Fossacesia, a coastal town in the province of Chieti in Italy’s Abruzzo region, will start billing every household and business on the amount of residual waste it actually puts out from 1 January 2027. The switch places 5,370 user accounts onto a metered waste tariff, and the meter is an RFID tag.
The scheme is TARIP, short for tariffa puntuale, Italy’s version of pay-as-you-throw. Under the older TARI arrangement a waste bill is calculated largely from the floor area of the property and the number of occupants, so two houses of the same size pay the same whether they fill a bin a week or one a month. TARIP replaces the variable part of that sum with a count of what the household has actually presented for collection.
What carries the tag, and what does not
In Fossacesia the mastelli, the kerbside bins issued to each address, and the sacchetti, the sacks used for indifferenziato or residual waste, carry an RFID tag tied to an individual user account. Every time the residual container is emptied, the system records a conferimento, a disposal event, against that account. Fewer residual presentations across the year means a smaller variable charge.
Only the residual stream is metered. Organic, paper, plastic, glass and metals are collected as before, with no per-emptying count attached, and that asymmetry is the incentive the design turns on: material moved out of the residual bin and into a separated fraction stops costing the household money. In summer, residual waste is collected once a week for all users.
Bin-identification schemes of this kind generally work in one of two ways. On a wheeled bin the tag sits in the body or the lip, and is read by an antenna on the collection vehicle as the lifter raises the bin, or by a crew member with a handheld unit. Tagged sacks are read at the point of collection instead. Neither the municipality nor the contractor has published which tag technology Fossacesia has chosen.
5,370 accounts, and where to collect a bin
The rollout covers 5,052 domestic users and 318 non-domestic users, 5,370 in total. Distribution of the tagged bins began on 20 July 2026 at the municipal Infopoint, and containers are issued from the EcoPoint office at the town hall on 0872 622230, open Monday to Wednesday plus Friday and Saturday 08:30 to 12:30, and Thursday 15:00 to 18:30.
The contractor running the collection is EcoLan SpA, a publicly owned waste management company serving municipalities across the Chieti area. Fossacesia did not go straight to a full switch: the Villa Scorciosa district ran the scheme as a pilot from 1 January 2026, after a public assembly the previous October and bin distribution that November. The wider scheme was presented to the town on 4 June 2026 at the municipal theatre.
The seasonal problem at the Marina
Fossacesia Marina, the town’s seaside district, is the awkward part. Its population swells with second-home owners, tourists and seasonal businesses, none of which produce waste on the same rhythm as a year-round household. A dedicated public meeting for the Marina was held at 21:00 on Wednesday 19 August 2026 in the piazza of the Stella Maris church on the northern seafront. Mayor Enrico Di Giuseppantonio said the August date was chosen deliberately, because that is when residents, second-home owners, tourists and businesses are all present at once.
Speaking in Italian, Di Giuseppantonio described TARIP as an important step towards fairer, more efficient and more sustainable waste management, the principle being to tie the tariff more closely to the quantity of residual waste produced. Environment assessor Umberto Petrosemolo said the council had carried out a careful analysis of the different types of user present at the Marina, particularly along the seafront and the Statale 16 Adriatica, work done by the finance and tax office with EcoLan and, in his words, essential to arriving prepared for the extension of TARIP. Laura Scutti, who heads that department, has fronted the public meetings alongside EcoLan president Massimo Ranieri and services director Gabriele Di Pietro.
What happened at Lanciano
EcoLan has a comparable result to point at. Lanciano, a larger town in the same province, started TARIP on 1 January 2025. Its residual waste fell from 3,841 tonnes in 2024 to 2,840 tonnes in 2025, a drop of roughly 1,000 tonnes in a single year, which Ranieri has linked to around EUR 530,000 in avoided disposal costs. The material did not disappear, it moved: mixed packaging rose from 1,500 to 1,700 tonnes and paper and card from 2,500 to 2,700 tonnes. Lanciano’s separate collection rate reached 81.2%.
Why 2027 and not 2028
The regulatory driver is a national one. TARIP becomes mandatory for all Italian municipalities from 2028, so towns the size of Fossacesia are effectively choosing whether to reach that deadline with the bins already tagged and the user database cleaned up, or to do the whole thing in a rush. Fossacesia has opted for the first.
More deployments of chipped bins and metered collections are covered in the RFID News waste management section.
