by Giada Gavazzi
Have you ever thought of Rome as an environmentally-friendly city? I personally never have. I have grown with the idea of Rome and its surroundings as pretty filthy places, filled with polluting cars and garbage on almost every street. But something is finally changing.
In August 2019, Rome engaged in a new adventure: it’s called +Ricicli+Viaggi, a project created by ATAC to keep the environment relatively free of plastic recipients and use them as merch in exchange for a ticket for public transports.
The process is pretty simple: if you have plastic in excess and want to get something out of it, you can carry it to one of these following stations:
- Line A: CIPRO – ANAGNINA – TERMINI
- Line B: LAURENTINA – BASILICA SAN PAOLO – PIRAMIDE
- Line C: SAN GIOVANNI – MALATESTA
(for more information on where to find these stations you can check out the map on this page)
Once you’re there, you can find CORIPET machines, which are the ones that will take your plastic. Each plastic bottle (from 0,5l to 2l formats) is worth 5 cents, so 30 bottles will be sufficient in order to get one ticket to get anywhere you want, through bus, tram and metro.
The project promises to use all that plastic to make new bottles and reuse them, instead of producing new containers that would have further polluted the streets of Rome.
By accessing the app My Cicero and clicking on the button “+Ricicli +Viaggi” a barcode will be generated. That barcode will be positioned by the user in front of the optical reader in the plastic bottle machine. Once it has eaten all of the plastic it needed to recycle, the system will upload all the points on the My Cicero app.
Originally, the process only had to last less than one year, until July 22, 2020. It had to be just a short-term experiment to see if the citizens of Rome would accept the idea of finally doing something for the environment in which they live.
And the results were spectacular. ATAC estimated 350 thousand of recycled plastic bottles in just the first 6 weeks.
I personally saw the effects on Piramide station, when the pandemic still wasn’t making us be confined at home. Every day to come to university or to go home I passed through Piramide and saw a kilometric queue in front of these machines, with people carrying even tens of plastic bags filled with bottles.
Once, I got there and found a line so long it covered the whole area of the station. It obstructed the way to the underground.
The project was so well-liked that it was extended for a full year after the original date of termination. It has been active until August 2021.
It has turned out to be a great project with a great response. For the first time, Rome is trying to act against city pollution, and it is making it a collective effort. It means little for Rome’s actual plastic pollution, but it means everything for the people. We are starting to take a new direction. We are starting to care.
It’s just a small step, that’s true. There is still a really, really long way ahead of us if we want to become more environmentally friendly. But how a wise man once said, it is never too late to make the first step.
And who knows, maybe the project will be extended again, and we will meet on a bus on our way to university, only thanks to empty plastic bottles.
Writing For Advocacy: Climate Crisis 