What is the real impact of over 139 million tourists on Italy's waste? The answer is less obvious than it seems.

Every year, tens of millions of visitors travel across Italy. Accordingto ISTAT, 2024 set a new record with 139.6 million arrivals. Tourists crowd squares, hike trails, fill restaurants and hotels, and thenleave. They take home memories of their holidays and, in return, make a major contribution to the country’s wealth, accounting, according to ENIT, for 10.8%of national GDP. Obviously, millions of people also consume resources andgenerate waste. Civiqa has used data to address an apparently simple question with a far from obvious answer: is there a correlation between the intensity of tourist flows and municipal waste generation in Italy? And how does a separate collection perform in this context?

The invisible weight of visitors

A first way to measure this impact is to look at how much tourism“weighs” on municipal waste. According to ISPRA’s environmental indicators,in 2023 waste attributable to tourist flows averaged 15.7 kg per equivalent inhabitant, up on the previous year. The equivalent in habitant indicator adds tourist overnight stays to residents, converting them into “additional inhabitants” on an annual basis: a tourist spending ten days in a municipality counts as 10/365 of a resident. To calculate this, ISPRA looks not only at overnight stays in official accommodation, but also at secondhomes, stays with friends and relatives, and day trips. This reveals the“invisible” contribution of people who are not recorded as residents but stilluse public spaces, services and local infrastructure, and generate waste as if they were, in all respects, one more inhabitant.

Where tourism weighs most on waste

The next question is how this impact is distributed across different municipal contexts. Territories do not all start from the same baseline: a coastal municipality with 10,000 residents and 100,000 annual tourist stays faces very different pressure from an inland village that only attracts a few thousand visitors. Service capacity also varies according to the latest data on municipal waste; some municipalities exceed 600 kg of waste per inhabitant per year, while others remain below 400 kg. To capture these differences, Civiqa compared tourist stays and residual (non,separated) waste by type of municipality, distinguishing between urban centres, inter,municipal hubs, peripheral municipalities and ultra,peripheral areas located in inland, coastal and mountain contexts.
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Urban hubs and ultra, peripheral areas: two sides of the same challenge

As often happens with territorial data, the picture is more complex than it seems. ISTAT and ISPRA figures for the most recent two, year period show that tourist flows reshape pressure on local waste management systems, but in different ways depending on the area.

The first finding is counterintuitive. The relationship between tourist stays and residual waste is not linear and is not limited to large cities. The most critical issues cluster at two extremes of Italy’s geography: major urban hubs and ultra-peripheral areas, both in inland, coastal and mountain settings.

In large centres, the combination of residents, daily users of the city and tourists generate high volumes of residual waste: in some seaside resorts, such as Rimini, peak, season waste exceeds 77 kg per tourist. Cities like Rome, Venice and Naples manage peak, season visitor flows that put significant strain on collection services.

At the other extreme, many small ultra-peripheral villages, often facing population decline and served by minimal infrastructure, have to cope with tourism concentrated in just a few weeks. In these places, annual tourist stays only need to be 2–3 times the resident population to push the collection system to the limit. In 2026, more than 21.3 million arrivals are expected in municipalities with fewer than 5,000 inhabitants, a figure that makes it clear that organisational capacity matters at least as much as the number of tourists.

A map that redraws the North–South divide

The bivariate map that combines tourism intensity and separate collection rates shows that the North–South divide is not clear,cut, even though it remains evident. In 2024, separate collection reached 67.7% on average at national level, with the North at 74.2%, the Centre at 63.2% and the South at 60.2%. The most virtuous quadrant, high tourism intensity and high separate collection, is largely occupied by North,Eastern Italy (Veneto, Trentino,Alto Adige, Friuli,Venezia Giulia), where some regions consistently exceed 75–78%. At the opposite end, many coastal and island areas in the Mezzogiorno fall into the critical quadrant, with high tourist pressure but separate collection rates that rarely exceed 55–60%, suggesting that the issue is not tourism as such, but the weakness of the infrastructure that is supposed to support it.

The coastal (and Alpine) trap
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A particularly critical group are the High Tourism, Low Recycling municipalities, characterised by high tourist pressure and low separate collection rates. On the map they cluster mainly along the southern coasts and on the islands, with the partial exception of Sardinia, but the same pattern also appears in some Alpine areas in the North. The key factor is not only latitude, but also the seasonal structure of tourist flows: municipalities that concentrate most of their visitors in a few weeks have to manage waste peaks in a very short time. In this sense, a ski resort in the Alpine arc and a seaside town in Calabria share the same problem: a collection system designed around residents that must suddenly expand to cope with a seasonal demand that is hard to plan for.
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Territory, infrastructure and governance: the real drivers
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The data point towards a clear conclusion: tackling waste in tourist municipalities means tackling, first and foremost, territorial governance. Separate collection reached 67.7% on average in 2024, with the North at 74.2%, the Centre at 63.2% and the South at 60.2%. But these averages mask huge territorial gaps and do not factor in tourism: a municipality that performs well in January can easily struggle in August. For local authorities, the challenge is not just to increase percentages, but to build collection systems that are flexible, resilient, and proportionate to the actual pressure generated by the combination of residents and tourists.
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A briefing for decision makers
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For mayors, environmental councilors and managers of local public services, these data provide a starting point for action. Municipalities with high tourism intensity should have access to dedicated financing tools for seasonal waste management. Small inland municipalities, which often lack economies of scale, should be supported through shared management models. And coastal areas in the Mezzogiorno, which display the most critical combination, need more than just awareness campaigns: they require structural investments that make separate collection feasible even when visitors arrive.

Tourism is a resource. But every resource has a cost. Making that cost visible, in data, policies and municipal budgets, is the first step towards governing it effectively.