In a place known for its cutting-edge fashion industry, it’s perhaps no surprise that fresh ideas have even hit the unglamorous world of food waste recycling. Milan, the second most populous city in Italy, is home to 1.3 million residents, and the wider urban area home to a further four million people. This makes the challenge of sustainably managing waste a matter of scale; how the municipality has met this challenge could be seen as a model for other large aspiring European cities.

Today, Milan has a successful separate food waste collection service, capturing 1.7 kilogrammes (kg) per person each week. In the process, the city’s recycling rate is well on the way to a target of 70 per cent. But to understand how it got to this point, it helps to know where it’s come from, explains Pierfrancesco Maran, Milan’s Councillor for the Environment (pictured above): “The citizens of Milan are quite sensitive about separate collection. They remember the early ’90s when we had trash on the streets. Also, we had tried to introduce a wet waste service twice before [again in the ’90s], and both times it stopped, so there was a perception that we would stop again.”

As a result, the decision to roll out the food waste collection was daunting, but, Maran observes, this time things were different. Notably, in 2011 the Italian government introduced a ban on single-use plastic carrier bags while crucially permitting retailers to instead provide compostable carrier bags to their customers. “This was important, not only because plastics bags are a pollutant [in the organic recycling stream], but also because a lot of public apathy on separate [food] collection was because of people thinking that ‘I have to buy bags’, but this way they can use the bag they get at the supermarket.”

The reason for a bag-orientated approach to the capture of food waste is in part due to the scope for aerated caddies to remove issues of odour, especially important in summer months, and to avoid bin juice. This has proved instrumental in achieving exceptionally high levels of participation and public approval. An independent survey conducted by IPSO Research found that 82 per cent of residents in Milan reported that having an aerated bin in their home was not a burden, and, of those that reported it was an issue, 88 per cent said it was an issue they were willing to overlook.

Over the space of 20 months from November 2012, Amsa, the city’s waste contractor (privately-run, but part-owned by the local government), rolled out the service to four quarters of Milan. Staggering this enabled effective targeting of communication and resources, and also established a baseline to measure the impact of the new service.

Homes were provided with 15-litre aerated caddies and a starter pack of 30 compostable bags, and buildings were additionally supplied with 120-litre brown bins for all residents to deposit their bags of food waste. Approximately 81 per cent of Milan’s residents live in a house of multiple occupation (HMO) – the same type of dwelling that has been an obstacle for most UK local authorities that have introduced separate food waste collections.

Although the new service in Milan has proved popular, its success is partly down to a punitive approach to contamination. Six months after the scheme was introduced to an area, a system of fines was introduced to buildings that were not correctly separating recyclables. According to Maran, these fines – typically €50-100 (£39-78) – were three per cent less the year that the food waste service was introduced, “not because we decided to push less, but because people are getting better at separating”.

He adds that because the vast majority of Milan’s residents live in HMOs, the application of fines to a building as a whole has a galvanising effect: “I think it’s important because it opens a discussion inside the building: ‘Who is responsible?’ ‘Why are you doing the wrong thing?’ It creates a system of community culture, so even if we haven’t sold the idea to everyone, they still feel they have to do it.”

The result is a contamination rate that is less than five per cent, which is acceptable for the 500,000 tonne per annum anaerobic digestion and composting facility sited 40 miles away in the Lombardy foothills. Consequently, Milan, which lost a €20-million central government subsidy for waste-to-energy treatment of residual waste (when the Italian government was forced to embrace public finance austerity by the European Central Bank), has been able to save approximately this amount through the introduction of its organics recycling service. “We had to show that separate collection is less expensive than before – a saving that has enabled Milan to finance other services, such as improved street cleaning”, comments Maran.

However, possibly the most impressive outcome of the new scheme is the impact it has had on recycling in general. Another finding of the IPSO Research is that six out of 10 people ‘actively’ involved in recycling state that their concern for recycling in general (therefore including other materials like glass, aluminium and plastic) has increased.

Further evidence of the impact is that 89 per cent of those who received the wet waste service in November 2012 reported that they recycle every day; for those that received the service by the end of 2013 this figure was 82 per cent; and for those that hadn’t received the service, it was just 73 per cent. The clear inference is that exposure to the service has enabled a norm of recycling to take hold with a section of the public that previously had not been engaged.

“To achieve even higher levels of recycling, it now becomes an educational issue, or opportunity”, says Maran. “We will push schools in 2015. We will have in every classroom a specific paper basket, not so much because we want to collect paper, but more as a means of educating on the idea of separate collection.”

Connected to this is a competition that the Milanese government is running in conjunction with paper recycler Comieco, challenging each of the city’s nine boroughs to increase the amount of paper recycled. Prize funding of €25,000 (£19,500), €10,000 (£7,800) and €5,000 (£3,900) is available to schools in the three boroughs that show the greatest improvement. A similar initiative two years ago resulted in a 35 per cent increase in paper collections.

A key component of the thinking here is to connect people with the outcome of their actions. Along the same lines, the municipality organises compost give away days, where residents can receive free compost, and so reap the benefits of a closed-loop process that they started.

The result is a universally adopted service, which places Milan ahead of all other large European cities when it comes to the capture and recycling of food waste. To achieve this has taken a broad based approach, in part driven by pragmatic legislation governing carrier bags, and involving education and engagement to ensure deep-rooted buy in: it’s a fashion that might catch on elsewhere.