Cenciaioli, Palermo

Although it’s not a Sicilian word, in Palermo exists a job that is passed on from father to son since almost a century. Are the “Cenciaioli”, people with a low income, some with problems with the justice, that are trying to reconstruct their life looking for sustainability in the garbage while offering a free service to the city and the citizen to earn an average of 30 Euro per day.

Are ecological workers that remove from the streets all those materials, in some case also dangerous, that we don’t need anymore, garbage that for us are annoyances, but for them a matter of survival.

It’s a job that have been considered illegal, even under everybody’s eyes; the garbage is property of the municipality, therefore removing stairs, bed nets, broken washing machines, paper and everything that could be sold from the streets, it’s considered as “stealing” from AMIA (Agency responsible for the collection of garbage).

In 2004 they tried to regulate their activities, opening the VAT account, adapting their mean of transport to the security rules and some organizing themselves in the cooperative APAS, that was in title to do differentiate collection door to door besides the routine collection of recyclable materials from the streets of Palermo.

In January 2009 it looks like that the Prefect gave the police the order to block the “Cenciaioli” activities, starting with the firsts impoundments of means of transport and arrests. Because of this decision the “Cenciaioli” started with protests that had the objective of getting back the permission of work.

Today, during a garbage emergency and while Palermo is exploding of rubbish, the municipality insists in forbidding this free service to the citizen and to the city, forbidding moreover to the platforms that collect recyclable materials, to receive collected materials from the “Cenciaioli”.

A paradox that it primes a mechanism that resend to the street without a job the “Cenciaioli”, removing precious material from the platforms (every day an equivalent of 48.000 Euro of recyclable material end it up in the Bellolampo rubbish dump) and permitting that the amount of garbage in the street s of Palermo increase.