(Alberto Azario Pres. Green Holding spa) It is news of a few days ago the project of Raffaele, 23 years, who decided to turn to the beaches of his Ischia to talk about the impact of man on the environment. Nothing strange except that the particular boat used for this trip was totally built by assembling the plastic bottles used by the young video maker during the past year. Six hundred bottles, kept one by one to tell the world that plastic is a threat. A simple project, as original, to make us think about how much plastic we consume. And to understand that the logic of zero waste is not an opportunity, but almost an obligation.
Estimating the real value of our environmental resources in order to promote favorable changes to the environment without overloading economic growth is one of the most challenging and complex puzzles to solve today. US President Ronald Reagan had tried in 1981 when, through an executive order, the various federal agencies ordered the evaluation of the costs and benefits of any future government proposal of a certain level, and, in most cases, to adopt it only if the benefits for the company exceeded the expenses. The cost-benefit analysis was very successful and was also used by the successive administrations despite leading to analyze benefits not "priced" in a typical market environment. Never before had it been thought about how important it was to guarantee citizens more healthy drinking water or less exposure to pollutants. And instead the results of these analyzes have given us a clear example of how important it is, also for the economy as well as for the environment, to maintain a good relationship with the Earth: outdoor activities, for the Bureau of Economic Analysis of the United States, in fact, 373 billion dollars for the economy are evaluated. 2% of gross domestic product, more than agriculture and mining industry and raw materials, almost the economic contribution of defense.
In short, in a healthier environment, citizens and tourists in general are more likely to travel, spend and carry out activities. It is therefore not surprising that today in Italy the streets of our cities of art or the suburbs full of waste can bring incalculable damage to the image of our country. See then the same tourists photographing with their smartphones these heaps of waste leaves us bitter in their mouth and to them the memory of a country as beautiful as ours but, too often, terribly neglected by administrations, negligence and lack of civil sense .
Of all those millions of people heading out of the city in the summer, both day to a nearby lake, or for a month-long trip, I guess none of them would want to be in a beach dotted with syringe needles, bottles of plastic and abandoned fishing nets. Cleaning up marine waste is expensive, however, and it is difficult for communities to recover costs, especially for free beaches with free access. Recent research to estimate the increase in travel and time spent by people to avoid rubbish and waste shows that visitors to these beaches would have agreed to incur higher additional costs in the face of cleaner beaches. .
Many administrators and local communities from estimates such as this calculate how much money this type of activity adds to local economies through direct remittances, and so the vacationers pay the income of the workers involved by booking their hotel rooms, and the same expense also finances local investments through taxes paid by the hotels themselves. We are in a circle where each part is connected to the next one and obviously the environment is one of the aspects that needs to be considered. Decisions on recreational destinations thus show the value that people attribute to the environment itself: more services and more opportunities are offered and more are willing to move even for many miles in search of the best location. If, for example, a high percentage of dangerous bacteria did close a beach that you were thinking of visiting, surely you will move to a more distant beach, but with clean sea.
In the case of large-scale environmental disasters, like the one in the Gulf of Mexico in the 2010 for the oil spill from British Petroleum's Deepwater Horizon platform, many tourists probably found themselves canceling their holidays altogether. An event of this kind caused a fall in 9% on journeys to Northwest Florida, resulting in a total economic loss of $ 252 million to $ 332 million across Florida and its immediate surroundings. Before these events it was normal to think that the environment was available to the concessionaries of the beaches, or perhaps companies engaged in the recovery of fossil fuels, just to name a few. And yet it is clear by now that the environment is too good to be someone's property. To give a price to natural resources today has also encouraged the administrators themselves to recognize the finiteness of natural capital and an estimate of this value makes it possible to use the power of the markets to design policies and rules that benefit everyone because the environment belongs to everyone, and its safeguard must be one of our priorities. Not only because it presents itself as an economic good, but above all because it is the world in which we live.