E' ciò che chiamiamo progresso : rifiuti destino di tutte le merci

The collection and disposal of waste is ancient, but has become a crucial issue in a relatively recent time, as far as quantity to recuperate, recovery of resources to deal with, novelty and variety of materials to destroy and disposal techniques at hand. It is known that a consumer society produces an extraordinary quantity of scrap and it is now clear there is urgency of change in disposal management. In effect, discarding should be just as important as producing and consuming. The entire path, from the production and the reuse, up to the elimination, should be subject to particular attention and considered as one only reality. Moreover we shouldn't throw anything away, because there is no one ‘way’, since materials can change form but not disappear. Each item has a story. Its life is linked to raw materials and energy used to design, produce, distribute, use and discard. Starting from its ‘end’ its 'adventure' of rejection begins. Waste is first collected, then according to the type, it can be recycled to recover materials or burned in incinerators to produce electricity and heat. Only residues, which cannot be otherwise recovered, go to the dumps. These are sites far from our common ‘wanting to see’, know how to be containers and at the same time, witnesses of the present, sincere mirrors of the world surrounding us. In general, they give us back unpleasant images, hostile and sometimes even catastrophic... however, today, there are new architectural languages that can shows other perspective: incinerators are an example. They create new architectural scenarios, landscapes always closer to urban centers we have to learn to live with and consider as planning opportunities. In effect, this study intends to highlight the consequences, the territorial changes following the construction of one of these plane, seen as a necessary infrastructure with 'scenic' potentialities. Thus a change is determining in our way of considering and welcoming waste. In this way, these lands leave more room for experimentation of action plans. We could probably say that from scrap material we can retrieve construction elements not only of objects but of new urban landscapes as well. Moreover, the modernization consists in experimenting these spaces, that is, what tradition has not yet recognized, innovative idea in planning. In particular, in Italy, in the last years, the great topic regarding urban waste has become a protagonist nationwide. There's plenty of talk and discussion about this but probably, more realistically it is only a challenge towards the new incinerators. Consequently I ask myself will incinerators soon become an architectonic jump in our cities, more or less fashionable animating the future of our urban cities such as Brescia, Vienna, Copenhagen…… demonstrate? Is this perhaps the definite solution to the mountain of waste that seems to invade our daily life? Waste appears to be like a river flooding our planet. Under the push of globalization, our planet is becoming a gigantic waste global dump with an enormous quantity and variety of slag. After all, despite our reluctance regarding this, in my opinion we are essentially what we are throwing away and what we don't want, and we can actually say ‘we refuse, therefore we are’, as a modern variant of the famous Cartesian phrase ‘cogito, ergo sum’.