging - beverage cartons.

This is a clear example of how renewable and circular materials are encouraging more and more companies to use paper and board to protect, preserve, and market their products. While the figures in this report show that we are ready for future challenges - and that, to some extent, we have always been - we need to retain the mindset that, forty years ago, gave life to Comieco - an ambitious and visionary, however steady and pragmatic one.