Environmental management systems and municipal solid waste management in local authorities

An ever increasing number of Local Authorities is adopting an environmental management system (EMS) in accordance with ISO 14001 standard and/or EMAS (Reg. CE 761/01) requirements in order to improve their environmental performances and to get an international recognition for their commitment towards environment. The implementation of an EMS, through an initial environmental review and the consequent definition of environmental programmes and operational procedures, can be considered a practical management tool for planning, acting and reviewing actions aimed at the continuous improvement of the organization’s environmental performances. In Local Authorities municipal solid waste management is one of the main institutional tasks having a significant influence on environment safeguard and quality of life perceived by the population and both ISO 14001 and EMAS require a detailed evaluation of such environmental aspect. In this paper we analyzed the experience of the first two Local Authorities in Piedmont Region (Italy) that have implemented an EMS (Cesana Torinese, a small touristic mountain town, and Poirino, a middle size rural city in the shelter of Turin) in order to evaluate the actions and related improvements in urban waste management obtained through this approach, despite the different characteristics of the two Municipalities.