Separate waste collection, biomethane rebates for virtuous municipalities

Biomethane, produced by Acqua e Sole, will be available at a discounted price for residents of villages near the biodigestion plant in Vellezzo Bellini (in the province of Pavia). As long as they do their differentiated waste collection well.

The company, which is also an agricultural company, disposes of organic waste in the province of Pavia, but also produces energy. Through an anaerobic process, organic waste is disposed of within the plant and produces energy. The substance used to create energy is digestate and consists of a by-product derived from anaerobic digestion (a reaction in an oxygen-free room) that takes place within the digesters of plants producing biogas and biomethane, the composition of which varies depending on the feedstock.

What is produced, first and foremost, feeds the waste recycling plant, but also ends up in a methane distributor for motorists passing along the road leading to the Melegnano toll station, which is a handful of kilometres from Acqua e Sole. And, given the success of bio-methane, the company's managers decided to trigger a virtuous mechanism with the surrounding municipalities. "We thought," says Virginia Palomba, technical office manager for Acqua & Sole technological plant development, "of proposing conventions to neighbouring municipalities. Basically, those who have a better differentiation are entitled to discounts on refuelling. Those who own a car that runs on biomethane and live in municipalities where an agreement is in force can contact us and we will give them a badge, with which they will be entitled to pay a lower price".

At the moment, the modalities of the discounts are not yet known, also because they will be assessed according to the separate collection quota of each individual municipality. 'We are not able,' Palomba continues, 'to establish a punctual rate for each person, but we can differentiate the discounts according to the quota of each town. In our intention is to trigger a virtuous mechanism, in which citizens push each other to make separate collection". The proposal to the Pavia municipalities is yet another innovation in the wake of the history of the Natta family, i.e. the sons and grandsons of Nobel Prize winner Giulio Natta. Today they own Acqua e Sole, but in the 1980s they founded Ecodeco, a company at the forefront of waste disposal. Their techniques for producing energy and fertiliser from organic waste were first tested on their farm.