Micro and Macro
Let us start with Mother!, the new film from visionary director Darren Aronofsky (Black Swan, Noah) with Jennifer Lawrence, Javier Bardem, Michelle Pfeiffer and Ed Harris. Undoubtedly, an imperfect ...
Buildings: The Circular Economy's Challenge
This article is featured in Issue #16 (Summer 2015) of Revolve Magazine on pages 68-73, revolve.media/brussels-building-the-future Brussels is known for making its buildings more &ldqu...
Finance and the Circular Economy Flirting
Last February, Eric Solheim, the Executive Director of the United Nations Environment Programme whom I interviewed for Repubblica, outlined a rather positive picture of the current state of affairs....
Critical Mineral Resources for Renewable Energies in Germany
Contribution to Ecoscienza 6/2014. Challenge The German Federal Government’s energy concept ascribes renewable energies the role of an “important pillar of future energy supply...
How to Turn an Old Sofa into Biofuel
Old furniture, sofas, nappies and bar receipts are solid urban waste. Globally, according to a World Bank report carried out in 2012, we produce 1.3 billion tonnes of it every year. Only 34% is recy...
From Coal to Biomass
The strong presence of the chemical industry (the sixth European country by turnover, according to CEFIC, the European Chemical Industry Council, and first in the world on a per capita basis), with ...
The Soil's Perspective
“On a global scale, our analysis systems show that farmland expansion has reached a point of no return”, these are the words used by Johan Rockström in the interview published in is...
Biobased in the Spotlights
The biobased economy is growing at a steady pace. It represents a large share of the overall European GDP, with €2 trillion in annual turnover, employing over 22 million people. While the growt...
Trumping the Environment
In its latest “Emissions Gap” report, the UN Environment Programme found that 20 countries – including the United States, Japan, and Australia – are failing to meet their red...
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,...