AGCM

PRESS RELEASE

PRESIDENT PITRUZZELLA’S PARLIAMENTARY HEARING: “WASTE MARKET, MORE COMPETITION CAN HELP PROTECT THE ENVIRONMENT”

“In the urban waste management sector, competition contributes in achieving environmental aims”. During the hearing before the Parliamentary Committee for an investigation on illegal activities related to waste, the ICA’s president Giovanni Pitruzzella highlighted “the monopolistic structure of the Italian system in the packaging collection and recycling sector, which constitutes a significant part of the Country’s separate urban waste collection”.

The ICA’s president reminded how in the mid ’90s, for this type of waste, the EU’s Member States introduced systems in their regulations compliant with environmental obligations deriving from European laws, according to which, packaging producers are responsible for their products even after the consumption phase. Therefore, said producers “must finance pollution costs caused by the introduction of their goods on the market,” on the basis of the principle according to which “who pollutes pays”.

“In Italy – president Pitruzzella continued – this role is almost exclusively carried out by Conai”. Therefore, the ICA launched an investigation against the mentioned consortium and Corepla (chain operating in the plastic sector). The proceedings were concluded with the acceptance of a series of commitments by the two operators, “aimed at limiting Conai’s role in the procedures for acknowledging autonomous systems and at regulating its economic relationships with Corepla in the phase following said acknowledgement”. According to the ICA’s opinion, “there is an extremely low competitiveness between Conai’s system and the alternative ones, with a consequent almost-monopoly held by Conai’s consortium”, as widely documented in the preliminary investigations.

“These organizational choices – according to Pitruzzella – produce negative effects on competition in the packaging market, as they sterilize the importance of responsibility in managing packaging waste”. Hence, the conclusion that “producers must support, effectively and entirely, waste management charges deriving from the consumption of their products. Moreover, packaging prices must adequately reflect their future charges, that is their higher or lower recyclability”.

Rome, 15 February 2016