Two Italians, together with two Catalan voters, participated in Hernani, Oiartzun, Usurbil and Urnieta in April 2010 in the collection of waste from Puerta a Puerta, carried out by the Zero Zabor groups of the region. The tumult that shakes the whole of Gipuzkoa these weeks focused on those days in Hernani, even more than a year earlier in Usurbil.

Neither Cavallo nor Ercolini were too shocked by the controversy. “After the clashes we have seen in Italy, this is nothing,” Cavallo said. Why Ercolini didn’t worry will be better understood in the BBC space by reading Italy waste campaigner wins 2013 Goldman Prize (2013 Goldman Prize to Italian anti-garbage militant): “Rossano Ercolini convinced Naples, a city caught up in the old garbage crisis, to take on the zero garbage targets.” Naples, the city of the camorra, which has been shown on television with mountains of garbage, waste in flames through the streets...

The BBC underlines that “Ercolini said: ‘In the world people die for lack of food, while the other half of the world is wasted too much.’ In 2011, Mr Ercolini got his most successful campaign, when the mayor of Naples signed that he would assume the zero trash strategy. The city of almost a million people was drowned by waste management problems in 1990; there are reports that show that the Mafia was involved in this problem.”

The man who managed to enter the road of recycling the city that was being sent to the Netherlands to burn waste in the midst of the crisis spoke in 2012 at the Aiete Palace in Donostia-San Sebastián, in the framework of the conference of the coordinator Zero Waste Europe in Gipuzkoa. They have now awarded the Goldman Prize to a militant who is naive and warm both in their conferences and in their relations.

Rossano Ercolini studied in 1994 with first-line children from the city of Capannor (42,800 inhabitants), when the authorities announced that they were going to build an incineration plant two kilometres away. By then, Ercolin was already engaged in environmental issues with her students, was fully involved in actions against the incinerator, denouncing the harm that this option entails fundamentally for health, the environment and social justice.

According to Ercolini, he and his environment made the leap in 1996, overcoming “incineration”, to proclaim “zero waste yes”. The Zero Waste formula was already widespread in the United States and, above all, echoes of Professor Paul Connet’s teachings to some European minorities. In 1996, during the campaign against the three incinerators they wanted to build in the province of Lucca, they managed to get Connet there.

From these meetings and debates would be the Environment and Future Partnership, which has become a benchmark in Italy in the conflicts in waste management. In the Basque Country Ercolini first emerged in 2007, when the global coordinator GAIA, organized by the movement against the Txingudi incinerator, held the congress in Hondarribia.

Capannori model

The Goldman Environmental Prize is named after husbands Richard and Rhoda Goldman. Although her husband was also a millionaire, Rhoda, who bore Haas's name in singles, was the grandson of the founder of the prestigious clothing brand, Levi-Strauss. In 1954 they founded the philanthropic organization Richard and Rhoda Goldman Fund, which according to Wikipedia has spread over 600 million dollars between different NGOs and groups around the world.

Since 1990, the Goldman environmental awards have been awarded annually on the advice of several world personalities on environmental issues, which receive $150,000 from each of the winners.

This year along with Ercolini, Jonathan Deal, who fights gas extraction through fracking techniques in South Africa, Azam Alwash, who strives peacefully to save the garbage in Indonesia, and Baun, who has returned to his country to recover the marshes that Saddam Hussein has sectioned.

Ercolini, who teaches up to the bones, has been discovering the hidden world that is hidden in a garbage bag for 20 years. It has brought, displayed and analyzed garbage bags in schools, municipal plenums, citizen meetings, media. He has explained to children, authorities and priests that incineration has an alternative to public health.

In the Italian city of Monza, in the 1980s, door-to-door collection already existed in Italy, but Capannori raised the new waste management to a new level, adopting and expanding the Rifiuti Zero strategy. A total of 72 municipalities, which already comprise 2,230,000 inhabitants, have already approved the zero garbage strategy in their policies.

The Legge Rifiuti Zero initiative is now being campaigned for all Italia.Con and 100,000 signatures are being collected – in Italy there are enough 50,000 – so that the Rome Parliament does not get the law.

They have developed a comprehensive law of 26 paragraphs, which can be downloaded from the Internet and which can be downloaded for free. The articles propose to extend selective collection, the moratorium on all waste incineration projects, the elimination of all premiums and aid for incineration, the ban on the export of waste, the ban on the marketing of incineration slag, the general reorganisation of taxes and tariffs, etc.

Although the routine that every citizen has made in their own house is part of the change, in the zero trash model cannot be brought forward if the producers of consumer products do not change their activity. Because industry still markets products every day that cannot be reused or recycled. The small Centro di Ricerca e Riprogettazio centre set up by the people of Capannori is investigating how to improve or avoid most of the components of rejection.

For example, the debate on Nexpresso type recyclable capsules has spread throughout Europe... and the alternative capsules that will ever reach Euskal Herria.

Rossano Ercolini, who leads an ascetical life, is attracted to the prize coins. Surely, during his visit with other honors, he has also taught some garbage to American President Barack Obama.