## 1 Introduction
In Italy, the adoption of this technological solution stems from the need to trace the different types of waste produced in a reliable and automatic way, associating them with the user in compliance with the regulatory framework outlined by the law. In fact, the national legislation sets precise objectives for separate collection (article 205 of Legislative Decree 152/06 and article 1, paragraph 1108, of Law 296/2006--Financial Law 2007). The starting point for meeting these requirements is to have reliable data about the collected waste (first of all, the type of waste and the user) without interfering in the usual operational process of the picking workers, therefore a user-friendly and robust solution, whose advantages lie in the possibility of fair taxation in addition to the control and waste management. The most advanced regions in this sense are Puglia, Abruzzo, Emilia-Romagna, and Tuscany, with the best performance [12], which mostly use systems aimed at identifying the single garbage bag to better rationalize services and penalize those who produce larger quantities of waste. This legislation, known as SISTRI--the acronym of \"Sistema di Controllo della Tracciabilita dei Rifiuti\" or \"Waste Traceability Control System\", in English--wanted by the national legislator and originally provided by Law n. 296 and by Legislative Decree 4/2008 and introduced in December 2009 (ministerial decree 17 December 2009) with the dual purpose of combating illicit traffic and illegal waste disposal and to simplify the documentary requirements for businesses, has been deleted pursuant to art. 6 of the law of 14 December 2018, n. 135. In other words, the use of RFID TAGs is \"additional\" and not a substitute for affixing the Register number to the product. The date of departure of such a system will be put into operation by the end of 2020, according to gradual criteria for the progressive participation of all operators [13]. Therefore, it can be stated that a large and increasing amount of RFID devices will be certainly employed in the next future in order to enhance waste traceability. In the meantime, some Italian companies dealing with waste management and disposal have already equipped themselves with RFID systems like other European countries, including neighboring Spain [11]. As an example, in Lucca, Italy, the Sistema Ambiente s.p.a. company has equipped the home waste containers with specific identification tags and installed RFID devices onboard the vehicles in order to know the exact number of withdrawals of waste generated by each user (Figure 1), thus providing the necessary data for the calculation of punctual pricing according to the Pay What you Throw principle [14; 15]. In this way, the user is encouraged to select recyclable materials, so as to minimize the amount of residual waste to be disposed of and, therefore, contain the related taxation, all at a low cost of workers for the Sistema Ambiente company. The starting point of an eco-sustainable and virtuous system of waste management is, therefore, the responsibility of the citizen, who must correctly differentiate the waste already produced at home, dividing it into special and equally different containers [16]. In this perspective of such massive usage of this RFID technology, despite the many advantages, it can represent a concerning environmental impact [17; 18]. In fact, the reduced dimensions of RFID tags must be considered as e-waste when they reach their end-of-life, as is the case for all information and communications technologies (ICT) in which the RFID system is included [19]. Moreover, the TAG life-cycle often exceeds the average duration of the objects they are associated with, especially the passive TAGs, which do not require batteries and have a theoretically infinite life expectancy [8]. This ends up in the paradox that the tags, also used for waste management in an environmentally sustainable perspective, are themselves contaminants.