Recycling Lunigiana Style · Apr 7, 11:57 PM by James Martin
Recycling in Italy is in a state of flux. When we made our triumphant spring return to the Lunigiana a week ago, a plethora of bins and bags were waiting for us. They are part of the latest recycling plan, put in place most likely to avoid the dreaded Naples refuse problem.
Here’s a picture of the instructions. They look complicated, don’t they?
And here’s the hardware:
There’s actually more here than you think. Some stuff is nested. You have your casetta bianca and cassetta grigio, white and gray boxes. The white is for paper, books and cartons, stuff like that. The gray is for bottles and cans.
There are three colors of big sacks and one bio sack. The small bio sack goes inside the brown trash bin and is used for the umido kitchen stuff, the humid trash—things that compost, like fruit and vegetable material and those coffee pucks that exit from the espresso machine. The blue sacks are for plastic bottles and other thin-walled plastic things. The green sacks are for the garden stuff, old leaves and grass, that sorta thing. The big gray sacks are for the non-recyclable objects: plates, plastic cups, light bulbs, audio and video cassettes and your rubber objects (you devil you).
There is a day for everything to be set out in front of your house. The service is, in fact, called porta a porta or door to door. Thus the big dumpster at the end of our little road is gone, and we can now actually make the sharp turn into our little raod with no more than three up-and-backs.
The umido gets three pick-up days: Monday, Wednesday and Friday. The green garden stuff goes out on Saturday, and plastic on Wednesday, and the paper on Tuesday.
Frankly, it’s gonna take some getting used to. I mean, I hardly know where to throw things any more. It’s really complicated; the rules are lots more specific than I’ve outlined here.
One thing I do know. After this experience, my Italian vocabulary will be quite strong in the area of refuse. I will talk trash like a pro.
Recycling Lunigiana Style originally appeared on WanderingItaly.com Apr 07, 2009, © James Martin, 
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