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Public service provision in the European Union has received great attention in the last decades. Waste management is among the most important public services and challenges for a sustainable world owing to its impact on the environment, economic development, human health, and equity. Throughout Europe, along with the circular economy, the related zero waste (ZW) framework is also rapidly spreading. This introduction provides information about research questions and methodology used to discuss the most relevant and critical issues for good management of waste service provision under the ZW framework.

Chapter 5 deals with key drivers allowing waste management systems to meet circular economy goals, targeting a zero waste approach aimed at eliminating waste and changing the concept of waste into secondary materials. Case studies around Europe highlighted conditions and drivers of sustainable urban solid waste management systems; innovation, responsibility, stakeholder engagement, and knowledge sharing are factors enabling effective and viable urban waste management.

The chapter illustrates the relationships between concepts, theories, and processes presented so far in the book.

The cases explored show how this model can be recognized first and foremost in publicly owned waste operators linked to the territory where the service is provided. The content that justifies and legitimizes their presence is that of the integral recovery of materials through the zero waste strategy.

Innovation, responsibility, stakeholder engagement, and knowledge sharing have been highlighted as the four key drivers of sustainable urban waste management. These drivers reciprocally reinforce each other in a virtuous exploitation system that generates a positive circular path of new managerial and technical resources and competencies, and new responsibility schemes shared among managers, policymakers, employees, and users.

Further, each key driver impacts the economic, environmental, and social performance of urban waste operators, increasing the overall impact and strengthening the effect of the other drivers in a virtuous exploitation of benefits for waste operators and stakeholders beyond the served territory.

Chapter 4 focuses on how can we best measure and compare performance of waste management companies, discussing the triple bottom line perspective as a driving approach for public service provision like urban waste management. This approach contributes to extend relevant performance dimensions, broadening its scope to encompass not only cost and efficiency in waste collection and treatment but also environmental and social implications.

Chapter 3 discusses existing management models and corporate governance best practices for waste management firms. It provides some relevant experiences across Europe. It offers a focus on the ongoing remunicipalization process in the public service provision and urban waste management.

This chapter provides an overview of waste management across Europe. It offers an outlook of evolution of waste generation and how European Union (EU) countries treat waste, by providing historical and current data as well as by describing a few best practices of waste management companies and municipalities throughout Europe. The circular economy framework applied to urban waste management and the zero waste strategy are described.

The chapter will describe the genealogy of the international social movement “Zero Waste (ZW)” and highlights its role of cultural, organizational, and scientific reference point for the waste management, in particular the public one in Italy. The chapter proposes to interpret ZW as a part of a wider social movement on “common goods” that in Italy proposed a radical critics of the neoliberal governance of local public services. The climax of this movement was the referendum of 2011, when 27 millions of Italian citizens voted against the privatization of waste, water, and transport management at an urban level. By door-to-door recycling, composting of community, pay as you throw system (PAYT), reuse centers, and environmental communication, ZW movement succeeded to create an apparatus of driver concepts for the management of waste. In particular, some of the proposed case studies were the actors that implemented the ZW strategy findings on the territory, experimenting new organizational and social practices aimed at increasing recycle and at converting the local economy into a circular one.

The purpose of this study is to examine whether there is a relation between corporate governance and the publication of corporate accounts that fail to comply with legal and regulatory provisions governing their preparation.

The paper analyses all the Italian listed companies that from 2002 to 2010 were subject to accounting enforcement actions. From the literature review, 11 hypotheses were developed in relation to six issues: CEO Chairman duality, board size, board independence, the presence of an audit committee and its composition, the presence of nomination and remuneration committees and, finally, the presence of a big audit firm. Using non parametric tests, the paper compares the governance characteristics of fraudulent firms with those of a control sample of comparable firms.

It is found that board independence is the sole effective mechanism in detecting financial reporting fraud. The results show that firms committing accounting fraud have a lower percentage of independent directors on the board and fewer non‐executive and independent directors on the audit committee than the matched control sample.

The main limit of this research is the small number of companies observed, even if this limit reflects the size of the Italian Stock Exchange. Another caveat is the endogeneity problem that impacts much of the board literature.

This paper extends the accounting literature related to financial reporting fraud since it analyses the issue for the first time with reference to Italy, one of the most relevant European Union countries.