Asia Napoli and Erion Weee together to raise awareness among citizens about recycling WEEE

In the presence of the Mayor of Naples, Gaetano Manfredi, the Councilor for Health and Greenery of the Municipality of Naples, Vincenzo Santagada and the Councilor for Education and Family, Maura Striano, the agreement for collaboration between the integrated environmental hygiene services company and the Erion System Consortium dedicated to the management of Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment (WEEE) was signed today by the Sole Director of ASIA Napoli SpA, Domenico Ruggiero and the General Manager of Erion WEEE, Giorgio Arienti, which will start in the next few weeks with the aim of raising awareness among the citizens of the Campania capital on the issue of WEEE and on good practices for their correct disposal.

With the initiative “Recycling WEEE is a beautiful story!” – presented this morning during a round table at the Sala Giunta del Comune in Palazzo San Giacomo – the Consortium and the municipal company are implementing a combined action on three fronts: poster campaign, training activities for students and extraordinary moments of collection of small WEEE at the schools involved in the project.

Starting March 13, the streets of the Campania capital will be covered by a billboard campaign to educate residents about WEEE and how to properly dispose of it. Subsequently, 11 participating schools will receive training sessions led by industry experts on sustainability and recycling, and will also participate in a competition. Special containers will be placed within the school buildings where students can drop off their small electrical and electronic waste, which will then be collected by ASIA Napoli. The school with the most WEEE will be awarded a voucher for the purchase of educational materials during an official ceremony in May.

“I thank ASIA Napoli and the Municipality for their prompt availability to collaborate on this important project, which has the objective not only of raising awareness among young people on the issue of correct disposal, but also of inviting Neapolitan citizens to take advantage of the services available to them to dispose of WEEE correctly. In fact, still too often, this waste is kept at home even if unused or thrown in the unsorted waste.” declared Giorgio Arienti, General Manager of Erion WEEE. “The initiative is part of the broader communication and awareness program DireFareRAEE, launched in 2022 and which will continue throughout 2023.”.

“There is a small mine in our homes: all those electronic devices that we no longer use but keep aside in drawers and closets. Cell phones, battery chargers, radios, remote controls and any other unused object because it doesn't work or simply because it's "outdated" can still be useful if correctly sent for recovery” declared the AU of ASIA, engineer Domenico Ruggiero who then continued: “Separating and correctly disposing of waste from electrical and electronic equipment has a double value of respect for the environment: it doesn't pollute it with the old and it reduces the exploitation of mines to create the new. The DireFareRAEE initiative of the Erion WEEE consortium that ASIA has welcomed and included in the Educambiente project under the patronage of the Municipality aims precisely to convey this message and increase awareness on the issue.

“Today we are signing a very important agreement because the disposal of electronic waste is one of the great emergencies of contemporary times, it is a great resource but it is also a great environmental problem” declared the Mayor of Naples, Gaetano Manfredi. “We decided to start with schools because those who handle cell phones and electronic devices in general the most are young people and so this is an opportunity to explain to them that these devices must at a certain point be disposed of correctly and regularly.

 In general, we are pushing hard on the organized and industrial recovery of waste in order not only to protect our environment but also to consider it as a great economic resource. In electronic waste there are noble metals, there is the possibility of greatly reducing the environmental impact but also of finding economic resources and we are moving strongly in this direction”.

The survey

During the morning, the survey carried out by Ipsos for Erion WEEE was also presented as part of the “RAEE Knowledge Observatory”, created by the Consortium to monitor the levels of awareness of citizens, their opinions and their behaviors. The study, carried out on a sample of 1.000 Italian citizens to which is added a specific focus on 500 young people aged 18 to 26 and one in 500 inhabitants of Naples, highlighted that there is still a long way to go in terms of awareness.

It has emerged, in fact, that 80% of Neapolitans do not know the meaning of the acronym RAEE. An alarming figure, the worst among those of the five large Italian cities analyzed (Bologna, Turin, Milan, Rome and, indeed, Naples), and significantly higher than the Italian average, which stands at 61%.

Even with regard to the methods of disposal of Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment, the picture is critical: with respect to 14 types of products covered by the survey, ranging from PCs and smartphones to pedometers and electric toothbrushes, almost 1 in 2 Neapolitans (49% of the sample) would end up throwing at least one of them in the plastic or unsorted waste containers (among other things thinking, in 88% of cases, that this is the correct procedure).

The survey also reveals behaviors that fuel parallel illegal flows: 35% of Neapolitans interviewed said they had turned to “cellar clearers” to get rid of their WEEE and 30% said they had come across unauthorized individuals outside collection centers who asked to deliver such waste to them. These are worrying figures, which are in line with the national average, respectively 32% and 34%, but higher than those of the other cities involved in the research.

Finally, the problem of lack of information also emerged from the analysis of the levels of knowledge of the disposal options available to citizens: 31% of Neapolitans do not know about the “1 vs 1 service” (i.e. the consumer's right to ask the retailer, when purchasing a new appliance, to take back the equivalent one they want to get rid of), while 62% do not know about the “1 vs 0 service” (i.e. the possibility of disposing of small WEEE at large household appliance and electronics stores free of charge and without any obligation to purchase).

WEEE management data on Naples

In the Naples area in 2022, Erion WEEE managed over 1 tons of domestic WEEE, from the correct treatment of which the following were obtained: 8 tons of iron (equivalent to the weight of a Frecciarossa 514), 1000 tons of plastic (equivalent to approximately 174 garden chairs), 69.600 tons of aluminum (equivalent to approximately 27 coffee makers) and 31.500 tons of copper (equivalent to 29 km of cables).

Thanks to the virtuous management of this waste within the municipal territory, Erion WEEE has avoided the emission into the atmosphere of almost 13.400 tons of CO2 (the same amount that would be absorbed in a year by a forest measuring 13 km2.000.000, slightly larger than Pompeii) and has enabled the saving of over XNUMX kWh of electricity (equal to the annual domestic consumption of a city of approximately two thousand inhabitants).