Cardboard Beats Decay
It is one of the areas with the highest population density in Italy. It is an old town centre. It is in Southern Italy, but recycling is working. We are talking about Rione Sanità in the cent...
If the Wolves of Wall Street Become Lambs
Turning the “wolves of Wall Street” – oblivious to any good cause – into lambs at the “planet’s sickbed:” a strenuous, nearly contrived, undertaking. And ye...
500 materials under the lens
When we talk about products, and thus about materials, renewability must be thought as a material’s ability to regenerate in time (months or years) to be again available for the system. With ...
An Opportunity to Rethink the Role of Foundations
“The circular economy can become an opportunity to systematise and restore meaning to many actions that the former banking foundation system in Italy carries out to catalyse and re-c...
Bioeconomy: The Virtuous Cooperation between National Cluster and Regions
A national platform to promote a model of circular economy focussed on innovative, integrated and multisector value-chains: this is how the Italian National Technological Cluster of Green Chemistry ...
Sustainability is Worth More
$22.890.000.000.000. Almost $23 trillion’s worth of banknotes. That’s the value of sustainable investments, as it’s been recorded at the end of 2016, the latest year for which we h...
Green Economy: Exporting Italian Know-How
There is an “Italian way” towards Green Economy that’s establishing in global markets. Ecomondo, the event organised by Rimini Fiera, that reaced the 19th edition, is a model able ...
Circulating Capital
These are the questions that for over a decade Jamie Butterworth has tried to answer. The former Ellen MacArthur Foundation CEO has become one of the founders and partners of Circularity C...
A Smart and Efficient Bioeconomy for Europe
The concept was initially developed by the wood sector. Here, the cascading principle is defined as: “A strategy for using raw materials or the products made from them in chronologically seque...
Bottom-up Funding
Funding the circular economy is not easy. Funding a start-up in the circular economy is complicated. Funding a start-up with a circular business model (product-as-a-service) becomes almost prohibiti...
We Have Ruined Three Quarters of the Biosphere
The panorama is so vast that it gave rise to three scientific magazines devoted to the Anthropocene (see the large research programmes on Global Change coordinated within the Future Earth Programme,...
The 4 Vital Elements of a Viable Circular Service Model
While the circular economy is gaining momentum all across the world, the urgency to develop and implement viable circular business models is crucial to its success. One business model that is very p...
Recycling Frontiers
The most virtuous experiences are not exclusive to the small municipalities of the North: just think of the 145 municipalities of Campania (about 10% of the national total) or about the 104 municipa...
A Winning Agreement
BBI JU is a public-private partnership between the EU and the Bio-Based Industries Consortium. It has funded as much as 65 projects in the past 3 years, playing therefore a fundamental role in enhan...
Eggs and Mines
The science of materials is generating strong pressure towards big changes of direction. One of the most recent ones seems destined to generate a conflict between calcium mines and eggs. Ivan Cornej...
It all Started in Helsinki
It might well have been the largest circular economy gathering to this day. We are talking about the first ever World Circular Economy Forum (WCEF), that took place in Helsinki, Finland, on 5-7 June...
Athens' Mistake
Excellent at exploring philosophy and art, Athens was not able to find the same balance in its relationship with nature. Twenty-five centuries later, can we really consider that lesson learnt? Can w...
This is How We Recycle Nappies
It is the first technology able to 100% recycle materials making up nappies and absorbent products. A plant built from scratch in Lovadina di Spresiano (Treviso), which transforms otherwise landfill...
Upcycle and the Atomic Bomb
Elliptical, philosophical, rarely obscure and always enlightened with solid, simple concepts. Talking for more than an hour with one of the XXI century design guru is a revealing trip in e...
Thinking with Our Hands
Terms such as “biobased, sustainable, circular materials” are at long last starting to be part of the layman’s vocabulary. Indeed, characterizing an object by its material is a lev...