Arcobaleno is a social cooperative founded in 1992 by the Gruppo Abele experience an Association founded in Turin in 1965 by Luigi Ciotti.

It currently employs about 300 people, of which more than 75% are working partners with permanent contracts. In its staff Arcobaleno can boast the presence of workers from more than 20 countries around the world.

The basic idea is that work represents an opportunity for recovery and social reintegration for people belonging to the so-called social marginalization.

Arcobaleno is well known in Turin thanks to the Cartesio project which carries out the separate paper and cardboard collection service, which in its time represents the first experimentation in Italy of the “door to door” method. Later it extended its activity to the separate collection of other types of waste (bulky items, multi-material, self-removal of asbestos and WEEE) and began the digitalization of physical archives with dematerialization and cataloging services.

Arcobaleno has always invested in Innovation and Research by collaborating with the University and the Polytechnic of Turin (here I would specify the departments) to open up new employment opportunities through the creation of new activities or new businesses.

In 2008 Arcobaleno incorporated the Soeko social cooperative and began to operate also in the Chivasso area, dealing with separate waste collection services for some of the municipalities that are part of the «Basin 16 for waste management». With this acquisition, the strategic operational offices have become two: Turin and Chivasso

Arcobaleno has always aimed to activate services with the following characteristics:

• high labor intensity to facilitate access even to fewer professional people and low entry threshold even for the frail;
• work organization capable of balancing the needs of the market (efficiency and effectiveness to ensure competitiveness) and the inclusion of fragile people from the so-called area of ​​social marginality.
• compliance with its own internal code of ethics which excludes the possibility of participating in tenders for existing jobs, even more so if already carried out by other social cooperatives.

The goal is to give back to the communities of reference a double advantage, an excellent quality service and to alleviate costs and inconveniences that derive from offering people who would not find other employment opportunities outside of a system based on care and accompaniment. constant. The advantages derive from the reduction of health care costs, from the increase in tax revenues, from the increase in safety thanks to work as a tool to combat crime.

Arcobaleno currently carries out activities in the nutraceutical and biotechnology sectors through subsidiaries all internally born from research and development activities. It has recently developed a technology for the bio fixation of carbon dioxide by essentially reproducing the process of chlorophyll photosynthesis through photobioreactors that ENI is experimenting with in the plant, built at the Research Center for Renewable Energy and the Environment.