A Recurring Health Menace
Twenty-three years after being banned, asbestos is still very much present, in various forms, on Italian territory: CNR and INAIL have given the rough estimate of about 32 million tonnes. Although L...
Marine Biomass: An Unconventional Wealth
In fact, the ocean capacity is far from infinite and investigations in its ecosystems have shown the large impact of those man-made environmental condition changes, such as pollution, global warming...
Straw Yellow Gold
However, there are various sophisticated plans not to throw it away. This is happening within a cultural panorama that I find extremely fascinating: the most advanced technologies enable us to ident...
Putting Madrid and Barcellona back into Circulation
I believe it is worth talking about it for several reasons. First of all, what is striking is the level of maturity of the societies we are talking about. Catalonia is the historical flag of cultu...
The New Economy According to Tim Jackson
Meant as a report for the British government in 2009, Prosperity without Growth is back in the bookstores in a completely revised new edition. In such volume, Tim Jackson, professor of Sus...
Houses like Trees, Cities like Forests
In 1987, Michael Braungart – a chemistry graduate – founded EPEA, the Environmental Protection Encouragement Agency based in Hamburg, of which he is currently CEO. For over twe...
The Renewable Future is Already Here
A Country aspiring to have a circulating car fleet no longer powered by fossil fuels by 2030. A national chemical industry that – by the same year – aims at becoming totally oil free. A ...
The Circular Economy: A Transformative Force for Climate Change
Previously published in Swiss ECS, NZZ-Verlagsbeilage, 18 September 2017 (www.swissecs.ch/de/medien-kontakt/medienecho) The circular economy offers transformative mitigation opportunities t...
The Building Revolutionary from Singapore
World GBC, acronym for Green Building Council, is one the leading global association whose goal is to make the building sector sustainable. Born in 1999 in California, with member organizations in o...
2012 Earthquake: The Emilia-Romagna Model
While an increasingly vehement debate is still ongoing over the failure to remove debris and rubble in the Municipalities of Central Italy hit by the quake a little over a year ago, a Region –...
Looking after Inerts
Some figures first of all. At the moment, in Italy, there are 7,123 kilometres of motorways, 24,241 kilometres of state roads, 154,948 kilometres of provincial roads and 1.3 million kilometres of co...
Circular Business Models for the Built Environment
Arup and Royal BAM have been recently exploring the benefits and business opportunities that Circular Business Models (CBMs) offer to stakeholders within the built environment sector. This research ...
Horses Prefer Rubber
From car wheels to horses’ hooves the step is shorter that you might think. To help close the gap is a project that thanks to an innovative use of recycled rubber from end-of-life tyres (ELTs)...
Fighting Starvation, Beyond Food
The issue of fighting starvation is still at the forefront, pushed by the quantitative rationale that caused the problem. We have often heard the old refrain that we need to produce more because pop...
Recycling is Better than Mining
Karmenu Vella, the European Commissioner for Environment, Maritime Affairs and Fisheries, has recently defined Umicore as “great example of a company that has completely reinvented itself to m...
Claim the Sky!
The atmosphere is a community asset that belongs to all of us. The problem is that it is currently an open access resource – anyone can emit carbon dioxide into the atmosphere with no ...
Circulating Ideas and Know-How
The story of the Landbell Group begins in 1995 with the advent of “take-back” policies: the set of measures that introduced the obligation for producers to recycle the packaging material...
Green Innovation Needs Patient Capital
With no intention whatsoever to instigate legends on private companies, Pavan Sukhdev – interviewed in the last issue of this magazine – claims that the main driving fo...
Excellent Waste
Circular economy 2.0. This is how we could define the new phase of sustainable economy where the developments of the industrial supply chains generating waste are analysed, i.e. the processes that c...
Art that Walks in the World
This story was produced in partnership with FuturePerfect, www.resilience.org/stories/2015-06-08/art-that-walks-in-the-world# Daniel McCormick and Mary O’Brien have received plen...