The European Environment Agency (EEA) calculated that, if throwing all the urban waste produced by the European Union in 2020 (about 340 million tons) on the ground, such waste would cover an area equivalent to the surface of Luxembourg with a layer of the height of 30 cm or of the surface of Malta with a layer of the height of 2,5 m!
For such reason, compacting and shredding, permitting to reduce volume and space occupied by domestic waste, represent an unsuppressible necessity and guarantee articulated differentiated waste disposal and optimum recycling.
However, sustainable waste management cannotleave out of consideration an enlargement of available technological options.
Therefore the necessity to supply, thanks to research and to technological development, domestic and professional appliances permitting to optimize their performances is of strategic importance.
The TEXA division of ATOP SPA, by developing and manufacturing domestic and professional appliances, proposes a solution facilitating the economic exploitation of the resources represented by waste and permitting to protect the quality of environment, a system in which waste disposal constitutes a residual phase, whilst waste sorting for recycling has got a priority role, permitting to reduce in a significant way the volume of waste destined to disposal and to exploit the commodity components of waste since their collection.
• assigning a bigger quantity of urban waste to composting, to recycling and to recovery of energy instead of assigning it to disposal would permit to reduce greenhouse gas emissions to an equivalent of between 40 and 100 million tons of CO2 per year;
• would reduce the dependence on the importation of raw material
• would permit to separate the aspect of waste generation from the aspect of economic growth
• would permit a considerable overall reduction of waste to be managed, with the aim to improve the sensitivity of consumers and professional users, thus permitting to move to more sustainable consumption models; re-introducing the major part of waste into the economic cycle, especially through recycling, or returning waste to the environment in a useful form: for example through composting.