How Rome's rubbish emergency mirrors Scotland's own litter woes

Amid all the trash somebody has dumped a set of garden chairs, a carpet and a broken toilet. 

“We have been abandoned,” an unnamed local, a woman of retirement age, tells a news crew as cicadas chirp from uncut grass verges. “The few bins we have are broken and nobody ever repairs them. If they miss one collection the rubbish just accumulates and turns in to a dump. It is hell.”

Read more: Deprived areas of Scotland worst affected by litter

This was La Rustica, a neighbourhood on Rome’s eastern edge last month. The distressed resident was speaking to Ansa, Italy’s national news agency, as it documented the state of the capital “periphery”.

There has been rising anger this scorching summer over litter and uncollected garbage in Rome’s historic and overtouristed centre. 

But, as Ansa demonstrated, the situation is even more grave on the city’s fringes. Italy’s capital - a year or two after its refuse system collapsed amid pandemic lockdowns - is again in a public health and environmental crisis. There are particular concerns about mice.

The city, as the saying goes, is eternal. So is its rubbish emergency. 

Overflowing bins in Rome

Some jokers have even started referring to Rome as an “open-air museum in a landfill”. 

Mayor Roberto Gualtieri - a centre-left former MEP and Italian finance minister elected two summers ago partly on the back of trash problems facing his beleaguered predecessor - has admitted there is no quick fix.

This, of course, is huge local news. But it is also global, not least because some of the city’s discarded plastics ended up bobbing down the Tiber in to the Med. 

Rome is becoming the poster girl for Europe’s wider litter and rubbish emergency. And its “trash” politics echoes that of other major cities struggling to cope with modern throwaway cultures, including Glasgow and Edinburgh. 

Read more: Our poor, dear Glasgow is in a bad way. Who is to blame?

Yesterday the Herald revealed that Scotland’s cleanliness score had improved last financial year from the peak of the pandemic. But only slightly. It is still far higher than pre-Covid.

Hard survey data collected by Keep Scotland Beautiful showed nearly in one in 10 inspected public sites in the country was “unacceptably littered”. The figure rises to one in six in the areas with the highest footfall - shopping drags, densely populated urban residential areas or the precincts of secondary schools.

It has hard to make direct comparisons between countries and cities. Rome, however, clearly has wider issues with the collection and disposal of household waste than Scottish councils. And the city’s population - 4.3m - is closer to that of the whole of Scotland than to any of our local authorities.

Nevertheless, those trying to counter the rising tide of litter in our streets are firmly monitoring what happens elsewhere. Because the problems - if not always their scale - are similar.

“Data collected, in trials across cities of similar size, indicated that local authorities in all countries are experiencing similar challenges dealing with littered packaging and waste,”  saidCatherine Gee, KSB’s deputy chief executive, “It is clear that where people live, work and gather, local environmental quality is impacted by our behaviours, and that more needs to be done across the world to tackle litter – a global problem that doesn’t stop at a local authority, country or continent boundary.”

Critics of Rome’s Gualtieri are worried about the global impact too - but mostly on how this affects the Italian capital’s reputation as a tourist and businesses destination. 

On Thursday the Rome edition of the Corriere della Sera newspaper splashed a photo of gardens close to the city’s main train station filled with mattresses and plastic bags. Its headline was “Drugs, fights, litter: alarm over decay”.

Rubbish has become a symbol of perceived degradation. The scenes pictured - which were said to be in the central Esquilino and San Lorenzo quarters - were described as the “dormitories of degenerates”.

Read more: Yet another consultation won't reduce litter – we need action

Italy’s right and far right - the national government is an alliance of nationalists and ultra-conservatives - is mobilised on trash.

A local leader of Lega - a populist coalition partner - last week declared Rome’s rubbish-strewn streets to be a “world disgrace”.

At the same time a veteran right wing politician called Maurizio Gasparri - an old sidekick of the recently decreased Silvio Berlusconi - attacked the mayor on X, the social media platform until recently called Twitter.

“It pains me to see Rome in this condition,” fired off the Forza Italia figure. “The city is filthy. The dumpsters are stinking and brimming with rubbish, even during the day. And we have to explain to the millions of tourists visiting the city that Gaultieri and the left want to bury Rome.”

The senator and former minister was using a term that has become a bit of a meme - that the mayor and his PD or Democratic Party colleagues were “burying” their city both literally and figuratively.  

The rightist message message echoes what Gualtieri himself said when he was campaigning for the job nearly two years ago.

Back in September 2021, the now mayor lashed out at his populist incumbent opponent Virginia Raggi saying Rome was “filthy” and swamped with - literally “submerged under”  - trash. This was when the Italian capital was making international headlines as hungry wild boar roamed the town foraging in uncollected piles of rubbish. 

Rome lacks the capacity to either gather or process all its rubbish and this problem long predates the current regime. Last year a fire damaged a major trash processing facility. 

Read more: Shameful decline in learning languages is making Scotland poorer

Gualtieri has set his hopes on a new energy-from-waste plant, the technology used, among other places, in Glasgow.

But in the meantime his administration has signed a three-year 28-million-euro deal to send 900 tonnes of rubbish on a special weekly train to in Amsterdam. This Italian trash is then incinerated to generate heat for homes in the Dutch capital. 

Earlier this month in a special programme on Italy’s La7 TV-channel the mayor was frank about the crisis. “We are paying a pile of money because we are taking our rubbish out of the region and half away across Europe because we don’t have [processing] plants,” he said. 

Gualtieri also said that a problem with the city’s bin lorry and street-sweeping fleet had “ exploded” in May because of long-term maintenance issues that were now under independent judicial investigation.

“I have apologised to citizens,” he said, “because the situation in unacceptable.” Asked how long it would take to end the emergency, he replied.  “I cannot give a date but we are on the path to recovery.”

The mayor has tried to beef up the municipal cleansing company, Ama,  appointing a new boss. The firm’s operatives were out last week sweeping areas around schools in preparation for children returning to the classroom early next month. 

This, however, has irritated environmentalists. One of Italy’s most respected actors and directors, Alessandro Gassmann, described these publicity stunts as “offensive”. Gassmann - star of hit TV detective series The Bastards of Pizzofalcone - has been harrying Gualtieri’s green record over the summer. 

The politics of rubbish, and the blame game it generates, stinks as much as Rome’s bins. At least according to worried citizens. The pensioner in La Rustica filmed by Ansa was asked why she thought her neighbourhood was covered in trash. “Because nobody cares,” she said. “They care about the centre because it is ‘seen’, because it has tourists.” And who is responsible for the crisis? “Everybody,” she concluded.