Moved to Italy, or staying for a while? Your comune has its own recycling rules, its own calendar, and a leaflet that answers almost everything. Differenziata Prompt turns the assistant you already use into a local guide for your town.
Exhibit: the prompt is the product
Type in your comune and pick your language. You can also describe the bins outside your door. The page writes a prompt ready to paste into ChatGPT, Claude or Gemini.
That prompt makes your assistant do five things most people forget to ask for:
- Find the official source. It looks for the comune’s leaflet or the collection company’s calendar and gives you the link and the date the rules apply from. If it can’t find them, it says so and asks you for a photo. It never invents rules.
- Never guess bin colours. If the leaflet doesn’t state them, it asks you.
- Settle “that evening or the evening before”. A calendar day can mean put it out that evening or collected that morning. If the leaflet doesn’t say which, your assistant flags it and tells you how to check instead of choosing.
- Separate local rules from general Italian practice, and say which is which.
- Keep the Italian word next to the translation, so you recognise umido when you see it printed on the bin.
The result is a one-page cheat sheet in your language, for your phone or your fridge.
In Project mode, the prompt also sets your assistant up as an ongoing helper. Send a photo of any packaging and ask “where does this go?”. You get the stream, the day, and whether to rinse it first.
How to use it
- Open Differenziata Prompt and enter your comune.
- In ChatGPT, Claude or Gemini, create a project (or a Gem) called “Rubbish”. Paste the prompt into its instructions and turn on web search.
- Ask for your cheat sheet. Save it to your phone, or add it to the project’s files so your assistant always has it at hand. (Got a printer and a fridge? Print it too.)
- From then on, just send photos.
It’s free and works for any comune in Italy, with cheat sheets in twelve languages. Nothing you type is sent or stored.
How I ended up building it
It started on a Wednesday morning in a small town in Calabria. There were three bins outside the house, yellow, green and brown, and I was holding a bag of indifferenziata that didn’t seem to belong in any of them. It turned out it doesn’t. It goes in a transparent bag on the doorstep, on Thursday.
The comune’s leaflet listed the days and the hours. It did not say whether “Wednesday: umido” meant Wednesday evening or Tuesday night. I asked two AI assistants. Both answered with confidence, and neither could actually know. My neighbour settled it on her way to the bakery in about four seconds: the evening before.
After that came a morning of “where does this go?” The foil lid of a cheese tub, the tray from sliced cheese, the film around the toast bread, crumbs on a napkin and crumbs from the floor. Here AI was brilliant. It read the labels on the packaging and answered by my comune’s rules in seconds.
My first instinct was to design an app. Then the researcher in me asked the annoying question: what do people already have? Most of us already carry an assistant that can read a PDF, search the web and look at a photo. What was missing was a good set of instructions. So every mistake from that morning became a rule in the prompt.
What I’d still check by hand
The prompt can only be as good as what the comune publishes. Some towns have a clean PDF. Some have a photo of a calendar on Facebook, and some change the rules in April and forget to update the website. The prompt is built to say “I’m not sure” in those moments. That’s your cue to look over the fence at your neighbour’s bins.
If you try it for your town, tell me what your assistant got right and what it got wrong. I’m collecting the edge cases, and the good ones will become new rules in the prompt.
More free templates and resources in Templates & Resources.
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