The genealogy of waste in Italian law demonstrates that abandonment is no longer merely a form of urban disorder, but a juridical rupture within the modern governance of material flows
Abstract: This article traces the historical, legal, and anthropological evolution of the concept of waste in Italian law, from the traditional notion of refuse—primarily associated with urban cleanliness, public hygiene, and the physical removal of filth—to the modern legal category of waste as a central element of contemporary environmental policy. Through an interdisciplinary perspective combining legal history, cultural anthropology, and social theory, it demonstrates how the regulatory transformations that developed from nineteenth-century urban sanitary legislation through Presidential Decree No. 915/1982, the Ronchi Decree, and the current European and Italian regulatory framework have progressively reshaped not only waste management practices but also the symbolic, moral, and institutional meaning of discarded materials. Within this framework, the abandonment of waste is no longer understood merely as an expression of neglect or a breach of urban decorum, but as a disruption of a legally structured system of traceability, responsibility, and governance of material flows. Waste law thus emerges not as a purely technical discipline, but as one of the principal ways through which modern societies seek to govern what they themselves produce, discard, and yet can no longer afford to forget.
Keywords: #Waste #Refuse #WasteAbandonment #IllegalDumping #UnauthorizedLandfill #EnvironmentalLaw #LegalGenealogy #LegalAnthropology #UrbanSanitation #EnvironmentalHygiene #LegislativeDecree1522006 #RonchiDecree #CircularEconomy #MaryDouglas #ZygmuntBauman #OrestePetrone #EthicaSocietas #EthicaSocietasJournal #ScientificJournal #HumanSciences #SocialSciences #EthicaSocietasUPLI
Oreste Patrone (b. 1976), is an engineer and public-sector employee who has worked for many years in the field of environmental protection and waste management, developing solid experience through consultancy activities and institutional appointments. He currently deals with integrated environmental authorisations, waste treatment plants, and single-permit procedures, and serves as a member of the Friuli Venezia Giulia regional section of the National Register of Environmental Managers.
Contents: 1. The Genealogy of a Legal Category. – 2. Waste Before Waste: The Concept of Refuse. – 3. The City, Filth, and the Sanitary Order. – 4. The Emergence of Modern Waste Law. – 5. Abandonment as a Rupture of the Legal System: Uncontrolled Dumping and Illegal Landfills. – 6. Waste as a Category of Modernity.
1. The Genealogy of a Legal Category
“The primary function of historical knowledge—when considered for the purposes of legal education—is precisely to provide a corrective lens and a defence against the pitfalls hidden within legal dogmatics.” With these words, Pietro De Francisci opened his course on the Institutions of Roman Law at the University of Padua on 22 January 1923, identifying with enduring clarity one of the most subtle risks in the education of jurists: the belief that the categories through which positive law operates are necessary, almost natural categories, as though they had always existed in the form in which they are used today.
Legal dogmatics, by its very structure, tends to present its concepts as logically complete, stable, and universally available. Yet every legal category is, in reality, the result of a history, a cultural rupture, an institutional choice, and a conflict between different ways of ordering reality. It emerges at a particular time, in response to particular problems, through solutions that might also have taken different forms. To know the genealogy of a category, therefore, does not mean indulging in an erudite exercise, but rather freeing law from the false innocence of its concepts, by understanding why they have become what they now appear to be.
The category of waste offers, in this respect, an exemplary case. Today it appears to belong naturally to the vocabulary of environmental law, as though there had always existed a unified and technically defined notion capable of bringing domestic refuse, industrial residues, demolition materials, municipal waste, special waste, hazardous waste, by-products, and recovered materials within a single legal paradigm. Yet this apparent self-evidence is recent. Before waste, there was garbage; before traceability, there was removal; before the environment emerged as an autonomous legal good, there was the city to be kept clean, orderly, and healthy.
2. Waste Before Waste
Before becoming legally defined as waste, what we now identify as such was first and foremost garbage. And garbage, before being a normative category, was an urban, material, and sensory reality. It was that which dirtied the city, compromised its decorum, altered its habitability, and produced stench, stagnation, putrefaction, and sanitary risk. In productive contexts there were scraps, residues, processing leftovers, and unused materials, but there was still no unified legal notion capable of ordering different phenomena within a single system.
The transition from garbage to waste therefore does not coincide with a mere terminological shift. It reflects a deeper transformation in the way Western modernity progressively learned to think about discarded matter. Garbage belongs primarily to a material and visual logic: what is filthy is what soils, what disturbs the order of urban space, what must be removed because it is incompatible with the idea of a clean, orderly, and healthy city. Waste, by contrast, introduces a further and more sophisticated element. It is not merely what is dirty, but what is refused, excluded, or expelled from the sphere of utility by a subject.
From this perspective, the category ceases to depend exclusively on the material characteristics of the object and begins to depend on the relationship that an individual, an enterprise, or a community establishes with it. A substance or object becomes waste not simply because it is degraded, useless, or unpleasant, but because someone discards it, has decided to discard it, or is required to discard it. The centre of the category is no longer matter alone, but the legally relevant act of expulsion.
It is no coincidence that the public services responsible for managing discarded matter also changed in parallel. Urban cleansing, already in its name, evokes the task of cleaning the city and preserving its decorum; environmental hygiene, by contrast, signals a more ambitious shift in emphasis, because the issue is no longer merely to remove what disturbs sight or compromises urban order, but to protect collective health and, progressively, the environment as an autonomous and unitary good, not reducible to the mere sum of urban spaces.
In this transition, the meaning of abandonment inevitably changes as well. What once might have appeared as a form of neglect or a violation of civic order gradually becomes conduct that interrupts an organized system for governing matter. Abandonment no longer offends only the visible decorum of urban space; it attacks a good that contemporary sensibility perceives as possessing autonomous value and that law increasingly seeks to protect through complex tools of prevention, control, accountability, and recovery.
3. The City, Stench, and the Sanitary Order
In the earliest historical phase, the regulation of discarded matter appears fragmented and closely intertwined with the needs of urban and sanitary policing. The relevant references are municipal regulations on urban cleansing, systems for the disposal of wastewater, the management of organic residues, the emptying of cesspits, the removal of animal carcasses, and the control of all those material presences that could render the city unhealthy, indecorous, or dangerous.
The object of protection was not yet waste as such, but the city. What mattered was the removal of garbage as a visible element of degradation and a potential source of contagion. Historical studies devoted to the sanitary organization of nineteenth-century cities clearly reveal this paradigm. In the case of Milan, for example, the system was based on a widespread network of territorial controls and on prescriptions aimed less at classifying substances than at preventing their harmful effects. The sources refer to the management of wastewater, the emptying of cesspits, the agricultural reuse of organic residues, and the removal of animal carcasses from the streets.
There was not yet a legal notion capable of unifying these phenomena under the category of waste. Rather, there existed a plurality of practices aimed at protecting public hygiene, urban health, and collective safety. Pre-industrial and proto-industrial society did not construct a general theory of discarded matter, but intervened in relation to concrete phenomena that appeared dangerous, disgusting, or unhealthy.
Mary Douglas, in her celebrated anthropological reflection on purity and impurity, observed that dirt is not an absolute quality of matter, but the product of a symbolic order: dirt is “matter out of place.” From this perspective, the urban garbage of the nineteenth century did not yet represent an environmental problem in the contemporary sense of the term, but rather a rupture of civic order, a material and sensory alteration of common space, an element that disturbed the ordered arrangement of places and therefore had to be relocated elsewhere.
Abandonment accordingly carried a meaning different from the one it has today. It did not represent the violation of a legally organized cycle, but the introduction of disorder, stench, and sanitary risk into the city. For this reason, the system was primarily based on logics of removal and confinement. What was filthy had to be moved to the margins, away from the spaces of urban life and often placed in peripheral areas assigned to activities considered harmful, unpleasant, or incompatible with the decorous self-representation of the city.
4. The Emergence of Modern Waste
It was only in the second half of the twentieth century that waste acquired conceptual autonomy. A first organic attempt to regulate the field emerged with Presidential Decree No. 915 of 10 September 1982, issued in implementation of the European Community directives of the 1970s concerning waste, polychlorinated biphenyls, polychlorinated terphenyls, and toxic and harmful waste. At this stage, waste began to separate from the simple idea of garbage, although it still remained largely situated within the logic of disposal and the prevention of sanitary and environmental harm.
The decisive turning point, however, came with Legislative Decree No. 22 of 5 February 1997, the so-called Ronchi Decree, which transposed the second generation of European directives and introduced a definition destined to shape the field profoundly: waste is any substance or object which the holder discards, intends to discard, or is required to discard. It is in this formulation that the modern core of the category crystallizes. Waste is no longer such merely because of its intrinsic characteristics, but because someone has expelled it from their sphere of utility.
In this passage, law makes a decisive conceptual leap. Legal classification no longer derives solely from the material nature of the substance, but from the conduct of the person who decides to discard it or is obliged to do so. The object is not defined exclusively by what it is, but by the relationship that the holder maintains with it. Waste thus enters a dimension in which it becomes a relational category, arising from the intersection of matter, will, obligation, utility, exclusion, and responsibility.
At the same time, the entire structure of the system changes. Alongside disposal, prevention, recovery, recycling, producer responsibility, and the progressive construction of a regulated chain emerge. Waste is no longer merely something to be eliminated, but matter to be governed throughout a complex cycle, in which management does not coincide with the physical disappearance of the object, but with its controlled transformation within a legal, economic, and environmental order.
With Legislative Decree No. 152 of 3 April 2006, this approach was further consolidated. Waste definitively entered a unified environmental discipline, while European law continued to refine the system through the waste hierarchy, extended producer responsibility, the distinction between waste and by-product, end-of-waste status, prevention, and the circular economy. Directive 2008/98/EC, in particular, strengthened an approach based on the entire life cycle of products and materials, shifting attention from the terminal stage of discarded matter to the reduction of environmental impacts associated with production and management.
A gradual shift in the normative centre of gravity thus becomes visible. From the removal of garbage as a factor of urban degradation, the law moves toward the management of waste as a central node of an environmental policy based on the regulation of material flows. The issue is no longer merely to clean the city, but to govern the circulation of matter within industrial and post-industrial society.
5. Abandonment as a Rupture of the System: Uncontrolled Deposit and Illegal Landfill
Within this evolution, the meaning of abandonment inevitably changes. In contemporary regulation, abandonment no longer represents merely an act of material neglect or a visible manifestation of incivility. It becomes the removal of waste from an organized system of traceability, management, and control. The wrongfulness of the conduct no longer lies only in the external effect of dirtiness, but in the interruption of the legally regulated cycle of matter.
Recent legislative and judicial developments reveal this transformation with particular clarity. The repression of abandonment today tends to be graduated according to the harmfulness of the conduct, distinguishing between episodic cases, uncontrolled deposits, and more structured forms of unlawful management. The distinction between abandonment, uncontrolled deposit, and illegal landfill thus acquires a meaning that goes beyond the purely technical level.
Abandonment still evokes the punctual act of discarding. It is the dismissive, episodic, and extemporaneous conduct by which a subject expels waste from themselves and places it outside the lawful management system. Uncontrolled deposit, by contrast, introduces a different temporal dimension, made of permanence, accumulation, and continuing control over the thing, because there is not only the intention to discard, but also a form, albeit unlawful, of provisional or preparatory management. Illegal landfill, finally, represents the most advanced level of rupture, because it no longer consists in a simple act of subtraction from the system, but in the construction of an alternative and parallel system for managing matter, characterized by non-occasional accumulation, factual organization, degradation of places, and a tendency toward the definitive nature of abandonment.
This progression reflects a broader transformation in contemporary sensibility. Advanced modernity no longer tolerates merely dirt itself, but above all the absence of control over material flows. What appears intolerable is the loss of governance over the cycle. Abandoned waste is not merely matter out of place, but matter removed from responsibility, traceability, and the possibility of being redirected toward a legally governed destination.
In this sense, contemporary environmental law regulates not only substances, but also relationships, pathways, responsibilities, movements, and the permanence of matter within social space. It does not merely state what must be removed; it establishes who must take charge of it, according to which procedures, under which controls, toward which destination, and with which consequences in the event of withdrawal from the system.
The abandonment of waste, therefore, is no longer merely a scene of degradation. It is the sign of a rupture in the material order of modernity. Where waste is abandoned, it is not only individual conduct that fails; what fails is the law’s claim to make traceable what society expels, to hold accountable those who produce discarded matter, and to prevent the invisible from returning in the form of contamination, degradation, and territorial disorder.
6. Waste as a Category of Modernity
Zygmunt Bauman observed that every society inevitably produces its own waste. Modernity, however, appears to be characterized by an unprecedented capacity to produce material excess and, at the same time, to render it invisible. Contemporary waste arises precisely within this tension. On the one hand, consumer society incessantly accelerates processes of production, replacement, and expulsion of objects; on the other, the legal system attempts to reconstruct order around what is continuously excluded.
From this perspective, waste law appears as far more than a technical discipline. It constitutes one of the forms through which modernity seeks to govern the material consequences of its own model of development. Every society produces waste, but contemporary society also produces procedures, registers, authorizations, traceability systems, responsibilities, treatment hierarchies, recovery criteria, and sanctions, because it knows that what is expelled does not truly disappear. It changes place, form, state, dangerousness, economic value, and legal meaning, but it continues to belong to the world that produced it.
It is therefore unsurprising that the environment progressively assumes an almost moral dimension. When waste ceases to be mere urban garbage and becomes an element of a complex ecological balance, the symbolic meaning of abandonment also changes. It is no longer simply a matter of dirtying. It is the interruption of an order that contemporary society perceives as essential to its own survival. It is the refusal of a responsibility that no longer concerns only the neighbour, the street, or the municipality, but the environmental community as a whole.
Perhaps it is precisely here that the deepest transformation lies. The transition from garbage to waste does not merely recount the evolution of a legal category. It recounts the way in which modernity has progressively learned to recognize that what it expels continues nevertheless to belong to it. Waste is the rejected part of society, but for that very reason it reveals society’s most intimate structure: what a community consumes, what it discards, what it hides, what it attempts to remove, and what, in the end, it is forced to govern.
The genealogy of waste is therefore also a genealogy of responsibility. As long as discarded matter was garbage, the problem consisted above all in removing it from the sight and smell of the city. Once discarded matter becomes waste, the problem instead becomes following it, classifying it, tracing it, recovering it, disposing of it, and assigning responsibility for its management to specific subjects. In this transition, abandonment loses its apparent banality and becomes one of the most revealing forms of contemporary environmental illegality: not because every act of abandonment has the same gravity, but because every act of abandonment shows, on a different scale, that someone has attempted to interrupt the link between the production of discarded matter and responsibility for its destination.
This is perhaps the most modern feature of waste law: it reminds consumer society that nothing it produces can truly be expelled without consequences, because every discarded object, even when removed from sight, continues to interrogate the legal order, public ethics, and the relationship between human beings, matter, and the environment.
Essential Bibliographical Notes
Zocchi, P. (2006). Il Comune e la salute: Amministrazione municipale e igiene pubblica a Milano (1814–1859). Milan: FrancoAngeli.
Zocchi, P. (2015). Le misure di polizia sanitaria del Comune di Milano nell’Ottocento preunitario. In L. Antonielli (Ed.), La polizia sanitaria: Dall’emergenza alla gestione della quotidianità. Soveria Mannelli: Rubbettino.
Douglas, M. (1966). Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.
Thompson, M. (1979). Rubbish Theory: The Creation and Destruction of Value. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Bauman, Z. (2004). Wasted Lives: Modernity and Its Outcasts. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Bauman, Z. (2007). Consuming Life. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Renna, M. (2004). La regolazione amministrativa dei beni a finalità ambientale. Milan: Giuffrè.
Presidential Decree No. 915 of 10 September 1982.
Legislative Decree No. 22 of 5 February 1997.
Legislative Decree No. 152 of 3 April 2006.
Directive 2008/98/EC of the European Parliament and of the Council of 19 November 2008.
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