Rome’s municipal waste utility AMA and the European Space Agency have begun ingesting very-high-resolution satellite imagery directly into the city’s waste-management operations centre to identify illegal dumping sites, monitor ground motion and track urban heat. The proof-of-concept, developed under ESA’s Future EO Industrial Competitiveness and Resilience activities and in synergy with Italy’s IRIDE programme, is one of the first concrete demonstrations of how IRIDE-derived services can be embedded into a major European municipality’s day-to-day workflows.
A Capital With a Persistent Dumping Problem
Illegal waste deposits have long been one of the most visible operational pressures on Rome’s sanitation services, with abandoned piles appearing on roadsides, peripheral areas and brownfield plots faster than ground patrols can identify them. The initial phase of the ESA-AMA pilot focuses specifically on this challenge, applying space-based detection to selected areas of interest across the metropolitan territory.
The service draws on optical imagery at a 30 to 50 centimetre resolution sourced through ESA’s Third Party Missions programme, with acquisitions scheduled roughly every 15 days.
Machine Learning, Then Human Eyes
The detection pipeline combines machine-learning-based image classification with spatial filtering to reduce noise, followed by expert photointerpretation that validates and refines outputs before they reach AMA operators. This layered approach is intended to keep automated false positives in check while preserving the speed advantage of remote screening.
The workflow is based on a Service Chain originally developed for the IRIDE Environmental Intelligence Service, meaning the Rome pilot is essentially an early field test for a methodology that will scale across other Italian public administrations as the IRIDE constellation matures.
Direct Ingestion Into Rome’s Digital Twin
What distinguishes the AMA pilot from many EO experiments is operational integration rather than standalone reporting. Geospatial outputs are delivered through OGC-compliant WMS and WFS services and are pulled directly into AMA’s UCRONIA platform, the digital twin and operational ecosystem the utility uses to monitor city-wide sanitation in real time.
UCRONIA, an acronym for Utility, Circular Economy, Real-Time, Operations, Networks, Integration and Assets, was inaugurated in late 2024 and serves as AMA’s 24/7 control room. The platform is built on a Multi-Scale Convergence Framework that ingests data acquired at very different scales, distances and frequencies into a single representation, with stated applications spanning critical infrastructure, urban utilities, civil protection, urban planning, mobility, environment, agriculture, governance and public health. The satellite layer adds a new vantage point to an environment that already integrates bin sensors, vehicle telemetry and citizen reports.
Through the integration, AMA operators can visualise potential waste sites, including locations not previously mapped, within their existing GIS environment; track whether piles grow, shrink or are removed after clean-up; and convert remote observations into work orders for field inspection. Early ground truthing by AMA inspectors has shown strong consistency between satellite detections and on-the-ground findings.
“The ability to identify and prioritise illegal dumping sites remotely is a game changer for our operations. It allows us to optimise resources and intervene more quickly where it matters most,” said Giuseppe Morone, Head of Geo-AI Transformation at AMA Roma, in the project announcement published by ESA.
The Industrial Consortium Behind the Pilot
The service is being delivered by an industrial consortium led by e-GEOS, the Telespazio-Italian Space Agency joint venture, together with Planetek Italia and Latitudo 40. All three companies are deeply embedded in the broader IRIDE programme: e-GEOS leads the consortium building IRIDE’s data-access infrastructure, while Planetek Italia heads two industrial teams developing IRIDE’s downstream services under a contract reported at €42 million. Latitudo 40, a Naples-based geospatial intelligence startup, recently received a strategic investment from Kurrant Ventures, reflecting growing investor interest in EO-driven urban analytics.
The PoC also extends beyond waste. It includes urban heat island monitoring, intended to support climate adaptation and planning decisions, and ground motion monitoring designed to flag surface deformation that could threaten infrastructure. Together, these three use cases position satellite data as a cross-cutting input to municipal decision-making rather than a single-purpose service.
From Pilot to Operational Service
AMA is now considering an operational follow-up that would shift the service from demonstration to regular use, drawing on data from the maturing IRIDE constellation rather than third-party missions. IRIDE is currently progressing through deployment, with the first Pathfinder Hawk satellite launched in January 2025 and additional satellites added through 2025 and 2026; the full constellation, comprising satellites across multiple sensor types, is targeted for completion in 2026.
The programme is funded primarily through Italy’s National Recovery and Resilience Plan (PNRR), with a publicly stated budget figure of roughly €1.1 billion (note: figures cited across ESA and consortium communications range between €1.07 billion and €1.3 billion depending on the scope considered).
Market Context: A Wider Push to Bring Space Data Into City Operations
The Rome pilot lands in a market where municipalities are increasingly experimenting with AI-driven detection of waste violations, but most active deployments rely on ground-based sensors, CCTV or low-altitude aerial assets rather than satellites. In France, the city of Libourne recently turned to AI-equipped surveillance cameras to flag dumping in real time, while Oakland in the United States is moving to contract AI drones to map illegal dumping across 1,440 miles of city streets. Each altitude carries different trade-offs: cameras suit dense urban cores, drones offer high-resolution sweeps of defined corridors, and satellites add wide-area screening of peripheral and rural fringes where Rome’s dumping problem is most acute. The three approaches are complementary rather than competing.
For city operators, the economic case rests on whether remote detection genuinely shortens the cycle from incident to clean-up at lower cost than dispatching inspection patrols. AMA’s reported alignment between satellite hits and field verifications, while early, suggests the model is plausible. The harder open question is how cities will integrate EO outputs into existing IT estates and procurement frameworks once the pilot phase ends; AMA’s UCRONIA platform offers a clearer integration pathway than most peers currently have available.
What to Watch
The decision now in front of AMA, whether to convert the PoC into a continuous IRIDE-fed service, will be an early signal of how readily IRIDE downstream services find paying institutional customers as the constellation reaches operational maturity. It will also test the broader hypothesis behind IRIDE: that domestically produced EO data, processed by Italian industry and integrated into Italian public administration platforms, can deliver measurable operational gains for civic services.
