Synthetic environmental appraisal of waste management system: an application to the Sicilian region

This paper addresses the problem of synthetically evaluating the environmental performances of urban solid waste systems. This, in fact, represents a crucial point in the management process of complex systems that local administrations are called to cope with, in order to provide decisions about policy options that involve different issues characterising the quality of life of people. Suitable methods of evaluation are clearly required for this aim. This work introduces the dashboard of sustainability and the ecological footprint approaches as aggregate indicators of the performances of solid waste management systems. The methods have been selected due to their intrinsic simplicities, provided that the required data are available, although the first one can be defined as a political tool, while the second one can be defined as a technical tool. An application of both methods to the situation of Sicily is proposed here.