Andare in giro (Italy)

Andare in giro 🇮🇹
Location: Italy
Definition: Scouting for and collecting recyclable goods for mending, repurposing and resale
Keywords: Italy – EU – Europe – Informal economy – Informal employment – Migration – Payment – Money – Employment
Clusters: Survival – Informal entrepreneurship
Author: Isabella Clough Marinaro
Affiliation: John Cabot University Rome, Italy

By Isabella Clough Marinaro, John Cabot University Rome, Italy

Andare in giro literally means to ‘go around’ or ‘wander’ in Italian and is used in multiple contexts. It is, however, also a very specific term employed by some Roma communities in the country to refer to their practice of scouting for and collecting recyclable goods around urban streets and peripheral wastelands. It also includes sourcing items directly from an extensive array of personal contacts. The materials are then cleaned, mended, and sold through various formal and informal commercial channels. The practice constitutes a central link in the economies of many camp-dwelling Roma families and is deeply intertwined with urban businesses in Italy more generally.

Artisanal-level collection of discarded recyclable goods occurs around the world, both in the so-called Global South and Global North, providing essential employment for many low-income groups (Cattaneo 2017; Fahmi & Sutton 2006; Samson 2015). In some contexts, it is also becoming recognized as a sustainable, environmentally low-impact means of advancing a circular economy, enabling some communities to demand political and financial recognition for their environmentally protective work (Rutkowski & Rutkowski 2015; Schurman et al. 2017). In Italy, informal waste gleaning is a historically entrenched practice with deep roots in the country’s impoverished past. It is not an ethnic-specific activity and, indeed, it has seen a marked rise since the economic crisis of 2008, reflecting the country’s ongoing difficulties in addressing the needs of its long-term poor population (ISTAT 2020). Thus, residents of many backgrounds collect what they can for personal use or resale: food, clothing, metals, reusable electronics, and household goods (Masia 2016). Notwithstanding this diversity, it is a sector in which many Roma families in particular have developed expertise over various decades, using its elasticity to generate multiple income streams and weave extensive social networks. Although it is largely a consequence of multifaceted discrimination that has forced many Roma groups into poverty – due to frequent exclusion from other employment sectors and the relegation of numerous communities to peripheral slum-like urban camps – it also represents a crucial way of asserting entrepreneurial agency and maintaining economic autonomy from non-Roma (Solimene 2016).

Andare in giro usually involves driving along well-established routes, often various times a week, visiting illegal dumpsites as well as warehouses and bulk stores where Roma collectors have built friendly relations with managers who donate unsold or discarded items. Similarly, foremen at construction sites often allow them to take unwanted materials. However, there are also cases where such actors demand payment for these goods. Salvagers also dedicate time and effort to cultivating contacts in their neighbourhoods, and among NGOs and small business owners around the towns they work in. Relationships are often so consolidated that clients call with requests to empty cellars or remove bulky objects. Until the early 2000s, metals were the most lucrative material for collection and resale. However, their falling value on global markets, intensified legal barriers to transporting and selling them, and the physically exhausting and dangerous work of extracting and cleaning metals has forced many reclaimers to diversify into other second-hand commodities. Household goods are often less bulky than metal and do not need to be moved in trucks, thereby attracting less police attention. Moreover, they fall into a regulatory grey zone, making them less easily classifiable as special waste and thus subject to fewer risks of fines and confiscation. Their informal, rather than illegal, status makes the investment of time and petrol to collect them a less risky economic strategy.

In camps where the authorities still allow – or at least informally tolerate – the storage and separation of recovered materials, Roma salvagers then sort and clean the goods in open spaces around homes, with all members of the family participating according to their individual strength and skill. The objects are kept in sheds or under plastic sheeting until they can be resold or reused: old windows and wooden planks are saved for expanding or repairing homes, a battered sofa provides a safe place for small children to play, furniture awaits repair, supermarket trolleys hold items too heavy to carry. Most goods first flow through the domestic sphere; every item is evaluated for its immediate or longer-term utility to the household and for its market value. Some are used temporarily and then sold when a better replacement is found. Long-term stockpiling is impossible, though, as residents fear their goods may be stolen or damaged or that authorities will evict and demolish the camp and their wares. Consequently, they try to sell them as quickly as possible, on informal street markets or directly to their web of private clients. Indeed, their sales networks are as extensive and diverse as their suppliers. These include collectors and merchants of antiquities and vintage goods, second-hand furniture dealers, metal scrapyards, and migrant traders who regularly visit to source specific categories of goods for export primarily to Africa. This last group focus especially on good-quality second-hand sports shoes, construction tools and machinery, replacement parts for household appliances and electronic components for computers and cell phones.

The reuse economy within which Roma traders operate is therefore clearly integrated within global consumption and value chains. At the same time, their salvaging work involves constant weaving of social and cultural capital that reflect their deep embeddedness in Italian local communities and economies. Despite the evidence that these are not marginal or subaltern activities, they are subject to stigmatization by authorities and in mainstream media. Gleaning from dumpsters is considered theft in Italian law and media coverage regularly conflates second-hand wares with generic garbage (eg. Barlozzari & Benignetti 2021). Licences for transportation and sale are expensive and bureaucratically complex, and many city authorities obstruct the creation of street markets for secondhand goods. This resistance to facilitating artisanal recovery and reuse activities is in direct contrast to the EU’s policies for sustainable waste management. The recovery of metals and electronic components is of particular importance in the EU’s Waste Framework Directive (2008/98/EC), while the more recent European Green Deal has placed even greater emphasis on developing a circular economy that ‘work[s] for people, regions and cities’ (EC 2020). Such goals are echoed in the Italian government’s National Strategy for a Circular Economy (MTE 2022), yet a bill that aims to provide the legal framework for simplifying procedures, tax statuses, and licences for reclaimers and traders has been languishing in parliament since 2018 (CdD 2018). The bill’s proponents estimate that 500,000 tons of materials currently destroyed as waste could be retrieved and reused if a functional system were in place. This would bring Italy more closely in line with countries that support small-scale waste collectors as an environmental asset. For now, though, many Roma waste salvagers continue to operate in legal grey zones that contribute to their financial precarity and their ethnic stigmatization.

Extracted and adapted from Clough Marinaro, I. 2022. Inhabiting Liminal Spaces: Informalities in Governance, Housing, and Economic Activity in Contemporary Italy. Routledge.

References

Barlozzari, E. & Benignetti, A. 2021. ‘”Spegni, ci stiamo inc...zando”: Le minacce dei rom a chi mostra il degrado’, Il Giornale, 21 January

Cattaneo, C. 2017. ‘Natural resource scarcity, degrowth scenarios and national borders: The role of migrant squats’, in P. Mudu & S. Chattopadhyay (eds.), Migration, Squatting and Radical Autonomy. Routledge: 257-271

CdD (Camera dei Deputati). 2018. Proposta di legge. No. 1065. Disposizioni per la disciplina dell’economia dei beni usati e la promozione del settore del riutilizzo, nonché istituzione del Tavolo di lavoro permanente sul riutilizzo http://documenti.camera.it/leg18/pdl/pdf/leg.18.pdl.camera.1065.18PDL0026380.pdf

EC (European Commission). (2020). Circular Economy Action Plan, https://ec.europa.eu/environment/strategy/circular-economy-action-plan_en

Fahmi, W.S. & Sutton, K. 2006. ‘Cairo’s Zabaleen Garbage Recyclers: Multi-nationals’ Takeover and State Relocation Plans’, Habitat International, 30(4): 809-837

ISTAT. 2020. Le statistiche dell’ISTAT sulla povertà. Anno 2019, https://www.istat.it/it/files//2020/06/REPORT_POVERTA_2019.pdf

Masia, V. 2016. ‘Dal cassonetto al mercatino, viaggio tra chi di rifiuti ci vive’. ADN Kronos, 17 October

MTE (Ministero della Transizione Ecologica). 2022. Strategia nazionale per l’economia circolare. https://www.cisl.it/wp-content/uploads/2022/07/Strategia-nazionale-economia-circolare.pdf

Rutkowski, J. E. & Rutkowski, E.W. 2015. ‘Expanding Worldwide Urban Solid Waste Recycling: The Brazilian Social Technology in Waste Pickers Inclusion’, Waste Management & Research, 33(12): 1084-1093

Samson, M. 2015. ‘Accumulation by Dispossession and the Informal Economy. Struggles Over Knowledge, Being and Waste at a Soweto Garbage Dump’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 33(5): 813-830

Schurman, S. J. et al. 2017. Informal Workers and Collective Action: A Global Perspective. ILR Press

Solimene, M. 2016. ‘”I go for iron”: Xoraxané Romá collecting scrap metal in Rome’, in M. Brazzabeni, M. Cunha, M. Fotta (eds.), Gypsy Economy: Romani Livelihoods and Notions of Worth in the 21st century. Berghahn: 107-126