The first stop of the day was to a paper recycling facility. This was of particular interest to myself as I had always wondered how paper products were recycled and had no idea how they were actually processed. It was impressive to see the sheer amount of raw unprocessed paper and cardboard that were stacked into mountains outside of the main pulping facility waiting to be processed. The process of pulping itself was also quite interesting to see and I never expected the medium that is later turned into paper to be of such an oatmeal like consistency. I was also surprised by the fineness of the quality of the office grade paper that the facility produces. The most impressive thing I learned from this portion of the trip was that apparently 95% of cardboard and paper products in Italy are made from recycled materials.
Next we went to a composting facility nearby, in which municipal waste is sorted into organic waste and then processed into fertile composting mulch. Although the tour of the facility was very in depth, interesting, and through the smell of the composting waste was a bit overwhelming at times. There were literal mountains of stagnated trash awaiting to be processed, moved by a tremendously powerful claw-like mechanisms coupled with cranes. The mulch the facility produces is sold off at the ludicrously low price of 2 Euro per ton, which sounds like it could be tempting to those of the entrepreneurial mindset to procure for markup and resale in garden stores throughout the US.
The last stop of the day was to a waste to energy incineration facility also located nearby. The industrial equipment involved in this process is absolutely massive in scale, making one wonder about the tremendous amount of waste that is processed within it. Though I was able appreciate the complexity with which these mechanisms work cooperatively, I could not bear the thought of working in this facility on a daily basis. Although it did not smell nearly as bad as the composting facility the incineration processing equipment was so loud it made verbal communication almost completely ineffective at certain times.
I had spectacularly filling lunch today in between the first and second stops on the trip. We went out to an off-season beach community about 15 minuets away from the industrial areas to find a place to eat. We wound up finding a fairly large restaurant in which we were initially the only occupants. We walked into the restaurant to discover that the entire staff to consisted solely of one waitress and one man making pizza in a brick oven. I would have not at all been surprised if they were husband and wife. Anticipating there being some downtime between ordering and receiving our food due to the size of the staff, I decided to order a large beer for the wait. To do this I told the waitress my pizza order followed by "Heiniken gigante", as the menu had specified for the larger size of beer. Most likely due to my brutal pronunciation, lack of clarity, and total disregard for grammatical structure of the Italian language, the waitress interpreted this as me wanting a "gigantic pizza" and later presented me with a pizza about 15" in diameter all for myself. And man oh man was it delicious. I initially had no intention of finishing it in one sitting but my taste buds got the best of me and before I knew it I was down to one slice, which I fully intended to take home. When I informed the waitress of this she simply smiled at me and gestured towards my pizza while encouragingly exclaiming "Mangare!". I smiled, rallied, and forced down the last slice of deliciousness, thoroughly disgusted at the amount of food I was apparently capable of eating.
No regrets.
Really hoping to keep the overwhelming positive experiences with Italian cuisine coming.
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