Renewable Matter #4

RENEWABLE MATTER INTERNATIONAL MAGAZINE ON THE BIOECONOMY AND THE CIRCULAR ECONOMY 04 | June 2015 Bimonthly Publication Edizioni Ambiente

Lester Brown: The Great Transition is Underway • Pavan Sukhdev: Will Corporations Lead the Circular Economy?

• Natural Recall: Searching for Elective Affinities with Nature

Getting Rid of Industrial Dinosaurs • $80 Trillion: This is How Much the New Chemistry is Worth • 10% of Biofuels Without Giving up a Single Sandwich • Mediterranean Area’s Ecological Debt on the Rise

$655 Million for Fairtrade Food

Euro 12,00 - Download free online magazine at www.renewablematter.eu

• Packaging of the Future Will be 100% Biobased • Möbius Strip • Made of Food Waste: The New Life of Food Waste

Algae: Less Harvesting and More Production • Top Ten Beach Litter Items

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Contents

renewablematter 04|june 2015 Free bimonthly magazine www.renewablematter.eu ISSN 2385-2240 Reg. Tribunale di Milano n. 351 del 31/10/2014 Editor-in-chief Antonio Cianciullo

Contributors Mario Abreu, Filippo Bernocchi, Gianfranco Bologna, Emanuele Bompan, Lester R. Brown, Mario Bonaccorso, Marco Capellini, Rafael Cayuela, Stefano Ciafani, Marco Codognola, Giovanni Corbetta, Beppe Croce, Joanna Dupont Inglis, Alessandro Farruggia, Sergio Ferraris, Roberto Giovannini, Giuseppe Guzzetti, Giorgio Lonardi, Carlo Mango, Massimo Medugno, Carlo Montalbetti, Ilaria Nardello, Mauro Panzeri, Federico Pedrocchi, Carlo Pesso, Chiara Piccini, Sirpa Pietikäinen, Roberto Rizzo, Pavan Sukhdev, Massimo Zonca

Think Tank

Editorial Director Marco Moro

Antonio Cianciullo

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Throwaway Culture

edited by Emanuele Bompan

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The Planet We Will See Interview with Lester Brown

edited by Marco Moro

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The Future Is in the Hands of Corporations Interview with Pavan Sukhdev

Gianfranco Bologna

17

Capital is Natural

Roberto Giovannini

20

“70% Recycling Can Be Achieved. Not Enough?

I Would Be More than Happy”

Mauro Panzeri

24

Natural Recall

edited by Joanna Dupont-Inglis

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Draught from Berlaymont “Championing the Circular Cause” Interview with Sirpa Pietikäinen

edited by Mario Bonaccorso

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The New Chemistry Is Worth $80 Trillion Interview with Rafael Cayuela

Beppe Croce

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The Hidden Value of Plants

Chiara Piccini

38

10% of Biofuels Without Giving up a Single Sandwich

Carlo Pesso

42

Business Models Reaching For a Circular Slot

Alessandro Farruggia

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Ecological Debt’s Hidden War Increases Tensions in the Mediterranean Area

Giorgio Lonardi

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$655 Million for Fairtrade Food

Mario Bonaccorso

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The Bioeconomy Gets to the Fridge: Packaging is 100% Biobased

Acknowledgments Silvia Brunozzi, Ilaria Catastini, Dario Bolis, Aldo Femìa, Stefania Maggi, Aino Valtanen Managing Editor Maria Pia Terrosi Editorial Coordinator Paola Cristina Fraschini Editing Paola Cristina Fraschini, Diego Tavazzi Design & Art Direction Mauro Panzeri (GrafCo3), Milano Layout Michela Lazzaroni Translations Erminio Cella, Laura Coppo, Laura Fano, Franco Lombini, Elisabetta Luchetti, Mario Tadiello

External Relations Manager (International) Federico Manca, Carlo Pesso External Relations Managers (Italy) Federico Manca, Anna Re, Matteo Reale Press and Media Relations Silverback www.silverback.it info@silverback.it Contact redazione@materiarinnovabile.it Edizioni Ambiente Via Natale Battaglia 10 20127 Milano, Italia t. +39 02 45487277 f. +39 02 45487333

Policy

Executive Coordinator Anna Re

Advertising marketing@materiarinnovabile.it Annual subscription, 6 paper issues Subscribe on-line at www.materiarinnovabile.it/modulo-abbonamento This magazine is composed in Dejavu Pro by Ko Sliggers Published and printed in Italy at GECA S.r.l., San Giuliano Milanese (Mi) Copyright © Edizioni Ambiente 2015 All rights reserved

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Sergio Ferraris

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The MĂśbius Strip

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Green Paper that Gives Agribusiness Waste a New Lease of Life

Roberto Rizzo

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The Circular Economy at the Reach of Municipalities At Zero Cost

Marco Capellini

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Made in Food Waste

edited by the editorial staff

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Water, Energy, Matter and Employment from End-of-life Tyres

Ilaria Nardello

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The Blue Yonder A Marketable Seaweed Production

Stefano Ciafani

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Bioeconomy and Environment Beach Umbrellas Surrounded by Litter

Federico Pedrocchi

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Columns

Case Histories

Roberto Rizzo

Partners

Networking Partners

Media Partners

Innovation Pills Edible Films?

Courgettes Invented Them!

Supporters

Printed by Geca Industrie Grafiche using mineral oil free vegetable-based inks.

Geca production system does not produce exhaust and every waste of our manufacture is introduced into a process of collection and recycling. www.gecaonline.it

Printed on Crush ecological papers by Favini, made using process residues from organic products to replace up to 15% of virgin pulp: cover Crush Mais 250 gsm, text Crush Mais 120 gsm. www.favini.com

Cover Maria Grønlund, Cosmos, detail.

From Natural Recall - The Book (please see article on p. 24)

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renewablematter 04. 2015

Editorial

R M Throwaway Culture

by Antonio Cianciullo

“Throwaway culture”. Pope Francis’ message is potent: just two words say it all. Much has already been written on the critique to the technocratic and financial degeneration of the economy contained in the encyclical Laudato si’. The passages where this pontificate is radically moving the debate on our relationship with ecosystems and all the other species with whom we share the planet have also been stressed.

Each of these themes deserve careful attention.

First of all, the courage the Pope has shown in addressing the issue of climate change. He has been one of the few people who has stressed the link with the dramatic increase in flows of refugees who risk destabilizing Europe, by denouncing “a tragic rise in the number of migrants seeking to flee from the growing poverty caused by environmental degradation”. His words on the need to abandon our dependency on oil and coal are unequivocal: “Technology based on the use of highly polluting fossil fuels – especially coal, but also oil and, to a lesser degree, gas – needs to be progressively replaced without delay”.

On Renewable Matter, however, we need to highlight an aspect that has received little attention in the interpretations, not in the text itself. Talking about “waste and the throwaway culture” Pope Francis hints at a series of issues that emerge several times in all the pages of the encyclical. The fight against the mental laziness of those who solve the problem of productive supply by plundering nature is condemned time and time again. Be it for dignity’s sake (“Reusing something instead of immediately discarding it, when done for the right reasons, can be an act of love which expresses our own dignity”). Be it for the sake of defending the roots of our existence (“The Earth, our home, is beginning to look more and more like an immense pile of filth”). Be it because of tensions linked to the plunder of raw

materials that become scarcer and scarcer (“It is foreseeable that, once certain resources have been depleted, the scene will be set for new wars, albeit under the guise of noble claims”).

The Pope’s condemnation has to do, most of all, with the critique of an industrial model which has betrayed its preconditions and has denied the very concept of efficiency to which it seemed ready to sacrifice everything: “The way natural ecosystems work is exemplary: plants synthesize nutrients which feed herbivores; these in turn become food for carnivores, which produce significant quantities of organic waste which give rise to new generations of plants.

But our industrial system, at the end of its cycle of production and consumption, has not developed the capacity to absorb and reuse waste and by-products. We have not yet managed to adopt a circular model of production capable of preserving resources for present and future generations, while limiting as much as possible the use of non-renewable resources, moderating their consumption, maximizing their efficient use, reusing and recycling them. A serious consideration of this issue would be one way of counteracting the throwaway culture which affects the entire planet, but it must be said that only limited progress has been made in this regard”.

“The throwaway culture” should therefore be considered an oxymoron. It is actually a lack of culture, a limit in understanding efficiency and convenience criteria. But this limit does not correspond to the current limit of knowledge.

It is not an inevitable mistake. To maintain the current level of waste – tens of billions of tons of matter that are subtracted every year from the stable custody of ecosystems to be transformed into tens of billions of tons of waste that alter the equilibrium of the atmosphere and the earth – is a choice serving the interests of an industrial generation that is trying to delay the evolution towards a more mature approach to production.

The message of the encyclical is strong also

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from this point of view. The new approach to the circular economy is based on technology (the one that leads towards circular economy, the sharing economy, the economy based on a careful use of renewable resources). It is also based on consonance with nature (“We have forgotten that we ourselves are dust of the Earth; our very bodies are made up of her elements, we breathe her air and we receive life and refreshment from her waters”). Finally, it is based on new lifestyles (“Such sobriety, when lived freely and consciously, is liberating. It is not a lesser life or one lived with less intensity. On the contrary, it is a way of living life to the full”).

Laudato si’ is a text that speaks loud and clear, to catholics and non-catholics alike. It marks an important moment in the debate on the environment.

However, the lack of attention and authority on these themes in the political sphere is evident, also in response to solicitations from the secular world. For example, Achim Steiner, Director of UNEP, the UN Environment Programme, has recently stressed time and time again the need to speed up the transition to a circular economy. He has stressed how the last century has witnessed a rapid transformation of our relationship with the natural world, with an escalation in the use of resources: “We are now living 40% over the Earth’s capacity. If the world’s population and the levels of consumption stay the same, the annual global consumption of resources could reach 140 billion tons by 2050, triple what was consumed in 2000”.

Giuseppe Picone (Rome, 1926-2008), ceramic plate, Young Priests

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renewablematter 04. 2015

At 81, Lester Brown has still a clear vision of the future of our development. He discussed it with us in April in his office at the Earth Policy Institute, which will close down on 1st July 2015 because, as he announced wryly, “it’s time to retire”.

Think Tank

edited by Emanuele Bompan

The PLANET We Will See

Interview with Lester Brown Food, water and energy. There is only one man who can speculate on such a complex scenario: Lester Brown. For over half a century, he has constantly analyzed the relations amongst human activities, population, resources and the planet’s environmental balances. At 81, Lester Brown has still a clear vision of the future of our development.

He discussed it with us in April in his office at the Earth Policy Institute, which will close down on 1st July 2015 because, as he announced wryly, “it’s time to retire”.

Lester R. Brown has been described by the Washington Post as “one of the most influential thinkers worldwide”. In 1974, he founded and chaired the Worldwatch Institute, regarded as the most authoritative observatory on our planet’s environmental trends.

Then, in 2001, he founded the Earth Policy Institute.

He authored several seminal publications (mostly published in Italy

by Edizione Ambiente).

Lester Brown contributed enormously to the very notion of sustainable development.

His autobiography (Breaking New Ground) and his latest book (The Great Transition) are about to be translated into Italian.

Emanuele Bompan, journalist and urban geographer, has dealt with environmental journalism since 2008.

In your latest book, The Great Transition, you discussed how we are starting our transition out of fossil fuel.

Which technology you see trending right now and which have the highest hope of success?

Well, maybe the most exciting thing right now is the growing use of solar energy. Growing by 30% per year worldwide. The principal reason for that is the cost of solar panels has been decreasing, and now you can get cheaper electricity from a solar panel sitting on the roof. So it is an interesting situation because as more and more people put these panels on their rooftops, the market for utility continues to shrink, but it still has to maintain the same infrastructure. So it has to raise electricity prices, and the more it raises prices the more people put panels on their rooftops. So for utilities it’s kind of a death spiral. This story is being replayed in various places around the world. I mean, the idea that China could be getting more electricity from wind farms than from nuclear power is exciting.

If you look at a chart, the nuclear growth curve in China is very gradual and steady; the wind energy curve in China is explosive; going straight up and it’s going so fast. This was not really anticipated by very many people. China has a lot of wind, particularly in the north and western parts of the country. And with the high transmission technologies, they can link that wind power with the larger cities: to Beijing for sure, and even to cities in the costal south, like Shanghai.

With the constant growth of wind and solar power, what types of challenges does that pose in terms of materials and technology infrastructure?

One of the challenges with solar energy is what to do at night. That requires batteries to some degree. Batteries being one, and pumped water being another – where at night when you don’t need it you use the energy from the pumped water back up.

Your take on first-generation biofuels is quite strong but many farmers still see them as an interesting opportunity.

The ultimate limitation on the use of biofuels is photosynthesis. Photosynthetic yields are not high, even in the corn belt of the United States – enormously productive land. Let me put it this way. If a farmer in the Midwestern United States is growing corn, and he can put in wind turbines every so hundred meters, he’ll make far more from the wind turbines than from the corn.

And it requires a limited amount of soil.

Right. Wind turbines can take up at most 30% of the land, including the location itself and the dirt roads necessary to reach them for maintenance purposes.

So we’re seeing farmers get excited about other sources of income. And for many ranchers, they’re now earning more from wind sales – from royalties – because usually customers buy the wind turbines and then pay royalties to farmers, farmers are earning more from wind

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renewablematter 04. 2015 royalties than from cattle sales. And there’s growing competition among communities in rural areas in ranch countries to see who gets the wind farm in their area, in their community, because then they get the royalties.

To produce wind turbines, batteries, and solar panels, of course we need more and more materials, and some of them are quite rare – for example lithium for the batteries. We do see something changing in terms of sustainability for the production of these great energy machines. Some think about how to recycle them.

We have very smart technologies in terms of materials. Let me use an extreme example to illustrate what’s happening. 7 bikes in the bike share program reduce the auto population by 1.

And the younger generation is not so interested in cars. Let then analyze the material for this green transportation: for a bike it takes about 30 pounds of steel and rubber and so forth; for a car it takes about 2,000 pounds of steel and rubber and so forth. So in terms of materials consumption in a car centered economy, those materials are totally dwarfed in a bicycle-centered economy.

Photo by Steve Gottlieb

Lester Brown in 1988, with the early editions of the State of the World

But lots of more complex clean tech still requires large amount of rare materials.

Right. Panels and other devices contain some rare metals, but the exciting thing is that regardless of how much solar or wind energy we use today, it will not affect tomorrow’s

availability in any way. And that’s not true with fossil fuels. The more you use, the less there is.

The more marginal the remaining resources are, and the more costly.

Furthermore, these material can be reused or recycles. Oil, no.

Things are changing fast. It’s exciting for me as someone who has been working on these issues for half a century, and living through the period when carbon emissions were rising and then the temperature began to rise and you could actually see the early signs of global climate change.

But now suddenly we have at least the possibility of halting that or maybe even figuring out ways to lower somewhat the carbon emissions.

So this is an exciting period, and this is why I entitled this last book The Great Transition, because the transition is on.

More renewables, more circular economy.

The world has started to act following a plan B, very similar to Plan B you outlined in your books years ago.

The most interesting signals come from Wall Street. Finance is beginning to vote for green in a major way. And the big investment houses – the big investment banks – are investing in renewables now on a large scale.

There are also several billionaires, like Warren Buffett, probably the richest man in the world, that are pouring money in these tech. He put $15 billion into renewable energy in the southwestern United States, and then said “I’m gonna add $15 billion more”. This is billion, not million. Then you have other people like Ted Turner investing in solar power plants.

Phil Anschutz, a guy from Denver, he made his billions with coal and oil and is building wind farms in Wyoming now with thousands of megawatts of generating capacity, and is building a transmission line.

One of the points I make at the beginning of the book is that we’re going to see a half-century of change in the next decade.

Do you think that in Paris (at the COP21) there will be any solid agreement on climate change that will actually boost this transition?

I don’t think Paris is going to make much difference. What is happening right now is so strong, and so market driven that the Paris negotiations have almost become irrelevant.

It is hard to find a situation where a large group of countries come together and negotiate something: that means very much. But the more people you have at the table the less flexible the group becomes, and so you get these very small, incremental changes, if you’re fortunate.

And if the whole thing doesn’t break down as it sometimes does.

Do you think that decreasing oil prices will somehow slow down the transition?

Not very much, because people know that oil

Think Tank

Lester Brown being congratulated

by President Lyndon B. Johnson in the Oval Office on receiving the Ten Outstanding Young Men in Federal Service award, 1965

supplies are limited. They also know that the prices are going up. One of the examples I have in the book is the Kashagan oil field in the Caspian Sea. The original estimate was they would have natural gas coming out with an investment of $10 billion dollars.

Then it grew to $20 billion, then to $30 billion, then $40 billion – and they still don’t have it flowing. If they’d known at the beginning how much it was going to cost, then that coalition of all the world’s leading oil companies wouldn’t have begun. The oil and coal companies are now beginning to see their markets begin to shrink.

You look at one of the most dramatic examples: Peabody Coal, which was one of the largest coal companies in the United States. Their stock value has fallen by something like between 70% and 90%, huge. We have this phenomenon that is referred to as stranded assets. You know, at one time oil companies calculated their corporate value not only by the equipment they have and their drilling capacity and storage capacity and all that, but also by how much oil was in the area where they had bought the reserves. And now suddenly, that oil may never be pumped. Those assets are now suddenly not worth that much. It’s been interesting to see how the value of these things has changed.

The term stranded assets wasn’t even part of our working vocabulary three years ago,

and now suddenly it’s front and center.

It includes coalmines that have been closed and will never be opened again. It includes corner service stations for cars. The one near where I live about a mile from here has just closed and is being replaced by a small apartment building because there’s not going to be enough demand for gasoline to support it. In fact, in the United States the number of gasoline services stations we had in 1960 or so was like 150,000, and it’s now down to something like 100,000. The number of service stations will keep shrinking because increasingly we are going to be running our cars on electricity.

For a lot of people, the solar panels that produce electricity for the house will also produce electricity for the cars. The idea of having your own automobile fuel on your rooftop 10 feet away is geographically interesting, because it wasn’t long ago that the energy for our cars came from halfway around the world.

So we can be positive about energy, and about the future of energy and the climate. But how about food?

Many countries have reached their peak productivity.

What we’re seeing on the supply side is that, in the more agriculturally advanced countries, farmers have figured out the things they need

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renewablematter 04. 2015

What is the weakest link in our food chain? Water shortages.

to do to raise yields: apply fertilizer, irrigate if necessary, and so forth. They’ve largely done those things now. Once you eliminate the nutrient constraints and the moisture constraints, then it’s photosynthesis that becomes the constraint. If you look at rice yields in Japan, they started rising more than a century ago. Then about 17 years ago they reached a ceiling and flattened out. Japanese farmers have since tried – and they are among the best farmers in the world – but they have not been able to break through that ceiling. The reason is because that’s the amount of photosynthesis that is possible. We saw that first in Japan, and now we’re seeing it with rice in China.

Rice yields in China are just 4% below those in Japan. Unless Chinese farmers can figure out a way of taking their rice yields above those in Japan, which I seriously doubt they can, then China – the biggest rice producer in the world – is hitting the ceiling.

The same is happening in Europe with wheat and in the USA with corn.

Therefore, new limits are emerging, which will make things harder for the whole world.

What is the weakest link in our food chain?

Water shortages. In India there are now 26 million irrigation wells pumping water at a rate that exceeds the rate of recharge.

So in every state in India now the water tables are falling, and in some cases they’ve more or less depleted the aquifers and the wells are starting to go dry.

The same as in California or in the Middle East.

Right. And it’s happening in many other countries. In 50’s farmers started drilling for water and using it to irrigate their crops.

Now, and that also true in all of India and a large part of the North China plain, we’re seeing over-pumping of aquifers and the water tables are going down. Now the wells are starting to go dry. Water is emerging as a major constraint on efforts to expand world food production. We’ve got lots of land that would produce food if we could get the water to go with it. Land is not the constraint. Water is. Look at the World Bank several years ago, it looked at India and calculated that 175 million people in India were being supported with grain produced by over-pumping, which by definition is not sustainable over the long term. So we have these huge deficits developing in India in particular, but also in a large part of China and the Arab Middle East for example. Every country in the Arab Middle East – and I’ve actually graphed this with peak water, and now it’s being followed by peak grain – it’s just going down very fast.

The Saudis have declared that by next year, 2016 they will be out of agriculture entirely because all of the aquifers will have been pumped dry. Then the decline in irrigation and in food production will forces them into the world market. Now, because they’re a small country they’re not going to overwhelm the world market. But some of the larger countries like China or India are in this situation then we’ll see the pressure begin to build on world grain supplies because of the constraints composed by water shortages.

So if we have to discuss a topic at the Expo in Milan, about nourishing the planet, then, water is the topic to debate.

I think it is. For example, at Stanford they selected 600 agricultural counties in the US, and each county has it’s own data for grain

Lester Brown and Gro Harlem Brundtland at the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, 1992

Photo by Mark Edwards/Still Pictures

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Think Tank production, and they also record temperatures.

So what they did was to look at all of these counties and the yields each year, and the relations with temperature, and what they concluded was that a 1 degree Celsius rise in temperature reduces the grain harvest by 17 percent. Now keep in mind that the projections by meteorologists for the world are that there will be a 6 degree Celsius rise in temperature if we continue with business as usual. If a 1 degree Celsius rise in temperature reduces the harvest by 17 percent, imagine if that goes to 2 or 3 or 6 degrees Celsius.

So we’re facing some unprecedented challenges.

Individual countries have had agricultural problems before because of drought or crop diseases or floods or what have you, but now it’s the world.

The other thing that’s happening is that there are about – I estimate – 3 billion people in the world who want to move up the food chain, and that means consuming more meat, milk, and eggs – which takes grain. In the US we consume say 1,600 pounds of grain per year. Most of that is in meat, milk and eggs – only a small fraction is breakfast cereal and bread and pastry and so on.

In India it is 400 pounds per person, per year.

Only one fourth. When you only have 400 pounds of grain per person, per year, that’s a pound a day, you can’t afford to convert much into animal protein. You need just that much to keep body and soul together. So that gives a sense of what happens when incomes in India start rising and they start eating more milk and eggs. For religious reasons they may not consume huge amounts of additional meat, as China is doing, but they will be consuming more milk and dairy products, and eggs – and that all takes grain.

The rule of thumb incidentally for converting grain into meat in a feedlot with steers is about 700 pounds of grain per pound of additional weight in terms of growth of the steer. For pigs it’s more like 3-4 pounds of grain per pound of additional pork. With poultry it’s less than 2 pounds of grain per pound of additional meat.

With catfish it’s almost down to 1 to 1 because some species of catfish are bottom feeders, some feed on the vegetation. This is one reason why we’re seeing the enormous growth of fish farming in China.

How are we exploiting the land?

One of the things contributing to that is the huge growth in demand with the soybeans. Whether you’re feeding pigs or chickens or steers in the feedlot, the standard mix for feed for livestock and poultry is 1 part grain, 4 parts soybean meal.

The high quality protein in the soybean meal allows livestock and poultry to convert grain and animal protein more efficiently than if they had an all grain diet. Then the question is how do we get the soybeans? In the Western hemisphere today, Argentina, Brazil, all the way up to the US and Canada, there is now more land in soybeans than either wheat or corn. Though the soybean

originated in China, it produces maybe 13 million tons of soybeans a year. United States produces 85 million tons; Brazil produces 85 or 90 million tons. Most of the world soybean supply comes from the western hemisphere. Most of it – probably 90% of it.

Thas require soil.

Lester Brown in India, 1956

What would your message for the Expo be?

One: we’ve got to revisit the population issue.

Populations can’t keep growing indefinitely.

We’ve got to begin coordinating population policy with water policy, for example.

So we have to start to talk again about the population issue.

No question. That’s one thing. Another thing is moving up the food chain. Many Americans have moved far enough up the food chain that they’re not only consuming excessive amounts of meat and milk and eggs, but they’re also negatively affecting their health. Too much animal fat in the diet. By moving down the food chain in a country like the United States, we can both simultaneously improve our health, and that of the planet because we lessen the stress on the earth’s land resources.

Third: concentrating on the water issue and how to stabilize the water situation, and how to use water more efficiently. This applies particularly to irrigation, because 80% of the water that we take from rivers or pump from underground is used for irrigation in the world. So irrigation efficiency becomes the key. That’s not just the irrigation system itself – it’s the water intensity of the crops that are growing. This is nourishing the planet.

By moving down the food chain in a country like the United States, we can both simultaneously improve our health, and that of the planet.

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Pavan Sukhdev is Founder-CEO of GIST Advisory, an environmental consulting firm that helps governments and corporations discover, value and manage their impacts on natural and human capital. He was Special Adviser and Head of UNEP’s Green Economy Initiative and Study Leader for the G8+5 commissioned project on The Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity (TEEB). A former banker at Deutsche Bank, he founded and chaired Global Markets Centre – Mumbai.

Pavan Sukhdev - Photo by Beatrice Törnros

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The Future Is in the Hands of Corporations Interview with Pavan Sukhdev The Indian economist explains why big corporations will play a crucial role in the transition to the circular economy.

Marco Moro is editor in chief at Edizioni Ambiente.

How much are ecosystem services worth in monetary terms? How much are rain, oxygen, climate, biodiversity – services used by our economies for free – worth? And once the price has been calculated, who should pay for it?

According to Pavan Sukhdev, corporations should deal with this problem in order to become the crucial drivers of a type of development that instead of plundering the planet promotes inclusive and lasting prosperity.

edited by Marco Moro

“Good banker” and “nature’s banker” are two nicknames used to describe Pavan Sukhdev, the economist who, on behalf of G8+5 and UNEP, organized the research study that lead to the publication in 2008 of the memorable report The Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity, also known as TEEB Report.

The importance of the TEEB Project is effectively described by Gianfranco Bologna’s article presented in this issue of Renewable Matter.

After presenting the report, in 2011-2012 Sukhdev was Visiting Fellow at Yale University

Think Tank and it was in this period that taking into consideration the evidence that emerged from the research for UNEP, he started elaborating behaviour principles and action models for businesses, especially for corporations. His work led to the publication of the book Corporation 2020, which has now been translated in several languages.

These are the topics that we talked about during his recent visit to Italy for the Global Alliance for the Future of Food and the launch of the Italian edition of Corporation 2020.

“Today, the private sector account for 60% of global value addition and 70% of jobs.

In countries like the USA, perhaps 75% of GDP and jobs.”

A first, general question: Why could corporations be a good instrument for environmental and social sustainability?

Today, private sector account for 60% of global value addition and 70% of jobs. In countries like the USA, perhaps 75% of GDP and jobs.

The first point is: if we could solve the matter from the bottom up, from micro to macro, if we had all corporations behaving like green corporations, then we would have a green economy, one that would deliver the world to the right development. Then we would have the solution. But today’s corporations are the cause of the problem, they are not driving the solution. And the problems are externalities, all externalities of corporations: we are talking about issues like greenhouse gas emissions, fresh water extraction, water pollutants, chemical pollutants, poisoning of land, use of land in order to use it for private business, climate change... If you take all those externalities together, you see that the costs are huge, they are driving the Earth’s system

Sukhdev P., Corporation 2020. Trasformare le imprese per il mondo di domani, Edizioni Ambiente 2015; tinyurl.com/p7be88l

towards planetary boundaries, because the size is so big.

That’s why – both in terms of managing the negative externalities and in terms of changing the model towards the green economy – corporations are so important.

To me, due to its size, the private sector of the economy is the single most important institution of our times.

Second question: How could an improved attention to natural capital drive the economy towards new and more positive relations with resources... like the circular or bioeconomy?

The need of a circular economy is clear, because today’s economy is based on a linear model: take, make, waste.

As any linear model, it cannot be empowered, because it is based on two assumptions: that resources are infinite and the earth capacity to absorb waste is infinite. Neither is true, because resources are finite, and earth capacity to absorb waste is finite.

Today’s model cannot be circular, it cannot be the answer.

Corporations must identify ways of generating profit and being successful, while still maintaining circularity, designing their products in order not to create waste. There are corporations already doing so, getting involved in changing rules and regulations, changing the way in which taxation is done or accounting is done. Or changing the way financing is provided, or advertising is done. And for this, corporations need to work with different regulators: accountancy regulators, tax and finance Ministries, advertising associations.

They need to do this, they need to drive the urgency of the change and the direction of this change.

Today, the only people politicians would listen to are the CEOs, because politicians are supported by corporations. Corporations today are paying most of the taxes, providing most of the jobs and 70% of GDP, and are also paying most of the political campaign contributions. These are things that politicians need for their job, so the first reason why they should move or not move is what corporations think. And they are listening to corporations.

So do you think that corporations should be the “first mover”?

Certainly, they must be the first mover, for whatever reason. It could be because of their vision or their own leadership, it could be because customers say so, or because of the risks or opportunities. Whatever the reason, the first movers must be corporations.

How will corporations react to some trends which are now taking place and could help socially – like sharing economy – which in fact reduce monetary transactions?

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“So corporations would provide utility, would provide services, not a product. It is a different way of behaving. Personally, I don’t need the ownership of a computer, I just need the service.”

Corporations can react by positioning themselves. They have huge capacities, capitals, human capitals, connections, organization.

All these are very helpful elements for any kind of venture.

Let’s have an example for circular economy or sharing economy. Instead of today’s model of business, let’s say making and selling a laptop and immediately start designing a new one so that in six months there will be a new one to sell to Mr. Sukhdev, and then a new one and a new one... No, no, what a corporation should do is creating a laptop with the best available technologies, then offer Mr. Sukhdev a license to use it, maintaining the property of it, so that Mr. Sukhdev does not need to get mad about keeping it organized, then when he is through using it, taking it back and offering it to somebody else to use it again and again.

So the maker of the laptop can maintain the ownership of the product and lease it to Pavan, and another Pavan and so on. Maybe I want to use your laptop when you want to change it, since I prefer someone else to set it up before me.

So corporations would provide utility, would provide services, not a product. It is a different way of behaving. Personally, I don’t need the ownership of a computer, I just need the service.

There are many companies already offering leasing instead of sale, mainly for biggest equipment: for examples aircrafts are leased, not sold.

Then we can have another look at the matter if we speak of social economy, where people don’t rely on the producer of this laptop, but people have enough trust in each other, have enough “social capital”. So I can give you the product and you will look after it, take care of it and if something goes wrong, you will fix it.

But this could not work, because if the laptop has a problem and you ask Apple, they’ll answer “No, we sold it to Pavan Sukhdev, who are you? Who is Marco Moro?”. You see, in a shared economy comprehension plays an active role; even if we both want to share the same product, if something goes wrong, who is going to look after the problem? The product needs a manufacturer for that.

How can a corporation play a positive role in promoting social inclusion and participation?

It’s a question of recognizing that a corporation is not only a matter of operating in a small space of physical capital, factories and offices and products and manufacturing. We must not think that whatever a corporation owns is the only thing that matters, because a corporation operates on human capital. It doesn’t own the human capital, the employees, but it leases the human capital and pays a salary for it. In a way, it has a leasing to use the social capital.

In the same way it invests in the society in which it works, making people happy, providing offices and services, negotiating nicely with suppliers and buyers, maintaining good relations between suppliers and buyers so that it can’t happen that... oops, it ends up recognizing that it can’t do any good because its suppliers have decided to stop. So relations must matter, since relations are social capital and social capital has to be maintained.

But, what happens if a company impacts social or human or natural capital which has to be used all the time, with the need to have clean atmosphere in which to work, supply of clean water, supply of fuels and so on? A company never measures its impacts on all these elements, and that is the problem. So, just start to imagine the impact on these capitals, not only on financial capital: that will generate a new level of corporation, Corporation 2020.

A question focused on Italy. Does an economy based mainly on small or medium companies – not corporations – have the same principles and use them effectively?

I would argue that it has more potential than an economy based on large margin actions.

Because an economy based strictly on the model “take, make, waste”, with the old model of investing huge amounts of capital in order to achieve scale economies, then sells lots and lots of products... that historically makes investments go all the wrong direction, that’s brown economy.

Instead, if you have small companies, with little physical capital but possibly with good social and human capital, you’ll have more possibilities to change, more ability to transition from Corporation 1920 to Corporation 2020.

So, I would be more positive for a country having small and medium enterprises than for a country with a majority of big companies, because the chances for change without destroying all of its capitals are higher.

Think Tank

by Gianfranco Bologna

CAPITAL is Natural Graphic elaboration of Karl Marx (engraving), by Robert Diedrichs, 1970

Not only are we extracting resources from our planet at an incredible pace – 70 billion tons of materials in 2008 – but we are also destroying natural systems. Biodiversity and ecosystems have a huge value in economic terms as well. According to various studies, the benefits for the human race offered by ecosystems amount to 125,000 to 145,000 billion dollars a year.

Gianfranco Bologna is Senior Advisor at WWF Italy. He is Secretary General of the Fondazione Aurelio Peccei, which represents the Club of Rome in Italy.

He was also a member of the Club of Rome for a mandate under the presidency of Alexander King. Author and editor of many publications, in 2013 he wrote Sostenibilità in pillole (“Sustainability in pills”) (Edizioni Ambiente) and Natura Spa. La Terra al posto del PIL (“Nature Ltd. The Earth instead of GDP”) (Bruno Mondadori editore).

Dittrich M., S. Giljum, S. Lutter, C. Polzin, Green Economies Around the World? Implications of Resource Use for Development and the Environment, Vienna 2012; tinyurl.com/qxwbf82

Capital is still a term thought to be confined to the realm of economics and finance.

However, there also exists a natural capital without which no kind of development and welfare for human society are possible.

For the last few years, sustainability studies – not economic ones – have been leading the way in the most innovative research around this concept, possibly changing completely its identity and perception.

For the first time ever, in 2012, a world atlas was realized on the use of resources and the efficiency levels that has characterized this use in all countries of the world in the last 30 years.

At the core of the report Green Economies Around the World? Implications of Resource Use for Development and the Environment – edited mainly by researchers from SERI (Sustainable Europe Research Institute; seri.at/en) – there are not only abiotic resources, such as fossil fuels, minerals and metals, but also several biotic resources, such as those coming from agriculture, forestry and fisheries, which are critical in analysing the use of natural capital.

Iron, gold, sand, coal, oil, wood, rice and many other resources represent, as we all know, the basis of the economic welfare of modern consumeristic societies.

The result of this research shows that human beings are currently extracting resources from our planet’s natural systems at the highest pace ever recorded and that the economic system increasingly depends on the input of natural resources. This is demonstrated by the fact that global consumption of materials nearly doubled from 1980 to 2008, reaching almost 70 billion tons (a nearly 80% increase).

To be precise, we moved from 38 billion tons in 1980 to 68 billion tons in 2008.

SERI, together with other research centres, has been working for a few years on the analysis of the flows of raw materials that cross the whole of the global economy, contributing to the creation of the website www.materialflows.net.

The differences in increments of per capita consumption of raw materials show that the constant high level of consumption of rich and industrialized nations is now accompanied by growing material consumption in emerging economies, such as China and Brazil. Globally, the level of resource usage has increased at a higher rate than population growth. At the global level, a person uses an average of 10 annual tons of resources (2008 data): in Europe the average is around 15 tons and in rich oil-exporting countries it can even reach

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renewablematter 04. 2015 (www.ecoeco.org) – an interdisciplinary organization which has played a very important role in advancing discussion, research, analysis, culture and knowledge of a new economy strongly based on ecology.

If today we go back and read the special issue of the journal Ecological Modelling from 1987, a year before the birth of ISEE – which was entirely dedicated to ecological economics and coordinated by two scholars who have played a strong role in promoting this discipline, Robert Costanza and Herman Daly – we find in a nutshell many of the very important subjects that developed later.

TEEB clearly documents how natural capital represents the basis for our economies.

100 tons. At the other end of the scale, in Bangladesh, for example, the per capita average consumption only amounts to two annual tons.

In the last few years, significant international programmes have been initiated, which have stressed the value of nature and the importance of natural capital also in flows of matter.

TEEB (The Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity, www.teebweb.org) represents the biggest and most renowned international effort to systemize all data and knowledge acquired so far on the value of biodiversity and ecosystems for human economy. TEEB’s objective is to provide a clear and operational framework for institutions, politics, the economy, businesses and civil society in general, in order to help them evaluate and integrate the combined value of natural ecosystems into human economy.

TEEB follows the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment (www.millenniumassessment.org/en/index.html), the biggest planetary assessment on the health state of ecosystems and the services they provide to our economy and welfare, which was patronized by the United Nations and made public in 2005 documenting in detail the vulnerability and degradation to which we have led the earth’s natural systems. TEEB has represented a further advancement towards the awareness of the importance of the value of biodiversity and ecosystems in the life and survival of the entire human species.

TEEB was created after a series of very important studies, researches and analyses carried out in the last few decades, which led to the foundation in 1988 of the International Society for Ecological Economics, ISEE

This group of scholars who integrate TEEB is aware of the difficulties in providing monetary evaluations to services that ecosystems offer to the welfare and economies of human society.

They have nonetheless tried to organize the bulk of studies and analyses that had been produced, recommending a series of guidelines that can be found in an extensive form on the website www.teebweb.org but that we can summarize as follows.

1. Make the value of nature visible: it is necessary that decision makers at all levels are aware of the role of biodiversity and ecosystem services and that they are able to estimate their value and communicate it.

What is TEEB? Born out of the proposal by the German government on the occasion of the environment G8 in Potsdam in 2007, TEEB has then been patronized by the United Nations under the UN Environment Programme (UNEP) with the economic support of the European Commission and several governments (Germany, UK, The Netherlands, Norway, Belgium, Sweden and Japan). The programme has been led by Indian economist Pavan Sukhdev (see interview by Marco Moro in this issue of Renewable Matter), who has also been coordinator of the Green Economy programme of UNEP. TEEB clearly documents how natural capital represents the basis for our economies. The invisibility of the value of biodiversity in economic research has, unfortunately, encouraged the inefficient and destructive use of natural systems, which have not been properly taken into account. Biodiversity in all its dimensions, the quality, quantity and diversity of ecosystems, species and genetic make-up, need to be preserved not only for social, ethical and religious reasons but also for the economic benefits of present and future generations.

Think Tank Before and After TEEB: How Much is Natural Capital Worth?

In 1997, the prestigious scientific journal Nature published an article which made history, “The value of the world’s ecosystem services and natural capital”. 13 scholars of natural systems and their economic evaluation, led by Robert Costanza, made their investigation public, which estimated the value of 17 ecosystem services (from climate regulation to water cycles, from pollination to soil formation etc.). The figure was based on the gathering of all the studies published at that time and on some original calculations.

It was quantified in a range of 16,000 to 54,000 billion dollars a year, with an annual average of 33,000 billion dollars.

In 2002, in another research published on Ecological Economics – the specialized journal of the International Society for Ecological Economics – Bob Costanza and other scholars presented the results of the application of a unified model, which simulates the biosphere of our

At the global level, a person uses an average of 10 annual tons of resources: in Europe the average is around 15 tons and in rich oil-exporting countries it can even reach 100 tons (...) in Bangladesh, the per capita average consumption only amounts to two annual tons.

wonderful planet, defined GUMBO (Global Unified Metamodel of the Biosphere). In the analysis of the value of seven ecosystem services (from soil formation to nutrients’ recycling) for the year 2000, an evaluation of about 180,000 billion dollars emerged.

In 2014, the same Bob Costanza and other ecological economists, among whom figured another TEEB leader, Rudolf de Groot, published on the journal Global Environmental Change a new study – “Changes in the global value of ecosystem services” – which updated the information contained in the 1997 paper and which shows that the estimate for ecosystem services at the global level in 2011 is between 125,000 and 145,000 billion dollars a year. This study also estimates the economic value of the loss of ecosystem services from 1997 to 2011 due to changes in the use of soil, providing a figure of 4,300 to 20,200 billion dollars.

2. Assign a price to what today is priceless: it is necessary that decision makers include benefits and costs of natural systems’ conservation and regeneration in their evaluations.

3. Accept that there are risks and uncertainties: the “insurance” value of ecosystems in a healthy condition must be an integral part of the analysis of the total economic value.

4. Consider the future: it is necessary to use zero or negative discount rates in relation to the value of the natural systems that are evaluated, taking into account the levels of uncertainty and the aim of the projects and policies that are being analyzed.

5. Measure to its best, to manage at its best: it is necessary that current national accounting systems include as soon as possible the value of the changes in stock of natural capital and in flows of ecosystem services. Governments need to rapidly elaborate and apply sets of indicators that are useful in monitoring changes in physical, natural, human and social capital.

6. Natural capital and reduction of poverty: dependence on ecosystem services is particularly significant for many poor people in the world and therefore needs an urgent integration in the politics of poverty reduction.

7. Go beyond the minimum levels: current mechanisms and procedures and reporting standards do not pay the necessary attention to environmental and social externalities.

It is critical to integrate and incorporate biodiversity and ecosystem services in businesses’ production chains.

8. Modify the incentives: a reform of incentives and fiscal systems is necessary, which aims to eliminate perverse subsidies – which destroy biodiversity – and generate

a fiscal system which penalizes the excessive use of resources and their destruction.

9. Protected areas also constitute an economic value: it is necessary to establish a comprehensive, representative and efficient system of national and regional protected areas, with the aim to protect biodiversity and maintain a wide range of ecosystem services.

10. Ecological infrastructure and climate change: it is necessary to invest in “ecological infrastructure”, acting to safeguard the irreplaceable role of ecosystem services as well as ecological regeneration due to human action. Ecosystems’ conservation and regeneration represent an important choice of investment also in the context of climate change.

TEEB recommendations represent a very good operational base to make sure that economic systems can finally assign value to natural capital. The inclusion of these principles in governmental and business policies and strategies is key to the success of innovation processes such as those described in this publication. For this reason it will be important to continue documenting and disseminating the constant developments taking place in this crucial field of research.

From the next issue of Renewable Matter, a new section entirely dedicated to these complex but fascinating issues will start.

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“70% Recycling Can Be Achieved.

Not Enough? I Would Be More than Happy” Interview with Daniele Fortini, CEO of AMA and co-author of a recently published book presenting debate-provoking statements.

“Zero waste is an unachievable goal; some incinerators are nevertheless needed. But we must focus on the creation of an industrial system based on recycling and reusing.”

Think Tank

by Roberto Giovannini

Roberto Giovannini is a journalist dealing with economy, society, energy, the environment, the green economy and technology.

Talking about separate collection while strolling early in the morning along Trastevere lanes with Daniele Fortini (born in Orbetello in 1955), CEO of AMA (Azienda Municipale Ambiente, Municipal Environment Company) SPA for over a year and a half, is a curious experience.

The previous night action has generated heaps of rubbish, above all little bottles scattered all over the place. Cast iron rubbish bins are overflowing, would it not be better to follow the example of other cities and provide large and practical clear bags?

“I wish! We tried,” Fortini says, “but the authorities would not have it.” What about retailers, do they behave? “Let’s not go there!”

he says rolling his eyes. Street cleaners recognize the CEO and try to make an impression. But the daily papers highlight the abominations emerging from the Mafia Capitale inquiry: sometimes they talk about rubbish, sometimes about AMA, the company managed by the Municipality of Rome (7,800 workers) that does not shine for its efficiency and saving philosophy.

Daniele Fortini has always dealt with waste, in Tuscany, in Naples and as chairman of Federambiente. With Nadia Ramazzini (who worked for 10 years for A2A and currently works for Rubes Triva) he recently wrote an interesting book on this topic (La raccolta differenziata, Edizioni Ediesse). An entertaining and comprehensive book, suitable for non-insiders, containing some surprising statements. Separate collection is crucial but it is just an illusion (since it is uneconomic and physically impossible) because 100% waste recycling is unachievable. With enormous efforts, 60-70% of rubbish can be recovered and recycled – so in the future, we will still need a certain number of incinerators and landfills – but building an actual industrial sector on waste runs the risk of thwarting everything.

“We have been bombarded with the idea that separate collection is based on the virtuous behaviour of citizens, to be pursued by fair means or foul” Fortini explains, “but we have paid little or no attention to the industrial-financial-technological aspect behind separate collection. We forget that glassworks, paper factories and smelting works need ‘clean’ recyclable materials, free from contaminants, in order to easily process them in their plants without destroying their furnaces.”

For example, a lot of glass to be recycled can be spoiled just by the presence of some crystal.

“In short” the manager affirms, “convincing citizens to carry out high-standard separate collection is of little use if the downstream industrial system is not ready. And to get it ready requires investments.”

And this leads us to another burning issue.

Who should pay for the good working of the recycling system? According to the law and the ANCI-CONAI agreements, the consortium receives from each packaging producer some kind of tax, “an environmental levy” or “CAC”.

But basically, Fortini argues that not only do companies normally pass on the levy to end users, but indirectly they manage to keep part of it for themselves. “CONAI only gives municipalities – that physically collect rubbish and feed the recycling system – 35% of the levy value. The rest is kept by CONAI and by packaging companies. We, the rubbish dealers,

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Daniele Fortini

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would like this levy, worth €800 million and set by law, to be collected by an independent, third, public body created by the Ministry for the Environment.”

This argument is fully rejected by CONAI and other companies operating in this sector that highlight the success stories of packaging recycling (it has exceeded the goal set by law) fearing the return to a system dominated by the public sector that did not show great efficiency in the past.

“The recipe is to streamline separate collection in order to cut costs as much as possible, while investing in industrial equipment that can carry out what we cannot ask citizens to do.”

But going back to separate collection, what would the best method to promote both citizens’ collection and the appropriate processing of rubbish be? “Personally, I really like the model adopted by San Francisco, that of ‘separate waste fractions’” he replies. In the Californian city, there are only three bins: one for “dry waste” (paper, glass, plastic and metals), one for “wet waste” (organic waste) and one for “undifferentiated collection”. “Dry waste” is taken to a plant with the necessary equipment and technology to process it and divide it avoiding contamination. “Wet waste” ends up in composting plants. The recipe is to streamline separate collection in order to cut costs as much as possible” AMA CEO explains, “while investing in industrial equipment that can carry out what we cannot ask citizens to do”.

Very well, it is all clear. But in their book, Fortini and Ramazzini also explain another point:

not all waste is recyclable. So the “zero waste” goal can only be a goal, something to aim at in an ideal world, but a utopia nonetheless.

“We must be realistic” Fortini affirms, “even in small cities with very advanced recovery and separate collection programmes fully embraced by citizens, achieving 70% waste recycling is to be considered a great success.

30% of waste cannot be recycled.” Moreover, one thing is a small city – such as the famous Capannori by Rossano Ercolini, where there is a strong social control – and quite another a big metropolis like Rome. “Since the beginning of the year we have issued 5,000 fines for wrong waste management” AMA CEO says, “of which 3,500 for cars parked in front of rubbish containers that blocked night-shift

Think Tank

dustcarts from emptying them. In Rome we empty 70,000 rubbish containers every day.

Sometimes we are unable to empty 1% of the total: 700 rubbish containers are not emptied, mainly due to parked cars. They pose a serious problem for the city’s decorum, a problem that overshadows the fact that 69,700 have been emptied anyhow.”

“We are left with the problem of 30% of waste that cannot be recycled. A lot of energy is required for its transformation, so the only solution is to burn it recovering the energy it contains.”

“We are still faced with the problem that 30% of waste” Fortini asserts, “can’t be recycled.

We are talking about bricks, stones, cigarette butts, alloy metals, nappies and all kinds of heterogeneous plastic, the so-called polylaminate packaging. There are 400 different plastic families, but in reality, only 3 can be recycled: PET (plastic bottles), HDPE (High-density polyethylene, plastic used for example for washing liquids) and some lighter polymers used for carrier bags. The rest is a problem: sometimes a simple child’s toy contains 30 different types of plastic, some are recyclable but they present high costs, limited uses, poor quality and durability and they can be barely sold on the market” (but to be fair, it must be said that there are examples, such as that of Revet, proving that these limits can be expanded and the recycling rates of this plastic mix increased, Author’s note). “A lot of energy is required to transform them, so the solution is to burn them recovering the energy they contain.

Other things can only end up in a landfill.”

More landfills? But what percentage of waste will end up in a landfill? “In Germany, less than 3% of waste ends up in a landfill. In Sweden even less and in Switzerland only 1%. Normally, 70% of waste can be recycled. 20-25% can be burnt obtaining energy and heat. What is left, including ashes produced by the incineration process, can go to landfills.”

We got there in the end: incinerators (or waste-to-energy facilities) and landfills.

Unpopular and not very nice solutions.

“Clearly, incinerators are not perfect machines, and as such they generate emissions and pollution” Fortini continues, “we know that much, we also know that citizens’ hostility is not due to paranoia but it has deeper roots. Unfortunately, Italy is a country that has experienced environmental degradation, where nasty things have happened. Lies and corruption of and opposition to those in charge of supervising. There have been several incidents, including Farmoplant, Seveso and Ilva in Taranto... citizens’ diffidence towards this sector’s behaviour is justified.”

In the past, the solution was simple because environment and health protection was not paramount. Huge landfills, even on riverbanks, burning waste generating enormous amounts of waste and fumes. But now, can incinerators be reintroduced? “Look, we have very advanced filtering systems, I wish cement factories and refineries had something similar. In fact, the pollutant particles emitted do not pose a significant risk to human or environmental health. Having said that, these machines are still necessary and sufficiently safe. Zero pollution would be better, but what they do at the moment is sustainable. In comparison, landfills pollute much more, starting from methane release, a powerful greenhouse gas.”

In theory, after 30 years a landfill becomes inert, this means that it can be planted with trees and gardens, but leachate caused by rainwater still needs to be collected. So, incinerators are preferable to landfills. In Italy, there are 53 of them, rather old and with limited capacity, while Germany boasts 100 of them, even more powerful. Fortini suggests renewing Italy’s “fleet”, closing down the older small ones.

An idea not popular with everyone but a solution that the Capital’s biggest waste management utility intends to adopt in order to get Rome out of this emergency.

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NATURAL Recall “The man who has planted a garden feels that he has done something for the good of the world.”

- Vita Sackville-West

by Mauro Panzeri

Mauro Panzeri is art director and editorial graphic designer (also collaborating with this magazine). He teaches at Milan’s Polytechnic and at The European Institute of Design.

In 2013 he published La grafica è un’opinione (Ledizioni).

Info www.naturalrecall.org

The Natural Recall is an international non-profit project. Officially opened in May 2014 within Michelangelo Pistoletto’s Third Paradise at Milan’s Superortopiù, it is now in its second stage. Dozens of illustrators, graphic designers, journalists and writers were asked to describe their “elective affinities with nature” and have produced texts and, above all, large-format posters.

To date, they have been made into a book (Natural Recall – The Book), a calendar and a travelling exhibition that last December was hosted by Serra dei Giardini in Venice and in April by Atelier de gravure Zec in Paris. The exhibition has a strong vocation for travelling the world and evolving. Thanks to the beautiful tactile and colourful volume and the exhibition of signature posters from all over the world, selected and exhibited nonchalantly, one can gather the essence of the project: a good opportunity to admire and reflect, thanks to illustrations, graphic design and signature texts, on the multiple possibilities of representing nature, beyond style and taste, within the intimacy of delicate and pseudo-zen works.

This topic permeates the whole project.

The representation of the idea of nature, of the conflicts and sensitivity connected

to it, the idea of change, transformation and sustainability, has a complex history as if it had not found yet its own way (or several different ways) to fully express itself beyond the stereotypes that still constrains it. Just think of the concept of “organic”. Organic food and the image of its packaging; or trademarks, images in brochures and how the cultures of this sector express themselves through images.

From the old smiling sun to sphere-worlds, through animals, leaves, trees, ears of wheat and wind turbines, while the colour green, although exhausted, lives in the background characterizing everything. The gradual transition from minority culture to a widespread, entrepreneurial and more aware associationistic reality, even if characterized by aggressive marketing, has not changed the main points of the problem, as if the update of image culture was not yet up to speed with the transformations in progress. It shows a legacy of simple visual metaphors alluding to happiness, open spaces, skies and health. The other side is dominated by catastrophic images: mountains of waste, fumes on the horizon and the colour black. This is true for most iconography, from drawings to photos.

Just have a look online.

But change is possible: for example the magazine that you are holding in your hands (or that you are reading on your screen, tablet or smartphone), a gaily-coloured attempt to start a new image path for those who still have not got an image or are looking for one. It is a build-up, thanks to the best representations that contemporary culture can offer by shuffling the cards; moving away from a restricted reality to a tout court magazine, expanding the potential audience longing for new contents. The selection of posters included in Natural Recall offers a contribution to this topic, open and receptive to inspiration.

Think Tank

The Natural Recall Project is the brainchild of Gtower and co.me, two Italian creative and communication studios that have joined forces with Smack and Qwerty Studio.

Natural Recall – The Book, published by Qupé editions and printed on crush paper, was a finalist at the European Design Awards 2015 in Istanbul and received a nomination at the Luxe Pack in Green Awards 2015 in Shanghai.

Maria Grønlund, Cosmos, Denmark “Last summer I had a passionflower in my garden. I was fascinated by the complex shape the flowers had.”

Left: Diana Scherer, Nurture Studies, Germany-the Netherlands

Left (centre): Juan Hernaz, Man who planted trees, Spain

Top: Jean Jullien, Humility, France, England

Nurture Studies is an archive of flowers that the author grew in pots and then removed.

Her photos remind us of botanic encyclopedias: they are floral portraits poised between document and emotions.

“This illustration is the synthesis of The man who planted trees by Jean Giono, the consecration of a lifetime aimed at creating life through the trees.”

“There’s a feeling of humility that comes from observing nature when you draw it.”

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Think Tank Jerry Takigawa, Plant a Kiss.

Kiss a Plant, USA “We have a saying, Plant a Kiss, which simply means to place a kiss. But by reversing the order of the words to Kiss a Plant, the implied meaning expands to express the love of a plant.”

Left Page: Dian Jin, Life, Shanghai, China “Every life is unique and has its own shape.”

Top: Peta Hedemann, Midnight Secret Garden, Australia “Gardens provide the most magical atmospheres of peace and tranquility, and energy through living organisms.”

Right: Marijke Buurlage, Bliss, the Netherlands “This outbalanced scenery shows a man living in complete harmony with his succulents.

His long arms and legs even make him look a bit like a plant himself.”

Nazario Graziano, Aria/Air, Italy “The nature as a perfect machine, such as a factory of fresh air where everything works perfectly.”

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Draught from Berlaymont

“Championing the Circular Cause” Interview with Sirpa Pietikäinen edited by Joanna Dupont-Inglis

Joanna Dupont-Inglis specialized in Environmental Sciences at University of Sussex and to that of Nantes.

In February 2009 she joined EuropaBio, the European Association of bio-industries, and since April 2011 she has directed the industrial biotechnology field.

Sirpa Pietikainen is leading advocate for the EU bioeconomy and Rapporteur on the EP’s Own Initiative Report on the Circular Economy. “Even several manufacturers realized that an inefficient or unsustainable use of resources generates waste and costs where efficiency and profits could be achieved. We have to ensure growing benefits for consumers and competitiveness using only one tenth of the materials currently used.”

There has been an overwhelming interest in the circular economy, from industry to NGOs to member state officials – why do you think this is?

I think it’s because many people, from a broad range of sectors, see that developing a circular economy involves a true paradigm shift.

If you’re on a journey and you set off in the wrong direction, you can’t correct it by simply speeding up a bit. Business as usual, but a bit faster, won’t work. What’s needed is a complete re-think of our economic model. In this case, as we know, it means a departure from the linear production, consumption, disposal towards

designing a circular future. At the same time, whilst becoming more sustainable, we need to ensure increasing consumer benefits and competitiveness whilst using only one tenth of the resources that we currently consume.

Do you think that this paradigm shift is a daunting prospect for industry?

Those who have seen the light know that it makes good business sense. Inefficient or unsustainable use of resources makes for a bad business plan.

It involves waste and cost where instead there could be efficiency and profit. Many industry

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leaders, from construction, to food, energy, packaging, chemicals and materials realise that we can’t continue to behave as if we have 4 planets when we only have one. In my experience, its actually industry that is calling on policy makers to help them develop and implement the measures needed.

You have been a champion of bio-based industries for some time and Finland

Sirpa Pietikäinen

Sirpa Pietikainen is a Finnish politician from the National Coalition Party. She has been a Member of the European Parliament since 2008, and re-elected in 2009.

She is a former Member of Finnish Parliament, former Minister for the Environment (1991-1995).

is a pioneer in the development of the bioeconomy. How do you see the link between the circular and the bioeconomy?

The link is a close one, because we have to start with a concrete interpretation of sustainability criteria. One aspect of this is that all non-renewable materials need to be preserved in totally enclosed loops.

Then, the renewables must only be used within the limits of their renewability. If you take a non-renewable, like aluminium or nickel, out of the ground it will not replace itself in any of our lifetimes. However, if you take wood from the forest you can calculate how long it will take to be replaced and replant accordingly.

If, for example, you are using straw instead or food residue then lifespan and replacement time is even shorter. So we do have the means to check what is sustainable and what is not and to stay within safe limits. A lot of the answers and solutions on sustainability and resource efficiency are already there in nature and it is up to us to recognise and learn from this.

In your opinion, is the EU well placed to lead in the development of a circular economy?

Yes, and the sooner we do it, the more we can benefit from the transition. The reality is that we are a resource-dependent continent and this makes us vulnerable as these resources become scarce. In addition, we are a costly continent, in terms of our standards of welfare, environment and employment amongst other things. This means that we will never be “the cheapest” union and cannot compete on cost alone. Therefore we need to innovate to produce higher value sustainable goods that people are willing to pay for.

Our economy and our infrastructure have been developed over 150 years or more

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Turin, 30’s

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relying on fossil carbon. While we know that we must act to tackle climate change and to become more resource efficient, fossil is well established and remains highly subsidised. Are we fighting an uphill battle and what can be done to level this playing field?

The problem for emerging industries is that they are usually less well resourced.

They are so busy struggling to emerge that they don’t have the time, the connections or the network to seek support. On the other hand, there are very well established unsustainable industry “dinosaurs” – what I call the walking dead – who have protection of their existing market as their number one priority. As politicians, we are frequently challenged by these groups who insist that regulation needs to change in order for them to continue to exist. If we protect and prolong the same bad practice of polluting and unsustainable industries, through subsidies for example, we are actually doing them, and the public, a disservice. It is a kind of “life support” for the already departed.

But when new, renewable industries do manage to emerge they are often penalised for not being “sustainable enough”. How can we tackle the EU affliction of “making the perfect the enemy of the good”?

We didn’t get ILUC right. What was needed was a genuine land use sustainability criteria and we don’t have that. It was extremely stupid to provide preferential support for first generation (1G) biofuels only to change our minds and try to kill them a couple of years down the line.

What we need is a predictable, progressive, coherent legal framework to provide industry with the certainty it needs to invest. The support, its levels and its duration needs to be clear

from the start and we cannot afford to move the goal posts again.

But, we also need to be pragmatic. Of course we can’t create a new world in 7 days and then sit back and rest. Building a circular economy is going to take time and there will be no quick and dirty fixes. We need more financial incentives for second and third generation products and a series of periodic supports for taking each step. For example supports from 1G to second generation (2G) to third generation (3G) all need to be put in place.

We cannot pretend to be shocked if an industry which has been mistreated as a 1G producer will be unwilling to invest in 2 or 3G in the EU. What kind of support should be envisaged for proactive, emerging industries within the circular economy?

Getting new, more sustainable products to market means investment in new infrastructure.

For example, demonstration and flagship biorefineries within the bioeconomy represent big capital expenditures and long payback times.

Some of these biorefineries are already using renewables, like wood, to produce fantastic new bio-based products, such as clothing, medicines, food, feed, chemicals and plastics.

But these biorefineries require longer term financing and we need new models for this.

In addition, industries need longer term legal certainty and a circular economy strategy should factor this in. Now is the time to put this in place.

When in 2020 we will look back at the previous 5 years, what do you think we will have achieved?

We may have travelled 5% or 10% towards creating a bio and circular economy, but not further. Our population, its needs and our levels of consumption are growing at such a rate that it’s going to take a huge, collective effort simply to stay in one place. However, what we know for sure is that, in 30 years, we need to produce 30% of our products from bio-based sources and to have all of our non-renewables in closed loops, whilst having drastically reduced our impact on biodiversity and our emissions of Green House Gases and hazardous chemicals. 30 years will go by quickly so it’s not just resources that we can’t afford to waste. It’s time.

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edited by Mario Bonaccorso

The NEW CHEMISTRY Is Worth $80 Trillion Interview with Rafael Cayuela

Rafael Cayuela is the author of the book The Future of the Chemical Industry by 2050, published by Wiley in May 2013.

Mario Bonaccorso is a finance and economic journalist. He works for Assobiotec, the Italian Association for the development of biotechnology.

For the chemical industry it is an epoch-making change. The way to sustainability is a journey of no return, fuelled by the need to tackle climate change and energy efficiency challenges, rather than oil price volatility. All this will create an unprecedented business opportunity: $80,000 billion by 2050.

Raw materials (more shale gas and biological resources), the kind of products (more sustainable), markets and players will change, with Europe and the United States still in the lead, but Brazil, Russia, India and China are bound to have more and more prominence. Rafael Cayuela, author of The Future of the Chemical Industry by 2050, a book published in 2013 by Wiley about the future of the world’s chemical industry, will discuss such themes with Renewable Matter.

Let us begin with your book, regarded as the Bible by those in the know. Will you help

us understand where the world’s chemical industry is heading for?

Over the last ten years, the chemical industry has gradually shifted its focus from operational efficiency and commodities to real innovation and technological convergence. Sustainable chemistry is progressively bound to become the standard of advanced economies, while the emerging economies will have to follow suit, as they will increasingly have to apply more stringent and global regulations.

The need to make energy use more efficient and to reduce CO2 will entail a considerable cost for the industry, but more importantly a huge business opportunity. In a world ready to live with barely 4,000 grams of CO2 per capita a day by 2050, from 28,000 of 2010, the chemical industry, technology and innovation are to play an extraordinary role. Against this backdrop, the need to reduce emissions and energy use will represent the single biggest business opportunity in human history, up to $80,000 billion by 2050. The chemical

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industry will be at the forefront of such sustainable solutions.

Following this line of reasoning, the plunge in oil prices in the last few months should not have negative repercussions on the choice to invest in renewable resources.

Is it the case?

I should think so because the use of biological resources by the chemical industry does not simply depend on economic reasons, but on the need to deal with climate change and to develop a sustainable economy.

Every historical innovation stems from the need to solve a problem. But history should not decide what the problem is, that is a government’s job, then industries must find a solution to it.

Let me give you a historic example: when at the beginning of the Second World War the supply of natural rubber from Southeast Asia was stopped, the United States asked the chemical industry to research in alternative productions.

Thus synthetic rubber was invented, also known as GR-S (Government Rubber-Styrene), which subsequently was marketed in record time to meet the needs of the USA and its allies during the Second World War. With regard to the demand side, to what extent do you reckon the demand for biobased products is important, bearing in mind that – according to some market analyses – some consumers are prepared to pay a premium price just to buy sustainable products?

I think this is not a remarkable phenomenon, if we consider the issue in macroeconomic terms. Even assuming that 5-10% of consumers are prepared to pay a surcharge for a green product, we are still talking about the richer countries, so 10 million in Europe and 10 million more in the United States. This alone cannot drive the chemistry market.

So do you believe that programs such as the US BioPreferred – supporting demand by forcing public authorities to buy green and implementing a system of standard and labelling for biobased products – could be useful to facilitate the bioeconomy?

I strongly believe that governments have a major role to play in steering towards change.

In this perspective, the BioPreferred program, supporting the demand for biobased products, is positive. But we need to make sure that

governments should not spell out the solution to the industry. Their task is to pose a problem, as with the above-mentioned example of rubber.

Otherwise, market distortions might arise.

In order to tackle the challenge of climate change and energy supply, using biological resources is just one of the responses available to the chemical industry.

Would shale gas be another viable response?

By all means. Today, the industrial sector – not only the chemical industry – must adopt an overall view taking into account not only the price of raw materials but also CO2, water and waste prices. By using shale gas, CO2 prices are reduced by 30%. So it is doubly useful in that it keeps the CO2 and oil prices low with an added effect on the chemical industry because it strengthens its tendency to focus on its specializations rather than commodities.

The employment of shale gas to obtain low-cost methane has dramatically revolutionized the American chemical sector and it is having a strong impact on China as well.

Having said that, one should be aware that, between 2008 and 2010, oil prices have reached extremely high peaks, which are unlikely to occur again. This sudden rise was started when China joined the WTO at the beginning of 2000,

The economy and energy scenarios are evolving rapidly and it is difficult to make forecasts.

One thing is certain: it looks like we had been stranded in the desert for years, forced to pay water like champagne.

But today we are no longer in that situation.

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with its strong demand for energy and its poor energy efficiency. Today China is reaching Europe’s and the USA’s energy efficiency and that means less millions of gallons of oil each year.

The economy and energy scenarios are evolving rapidly and it is difficult to make forecasts.

One thing is certain: it looks like we had been stranded in the desert for years, forced to pay water like champagne. But today we are no longer in that situation.

The focus on the CO2 emissions should make us say that a refinery employing not locally-sourced biomass is not sustainable. In Italy the reconversion of ENI refinery in Sicily into a biorefinery employing oil palm imported from Malaysia is highly controversial.

What do you reckon?

Clearly, if biomass is imported from faraway countries, CO2 emissions are not reduced.

It is fundamental that biomass be locally sourced in order for the integrated biorefineries to be truly connected with the nearby environment. Of course, the best solution is not always attainable. In ENI’s case, in Sicily, the need to protect jobs prevailed over the estimates of environmental sustainability.

To summarize, can the way towards sustainability be regarded as a journey of no return for the chemical industry?

I truly believe so. The chemical industry will be required to cope with increasingly stringent, global, targeted and efficient rules.

It will therefore have to be more and more proactive. Companies and industries able to forestall the next regulations and to be in the lead will dominate the future.

Technical convergence and technological collaboration will be at the forefront of what in my book I refer to as “the third industrial revolution”. Innovation will be the core of the chemical industry. The ability to work along the whole of the value chain and to innovate through a wide variety of technologies and sectors will underpin innovation and development.

To this end, new business paradigms and legal frameworks as well as new competences and performance metrics will have to be shaped.

Businesses, industrial sectors and countries that will not be able to think strategically and to innovate and adapt to the new challenges of the climate change will not survive.

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renewablematter 04. 2015 Highly-detailed margin

by Jean Bourdichon, from Les Grandes Heures d’Anne de Bretagne, c. 1503-1508

by Beppe Croce

The Hidden Value of Plants

Camaldolese monks and Franciscan friars utilized forests for useful as well as spiritual, poetical and beautiful purposes. That relationship has quickly been replaced by a productive approach which, ignoring the complexity of it all, miscalculates the economic impact.

Beppe Croce is national coordinator of Legambiente Agriculture and Head of Green Chemistry-Bionet association. He wrote La terra che vogliamo (“The land that we want”) with Sandro Angiolini (Edizioni Ambiente, 2013), and Bioeconomia (“Bioeconomy”) with Stefano Ciafani and Luca Lazzeri (Edizioni Ambiente, 2015).

“I will plant, says he, in the desert, cedars, hawthorns, myrtles, olives, firs, elms and boxes.” Therefore, if you wish to own plenty of these trees, and if you yearn to be numbered amongst them, whoever you might be, endeavour to enter the peace of solitude...

And so you will be a Cedar for the nobility of your honesty and dignity; a Hawthorn for the urge to correct and convert; a Myrtle for the quiet sobriety and temperance; an Olive for the fecundity of deeds of happiness, peace and mercy; a Fir for deep meditation and wisdom; an Elm for your patience and support; a Box because of your acquaintance with humility and perseverance.

Excerpt from Liber eremiticae regulae aditae a Rodulpho eximio doctore.

Arezzo Library, cod. 333, XI cent.

Translated into English from the translation by Padre Salvatore Frigerio – SLM – Sopra il Livello del Mare, n. 11, 2003

The Rule of the Camaldolese monks, which generated the first forest code in history, refers us back to the extraordinary variety of senses and functions of the main material the bioeconomy is dealing with: the vegetable kingdom. Today, western societies are rediscovering its importance in their own way.

“In the long run, fossil fuels will no longer be available cheaply and biomass will be the main source of carbon for the global economy.”

This is how the Bio-based Economy was announced in the words of a EU Commission official.1 Here, the vegetable kingdom boils down to an abstract and shapeless resource, biomass, largely available on the planet, to be exploited as energy source and raw material.

Policy 1. Benitez Salas M. A., Director, DG Agri, “The Knowledge Based Bio-Economy towards 2020 Turning Challenges into Opportunities”, The KBBE Conference, Brussels, September, 2010.

2. See in particular “Innovating for Sustainable Growth: A Bioeconomy for Europe” – Communication from the Commission to the European Parliament, the Council, the European Economic and Social Committee and the Committee of the Regions, Brussels, 13th February 2012 (ec.europa.eu/research/ bioeconomy).

See also “The European Bioeconomy in 2030 – Delivering Sustainable Growth by addressing the Grand Societal Challenges”, White Book of European Technology Platform (www.epsoweb.org/ file/560).

3. Brenneisen R., “Chemistry and Analysis of Phytocannabinoids and Other Cannabis Constituents”, in ElSohly M. A., Marijuana and the Cannabinoids, 2007.

4. This was the main question that we asked ourselves about food in another boook: Croce B., S. Angiolini, La Terra che vogliamo. Il futuro delle campagne italiane, Edizioni Ambiente, 2013.

5. Rockström J. et al., “A safe operating space for humanity”, Nature, 461, 472-475 (24 settembre 2009), updated at the beginning of 2015, Steffen W. et al., “Planetary boundaries: Guiding human development on a changing planet” (DOI: 10.1126/science.1259855).

These issues are expanded in Rockström J., A. Wijkman, Natura in bancarotta, Edizioni Ambiente, 2014.

Of course, Camaldolese monks and Franciscan friars used forests for economic purposes, but in a much more complex relationship, combining useful, spiritual, poetical and beautiful aspects. Forests were a cosmos, or its mediator. The often-narrow views of politics and business, which ultimately is our everyday language, adumbrate a potential for opportunities but also of risks.

Despite being more secular than St. Romuald, founder of the Camaldoli order, to fully embrace the bioeconomy, we cannot ignore the plurality of functions the vegetable kingdom performs for our lives. We could not even do away with the surprise, the poetry and respect for a blooming tree. We could not forgo more equitable economies and a relationship with disposable resources. If we reduce everything to biomass, we are fighting a losing battle.

An Extraordinary Ecological and Economic Challenge In a nutshell, bioeconomy means that bio-based renewables will be driving the economy in the next few decades, phasing out oil and other fossil substances,2 employing resources from plants, animals, algae and sea organisms, but also mushrooms, bacteria, yeasts as well as the biodegradable fraction of industrial and urban waste.

Exploiting bio-based raw materials and waste as the baseline for tomorrow’s products represents a new extraordinary and ecological challenge.

Bio-based raw materials offer three advantages: they are potentially inexhaustible, generally less polluting and toxic than their fossil counterparts and can be produced locally, thus guaranteeing more political and energy autonomy.

The driving force behind such development is green chemistry, or the design of products and processes to extract high-added-value substances from biomass. The biological domain offers a wealth of molecules and compounds much wider than that offered by oil-derived hydrocarbons. From the so-called metabolites, or the molecules produced by plant metabolism, through sophisticated building and breakdown systems. Some are common to all living beings: proteins, carbohydrates, lipids and nucleic acids. These are primary metabolites, obtained through glucose breakdown, which represents the main source of energy for cells, which plants build by themselves through photosynthesis.

But plants also produce an extraordinary variety of other specialized molecules – secondary metabolites, also known as active principles – strictly interconnected with the environment.

Molecules such as terpenoids, alkaloids and polyphenols, glycosides and so on that plants use to attract, repel, neutralize, recover

and for other functions. Secondary metabolites are thousands of different molecules constantly evolving. We only know the main properties of many of them. In the hemp plant, for instance, 480 chemical compounds have been identified.3 Green chemistry can obtain an enormous variety of products from this vast set of molecules.

And also energy raw materials: liquid, solid and gaseous biofuels.

Becoming More Efficient is not Enough The bioeconomy’s prospects are thus very promising. I would like to stress the fact that, in this challenge, agriculture should regain its role as primary mover for development, in that it is the main source of such biological resources.

But when we look at the source, we realize that soil is a limited resource. How to reconcile returning to agriculture as a source of primary goods with a population growth expected to reach 9 billion people and ever increasing protein consumption?4 Are the Earth ecosystems able to meet such growing expectations without suffering irreversible alterations? Human pressure on ecosystems has now reached its tipping point. Well, in many instances it has exceeded that limit, as Johan Rockström amongst others, warned us.5 Such a challenge implies an efficiency leap in matter and energy flows, so as to reduce to a minimum the use of natural resources and waste production.

But becoming more efficient is not enough.

This challenge cannot be tackled with technology alone and cannot be won only from a production perspective, but first and foremost Guercino, San Romuald, 1640-41, city art gallery, Ravenna

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renewablematter 04. 2015 Figure 1 | Energy potential of biomass at global level (in exajoule: 1018 j) 2,500 Net carbon absorbed every year by plants through photosynthesis

2,000

Carbon extracted today Carbon extractable sustainably (50% epigeal biomass)

1,500

Global energy use 1,000

Current use of energy from biomass

500

0 Source: author’s elaboration of data from Leopoldina Nationale Akademie der Wissenschaften.

6. These estimates, as well as the following ones are based on Thauer R. K. et alii, “Availability of biomass as energy source”, Statement Bioenergy: Chances and Limits, Leopoldina Nationale Akademie der Wissenschaften, 2012 pp. 10-12.

from a consumption viewpoint, namely the lifestyles of people and urban communities.

Dealing with Entropy The onset of the bioeconomy demands also a revisitation of economics theoretical principles and of its relation with the physical world.

The basic principles of a thought able to reconcile economy and ecology are to be found in the writings of the economist that first coined the term “bioeconomy”: Nicholas Georgescu Roegen. A statistician and mathematician as well as an economist, he was defined by Paul Samuelson “The Economist of the Economists”, even though unlike Samuelson, he was never awarded a Nobel Prize. Perhaps because he deviated from the dominant schools of thought. Georgescu Roegen declared the failure of the neoclassical economic theory focused on the principle of immediate utility: utilitarianism has always seen natural resources as free of charge.

The elementary notion that most 20th century economists overlooked is that economics is linked first and foremost to flows of energy and matter. According to Georgescu Roegen, economists are two centuries behind in the scientific knowledge, still clinging to Laplace mechanism where every process, including the economic cycle, is perfectly reproducible.

But in the physical world, the second law of thermodynamics is in force: the processes of energy conversion are not reversible.

In other words, nothing can go back to what

it was before. This is true both for a romance and a lump of coal. The entropy law not only regulates the evolution of the universe, but also our energy and industrial production.

If, existentially speaking, entropy conjures up the ineluctability of degradation, from an economic point of view the notion of entropy is linked to the concept of serviceability.

This is the problem looming ahead: it is not about the amount of energy we have on the planet that is important, but rather how much of it is serviceable.

New-Generation Biofuels on the Horizon The problem of energy production is also central in the bioeconomy. Currently at global level, one of the main forces driving biorefineries’ development is plant-based fuels – especially ethanol and biodiesel – similarly to petrol for the petrochemical industry.

It is true that we have high expectations of third-generation biofuels – those obtained from microalgae – the fourth generation is in sight – biofuels from artificial photosynthesis, experimented for the first time in the 1990’s by the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California, under the supervision of Steven Chu, Nobel Prize for Physics.

Combining sunlight, non-potable water, waste CO2 from industrial activity and genetically modified blue-green algae it is possible to produce solar diesel and ethanol using up very little soil and water resources.

But so far not even a litre of solar or 4G biofuel has been sold.

While waiting for the promises of the 4G biofuels, this dependence on energy production can become a limit, confusing the energy sector needs with those of the chemical industry.

From an energy consumption point of view, it is misleading to think that the huge body of agricultural and forest residues, instead of dedicated crops such as maize and sugar cane, can solve the supply problem.

The German Academy of Sciences, Leopoldina, carried out some calculations.

From figure 1, we can see that the biomass that can be used sustainably, that is without reducing or jeopardizing the Earth’s vegetation cover, can satisfy the global energy requirements (2010 data).6 This would be the case if we absurdly gave up all other uses. We currently exploit just one third of this potential, mainly for non-energy purposes: food and fodder (over 90%), building materials and green chemistry. Even if we used all the potential shown in the figure, food consumption will greatly expand due to the world’s population increase and changes in the global food habits.

So, even in the coming decades, biomass will satisfy about 10% of global energy consumption (rapidly increasing), albeit through secondgeneration biofuels instead of firewood.

Policy The (Different) Case of Plastic Materials The plastic materials and lubricants panorama is completely different, just to mention two chemical industry sectors with the highest productions at global level. It has been estimated that 96% of all goods manufactured in the USA contains at least one chemical product.7 Even if it has invaded all aspects of our lives, at global level, plastic production is responsible for less that 4% of the total annual consumption of oil. We are talking about two orders of magnitude less.

In short, if the main goal is to produce fuels, this involves very high production levels and plants’ sizes that are unlikely to be compatible with local resources such as those of most European regions. For this type of plants, raw materials are normally imported from different continents according to market prices.

Energy production can often become a dependent variable of other productions.

For example, the new Matrica biorefinery in Porto Torres is designed to produce first of all biopolymers, biolubricant bases, extender oils for tyres and bioherbicides.8 This plant also envisages energy production, but from residual biomass that cannot be exploited in other high-added-value uses, so the final process has been designed taking into account the residues of the biomass it uses.

This reversal of priorities between energy uses and other uses (food, feedstuff, materials, chemical intermediates) is crucial for the development of a bioeconomy based on locally integrated biorefineries, flexible technological systems using a variety of specific resources produced and available locally, to manufacture a wide range of bio-based products.

This approach is essential especially in countries with little land such as Italy and Europe in general.

A locally integrated biorefinery has several potential advantages.

•• Normally, it uses small and medium size plants, never oversized compared to the availability of local resources. In this way, it is able to offer better guarantees of traceability and sustainability of the raw materials used.

•• It can guarantee better wealth distribution in the area where it operates and the active involvement of local farmers, something nearly impossible to achieve with a big delocalized biofuel plant. It is thus able to get better social approval.

•• Since its production is linked to local characteristics, it is not easily exportable to areas where labour and approval are cheaper than in the local area.

This model of biorefinery, unlike that based exclusively on energy production, can be a niche but able to generate high added value thanks

to environmental qualities of bioproducts that can be obtained.

Biorefineries Start in the Fields But a biorefinery is not just an industrial plant.

As long as vegetable biomass is the primary source of the bioeconomy, the sustainability of the agricultural phase will play a crucial role in the entire chain. Excessive pressure on ecosystems or excessive use of mechanized cultivation and chemical inputs in agriculture are the first signs of a low sustainability chain or worse still of its loss of soil fertility.

Biorefineries start in the fields and they can only start in the fields if they want to guarantee quality raw materials and supply chain, not only from an energy but also from an environmental and social point of view.

It is unthinkable that the bioeconomy carries on with the traditional separation between a farmer producer of undifferentiated low-cost raw materials and an industrial processor who buys seeds and fibre where prices are the lowest.

Better still, biorefineries start with the plant itself. This opens up a huge field of research and innovation. We are used to exploiting hundreds of millions of hectares of fertile soil for monoculture using just a small part of the plant (for example wheat’s caryopsis). We still do not know how to use the huge wealth of substances and molecules that a plant can offer.

Even the so-called dedicated crops that we disregard because they conjure up images vast expanses of maize to produce only fuels, in reality could have multiple food and non-food uses. Why should a farmer grow hemp just to sell its straw without exploiting its seeds for their nutritional value? Why should thistle be seen only as a non-food crop (according to some it steals soil to food production) when its residual oilcake could be an excellent supplement for local animal farming, taking the place of GMO soy imports?

An economic thought that sees scarcity as the long run goal cannot forgo ecology.

This is the crucial role of the bioeconomy.

In this way we will then be able to discover the real sense of the economic activity, as Georgescu Roegen suggested, “the real output of the economic process is not the material flow of waste, but the immaterial flux of the enjoyment of life.”9

7. Unleashing the Power of the Bioeconomy, Financial Innovations Lab, Milken Institute, February 2013.

8. For the Matrica case see Chap. 5 of: “La rinascita: le bioraffinerie italiane” in Croce B., S. Ciafani, L. Lazzeri, Bioeconomia, Edizioni Ambiente, 2015.

9. Georgescu-Roegen N., “La legge di entropia e il problema economico” in Bioeconomia. Verso un’altra economia ecologicamente e socialmente sostenibile, edited by M. Bonaiuti, Bollati Boringhieri, 2003.

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by Chiara Piccini

10% of Biofuels Without Giving up a Single Sandwich

Exhausted quarries and mines, dismantled landfills and industrial areas: exploiting marginal areas for bioenergy crops are a tangible solution already under examination both in Europe and in Italy. The role of green chemistry is crucial to reduce environmental impact.

Chiara Piccini is a geologist and a freelance researcher at Consiglio per la ricerca in agricoltura e l’analisi dell’economia agraria (Agriculture Research and Rural Economy Analysis Council).

At global level, biomass currently amounts to 10-12% of energy production: it is the first amongst renewables and it has an enormous expansion potential both for the production of heat and electricity and in the transport sector. However, this is not enough. The challenge is to produce biomass sustainably (avoiding the conflict with food needs) and to adopt a more efficient and technologically more advanced use (at present, only 40% of available raw material is used with the current knowhow and technology at our disposal).

It is an unavoidable challenge because, despite the above-mentioned problems, the interest towards the bioenergy sector keeps growing for two reasons: increasing fossil fuel prices

and concerns about the security of energy supplies. This push thus calls for a careful analysis of this sector and its potential. Here are some salient points.

Green Chemistry The use of biomass as a renewable source can be obtained by recycling residual vegetable raw materials deriving from forest maintenance and agricultural residues to wood industry and the agricultural and food industry waste.

Alternatively, by producing it with ad hoc energy crops.

Most biomass is still used directly for heating, especially in developing countries. However, it is its technologically advanced uses that attract most interests. Let us talk about green

Policy Soil use distribution at global level Agricultural land 11%

Unsuitable for crops, pastures and forests 21%

chemistry: biomass, thanks to advanced chemical processes, can be turned into substances that can be used to produce a vast range of intermediate compounds from which other products (biobased products) and energy are obtained.

Urban areas 9%

Source: FAO data.

Pastures 27%

Forests 32%

Soil Consumption Unfortunately, at present more than half of the available residual vegetable matter goes to waste, concentrating on biomass obtained from energy crops. This is how the majority of commercial liquid biofuels are produced: from sugar cane, maize and other cereals, beets and other oleaginous crops.

This would be enough to understand the existing potential conflict between energy and food crops to meet in the near future the food needs of a fast increasing world population.

Soil – necessary both for cultivating food and energy crops – is a precious as well as a scarce resource.

Globally, most available land for the production of biomass is already used; without taking into account that more than 20% of the total surface (13 billion hectares) cannot sustain either crops, pastures or forests for climatic reasons.

It is impossible thinking of meeting energy requirements only with dedicated biomass crops because we would need enormous amounts of land. In some countries where this possibility has been taken into account – such a research study on the production of biofuels has been carried out in the USA – it has emerged that the available land would not be enough to produce fuel for the existing vehicles.

We must not forget that the potential competition between bioenergy and food crops is not limited to soil use but it also entails water consumption, fertilizer use and labour.

Impacts Besides, subtracting land that could be used to produce food, intensive cultures

for biofuels have an adverse impact on local biodiversity and promote the expansion of energy monoculture in non-agricultural areas causing deforestation.

We must also take into consideration the not always positive balance between the energy necessary to produce biofuels and the energy that can be obtained from them. Just one example. From a water point of view, the production of 1 litre of biodiesel requires a total of 4,000 litres of water, including that necessary for crop irrigation and that used in the chemical transformation process.

This is to point out that the bioenergy production risks must be assessed according to each country and region’s characteristics. In order to assess the pros and cons of investing in this sector, FAO has devised a new method called “Bioenergy and Food Security Analytical Framework”.

This method enables to assess the bioenergy production potential in a specific context while evaluating possible impacts considering the development project feasibility, its repercussions on food availability and security and on social and environmental aspects.

Exploiting Marginal Areas To reduce soil consumption and its impacts and in order not to subtract land from food crops, a tangible solution for bioenergy crops is to use marginal lands. We are talking about areas that due to their climatic, pedological or cultivation characteristics are unsuitable for traditional agricultural uses.

Some examples of marginal areas include exhausted or dismantled open-pit quarries or mines, closed or abandoned landfills.

Most biomass is still used directly for heating, especially in developing countries. However, it is its technologically advanced uses that attract most interests.

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renewablematter 04. 2015 Biofuel consumption trend in EU28 16

Source: Eurostat data.

14 12

Mtep

10 8 6 4

+1,225% in 11 years

2 0 2002

2003

Unfortunately, the potential of the Italian industry is largely underexploited [...].

In order to reverse this trend and to best exploit Italy’s production potential, it is necessary to stimulate a more efficient production of biomass while increasing the recovery of residual biomass.

2004

2005

2006

2007

2008

2009

2010

As well as polluted and degraded areas, dismantled industrial areas, croplands that have never been sown and with no vegetation, former military sites and land unsuitable for crop, forest and pastures uses included in the lowest classes of land capability.

These are areas, that contrary to what one could think, can be put to good use and become productive. For example, some plants are able to grow well even in soils polluted with heavy metals. Another possibility is to irrigate energy crops in these areas with wastewaters thus achieving great water consumption benefits without subtracting water from potable and agricultural uses.

The European Target: 10% of Biofuels From 2002 to 2012, the consumption of biofuels for transport in the EU28 grew constantly stabilizing at about 13.6 Mtep in 2013.

The European target is to achieve a mix of fuels containing 10% of biofuels by 2020.

This increase in consumption has had two consequences. On the one hand, it has promoted the import of raw materials and/or finished product – mainly ethanol – from non EU countries. On the other, thanks to EU’s incentives on biofuels, it has caused the indiscriminate conversion of a lot of agricultural land, subtracting it from food production. In Germany, the Netherlands and France where rape is the main crop for biofuels, more than 60% of this crop is grown for such purpose.

In reality, with the new CAP and the uncoupling of aid and land use, European farmers have several choices to increase biomass production,

2011

2012

2013

avoiding further soil consumption. For example, including energy crops in the rotation or using soils not suitable for growing food crops but that thanks to this could be recovered.

The Italian Panorama Over the last few years in Italy the production of biomass for energy and industrial uses has increased constantly. According to the National Action Plan on Renewables, biomass should meet – with regard to the total energy production from renewable sources – 19% of total electricity consumption, 54% of heating and cooling needs and 87% of transport requirements.

For the production of thermal energy and/or electricity, the most used biomass is essentially wood (about 23 million tons per year, of which circa 83% is used for heating) and forest, agricultural and agro-industrial residues.

In Europe, Italy ranks fourth in the production of biofuel, after Germany, France and Spain, with a production capacity of over 2 million tons per year (2011 data).

Unfortunately, the potential of the Italian industry is largely underexploited: incentive measures in place in some non EU countries make it cheaper to buy biofuel from foreign suppliers. As a result, despite a stable production, the increasing market demand is met more and more by imports.

In order to reverse this trend and to best exploit Italy’s production potential, it is necessary to stimulate a more efficient production of biomass while increasing the recovery of residual biomass. In other words, recovering

Policy Bibliography “Biofuels Barometer”, Eurobserv’er, 2014; www.eurobserv-er.org •• Di Mario F., G. Braccio, V. Pignatelli, N. Colonna, F. Zimbardi, Quaderno Biomasse e Bioenergia, ENEA, 2011 •• Meneghello G., “Biofuel, al 2020 il 10% sarà di seconda generazione” interview with Vito Pignatelli,

Qualenergia.it, September 21, 2011; www.qualenergia.it/ articoli/biocarburantibiofuel-la-secondagenerazione-2020Pignatelli-Enea-etanololigno-celulosico •• Khwaja Y., I. Maltsoglou, “Agriculture, bioenergy and food security: using BEFS to guide agricultural

change”, Bioenergy and Food Security – The BEFS analysis for Tanzania, FAO, Environment and natural resources management working paper n. 35, 2010, pp. 13-22 •• “M2RES - Transforming marginalities into RES opportunities: experiences and lessons learnt”, South East

widespread waste, quantitatively important, from the agricultural (pruning), forest (forest residues) and agro-industrial (shells, olive pulp) sector, that often is not utilized or destroyed inappropriately.

In Italy, the two main crops currently grown for energy production are rape (80%) and sunflower (20%). But in reality there are no exact data on energy crops that seem nearly ignored by official statistics.

If we exclude poplar cultivation for pellet production, other crops used to produce biofuels (rape, sunflower and soya) or to generate biogas (maize, sorghum and triticale) can not be differentiated from other similar food crops from which they differ only for the end use.

In Italy, they have never been widespread.

This was not due to a lack of interest by farmers or of land but because the market did not repay adequately the costs incurred by farmers compared with the traditional market of food crops.

Conservation agriculture can undoubtedly play a positive role in the exploitation of energy crops. For example, using hilly areas with no vegetation cover after harvesting cereals

Used and unused agricultural land in Italy compared to total area Source: ISTAT data.

24% Unused

76% Used

Total agricultural land in Italy: 17 million hectares

Europe Programme, 2014; www.m2res.eu •• Maddalena L., Lo sviluppo delle energie alternative: il caso Puglia, Franco Angeli, 2012 •• “Solid Biomass Barometer”, Eurobserv’er, 2015; www.eurobserv-er.org •• Supply Chain round table for bioenergies.

DM 9800 of 27th April

2012, “Workshop n. 1 Biomasses - Biofuels and bioliquids - Biogas and biomethane - Green Chemistry”, Stato dell’arte della bioenergia in Italia, June 2014; www.itabia.it/ doc/pdf Rapporto_Stato_ filiere_ bioenergetiche_ GR1.pdf

and other vegetable produce that during the autumn-winter period are more prone to water erosion.

It could also be useful to adopt short rotation forestry (SRF), that is single or multi-stemmed trees of fast growing species grown on a reduced rotation length.

Marginal areas contribution could also be crucial.

In Italy the total surface available for bioenergy crops amounts to 1-2 million hectares, of which 200,000 are untilled public areas that very often the public administration does not know what to do and in this context they would be a precious resource.

Exhausted open-pit quarries and mines are the best bet; they could produce 3% of the national energy requirements, followed by landfills, contaminated areas and military sites.

In Sicily and in Sardinia some projects exploiting dismantled old industrial sites are already in place: damaged and polluted areas where Giant cane (Arundo donax) is grown.

The “From marginal to renewable energy sources sites” (M2RES) Project is also based on the recovery of degraded areas. The proposed system promotes the reduction of biofuel production costs, the quantity of water and fertilizers without compromising food resources available to consumers.

The project includes the use of autumn-sowing crops able to grow even with little water; soils normally unsuitable for the cultivation of food species (marginal and premontane areas); complete exploitation of by-products to increase energy efficiency using the same amount of water, herbicides, fertilizers and labour; rotation with some specific leguminous plants, also suitable to grow in dry farming conditions, to avoid organic matter depletion in the soil. It excludes soils where in the last three years human and animal food crops have been grown, those belonging to the Class I and II of the land capability classification as well as soils for quality crops, for organic crops or EU-protected labels.

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renewablematter 04. 2015

BUSINESS MODELS 1982 the myth of continued economic Reaching For Bygrowth was under severe strain and circular economy appeared as a a Circular Slot the new frontier. At first that dream was put

by Carlo Pesso

When they created the Product Life Institute in Geneva in 1982, Orio Giarini and Walter Stahel stood as lonesome cowboys exploring the newfound land of the circular economy. Indeed, during the 60’s and the 70’s, affluent Western economies had swept pre-industrial product reuse and material recycling practice into oblivion. Ever since, business models, product innovation, private consumption and the economy at large aimed for infinite growth and universal wealth.

Giant caterpillar excavators stand as the symbol of ever-moving boundaries of the linear economy incessantly claiming: new land for agriculture, more mineral resources for industries, additional roads to accelerate growth, extra landfills to host ever-increasing wastes... No need to be an expert to figure out that someday, some time, the economic bonanza may come to a halt. That is why the lonesome cowboys gathered their rope into a lasso and moved on to catch a more viable solution: the loop economy (see figure 1).1 To walk the talk, the Product Life Institute immediately spearheaded new business models and tested them. Among these, a venture initiated in the early 90’s with Winterthur, recycled spare parts from the insurer’s damaged cars park while creating new employment opportunities. Later that model spontaneously replicated and adapted across many countries.

Another, now familiar, case concerned laundry machines: it showed the advantages

1. Diagram published in “Jobs for Tomorrow, the Potential for Substituting Manpower for Energy”, online version: Stahel W. R., 1st ed., Vantage Press, New York 1981, based on the 1977 report to the European Commission

“The Potential for Substituting Manpower for Energy”, Walter Stahel and Genevieve Reday sketched the vision of an economy in loops and examined its impacts on job creation, economic competitiveness, resource savings and waste prevention.

aside. Today, 30 years down the road, enterprises meet in London to compare experiences of walk-the-talk circular business models. Their objective is to meet the challenges generated by ongoing global trends and, above all, to seize the novel opportunities.

Policy Figure 1 | Life-cycles of an industrial product

Products

Virgin Supply

Primary Base Materials

Reconditioning Loop

Secondary Materials

That is why the lonesome cowboys gathered their rope into a lasso and moved on to catch a more viable solution: the loop economy.

Carlo Pesso, Study Center Edizioni Ambiente.

2. See Le Moigne R., “Économie circulaire: les nouveaux ‘business models’”, in Note de veille, September 5, 2014, Futribles.

Product-Life Institute: www.product-life.org

Accenture’s report Circular Advantage: Innovative Business Models and Technologies to Create Value in a World without Limits to Growth is available online: tinyurl.com/lcr99xs

Circular Advantage Business Forum: innovation-forum.co.uk/ circular-economy.php

of “selling goods as services” in the shape of intensive shared utilisation. While most washing machines are designed to last about 15 years and deliver 3,000 washing cycles, semi-commercial washing machines now commonly used in launderettes are designed to deliver 30,000 cycles over the same period of time and consume water in a loop. Customers pay a fixed amount per washing cycle that includes operating costs (water, energy, space), as well as maintenance and repair costs.

More importantly, Stahel advocated that, by retaining the ownership of the goods they produced, companies would be able to increase their earnings. They would do so by selling services rather than goods. Thus, they would establish a continuous “relationship” with consumers, one that would ensure incomes on the longer term. By adopting such a business model, he argued, companies would eventually go out of their way to retain and maximise the embedded value of their products. However, until recently, only industrial product designers and academia stood as the supporters of the so-called cradle-to-cradle approach. It would take several more years, and the advent of the knowledge-based economy coupled with the outburst of the circular economy, for such an envisaged shift to become operational.

So much so, the first Circular Advantage Business forum, dedicated to applied business models pursuing the circular economy, took place in London on June 7-9, 2015.

Major companies such as Alzo Nobel, Dell, Philips, Veolia, Hp, Carlsberg, Interface, Marks

Use

Disposal

Recycling Loop

& Spencer and several more, convened to discuss and share experience on how to implement new circular models. Accenture Strategy consultants provided backbone analysis and outlined emerging models based on research released in 2014. Companies show-cased how they tapping new revenue streams, reducing costs and risks, strengthening their relationship to consumers and reaching for the fuzzy concept of “sustainable growth” with much determination.

So it comes as no surprise that specialists in emerging trends, such as the Paris based Futuribles, spotted and pinned down the ongoing far-reaching change.2 The Accenture research mentioned above involved interviewing over 50 executives and reviewing 150 case studies of the circular economy, and established that, today, you may look at the Circular Economy (CE) in terms of five fairly distinct business models.

1. The first among the novel business models embraces the circular supply chain; it comprises companies that provide renewable, recyclable, or biodegradable inputs as substitutes for linear ones. Such enterprises have identified a business opportunity in finding new materials that can replace single life-cycle inputs. Akso Nobel’s development of bio-based chemicals stands as an example of such an approach, as in the case of bio-based coatings for food-packaging.

Alzo Nobel set itself very ambitious sustainability targets. It measures progress made at achieving these targets along the entire chain and not only through its own operations, i.e. from oil and gas extraction to the disposal of products. In practical terms, this means that the company involves its suppliers, customers and their own suppliers and customers. Bio-based coating for food packaging is an example. In 2014, Akso Nobel introduced a new technology that allows paper cups for cold drinks to be fully recyclable.

Although the company supplies a very small component of the final product (the paper cup), the new coating has made a difference for its clients.

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renewablematter 04. 2015

It is about looking at waste as a resource, about returning bio-products from the manufacturing process, or about the classic recycling or upcycling of materials.

Google’s Project Ara, www.projectara.com

Webinar “Circular business model strategy, how to create one and is it worth the effort?”, youtu.be/93bMKbh4rHE

2. The second business model is based on resource recovery; strictly speaking, it has been around for decades. It is based on material recycling and industrial symbiosis, and is triggered by companies that recover value from outputs generated either from their own operations or from different parts of the value chain. It creates new sources of value for those companies receiving the materials.

In other words, it is about looking at waste as a resource, about returning bio-products from the manufacturing process, or about the classic recycling or upcycling of materials.

For instance, one GM plant recycles about 90% of its manufacturing waste and, by doing so, has developed a landfill-free manufacturing process. Today it generates over a billion annual revenues by reselling the by-products of the manufacturing process.

Similarly, another Akso Nobel project looks at waste as a resource. Because much of the company’s waste is either landfilled or incinerated, the decision was taken to look at ways to convert discarded materials into useful raw materials. Hence, waste gasifier technology and technology to extract base chemicals from the resulting gas is under development.

Resulting products are to become the raw materials that will feed into chemicals and coatings operations.

Developing such an innovative solution implies much collaboration among different companies along the chain in terms of expertise, knowledge and capital. While one company develops the gasification technology, another supplies and handles the waste, typically a waste management company, a third company produces the chemicals by extracting them from the gas.

Overall, it is quite a complex business model to develop, but a necessary one to ensure that Akso Nobel is first on this slot of the CE. 3. The third model proves how Mr. Walter Stahel’s intuition and understanding of the new frontiers of the CE were correct: it is about product-life extension, i.e. extending the working life-cycle of products and components by repairing, upgrading and reselling products.

It means shifting the emphasis of businesses from volume sales targets towards performance and the durability of products. Google’s Project Ara provides a good example. Ara is developing a modular mobile phone that allows any consumer to replace parts and aspects of the mobile phone to extend both its life and its durability.

4. The fourth CE business model emanates from the sharing economy based on sharing platforms. A direct result of the IT revolution, that reaps a series of previously unimaginable economies of scale, it draws on the idea of using digital platforms for renting, sharing, swapping, lending, gifting, bartering products and services.

Effectively it allows increasing the velocity

and the utility of an extremely vast array of assets. Indeed, today, most assets are under-utilised: nearly 80% of things stored in a typical home are used less than once a month and, as most of us will have noticed, 97% of the time cars sit parked and are unused while they occupy the common ground. This is how we can get more velocity and utility from resources. The impact of AirB&B in increasing the utility of people’s homes provides a good example of how such a model is pervasive.

Meanwhile new models of sharing platforms continue to blossom.

5. The shift from products to services, where consumers can lease products or pay-per-use, underpins the fifth and last model termed as the functional economy. Again, the lonesome cowboys we met at the beginning of our journey through these novel CE business models, proved they were following the right path towards the future. The functional economy opens a market for all those companies or individuals who want or need greater flexibility in usage, rather than ownership, of the asset.

What was often strictly contained within the boundaries of neighbourhood relations and economics is now accessible and tradable.

In addition, this is yet another way to get much greater utility from the resources employed.

At a business level, Philips’ lighting service and Michelin, which is offering tyres as a service, based on a very innovative model where a consumer can pay per miles driven, are following this path.

At this point, it is worthwhile taking a closer look at the breakthrough model developed by Philips to deliver lighting to its customers. Marcel Jacobs, the company’s Director of supplier sustainability, participated in the webinar leading to the London Forum Innovation.

On this occasion, he described in some detail how his company is moving towards a circular model. For Philips, the path from linear to circular does not represent an extension of the usual way of doing business. Indeed, because of the great variety of products the company puts on the market, the ongoing shift implies the development of brand new areas of competence. These new areas must be able to meet global trends both in terms of challenges and, more importantly, in terms of opportunities.

Diminishing availability of resources, associated price increases, and the expansion of the planetary middle class stand as the major challenges. So the next obvious question becomes: how can Philips benefit from meeting these challenges? To answer these interconnected questions, a number of other relevant trends were included. Among these the advent of “big data”, i.e. the ability to know more about the company’s clients to identify the most significant patterns of consumer

Policy Shifting the emphasis of businesses from volume sales targets towards performance and the durability of products.

There is no standard fits all. Is pretty much learning by doing, this whilst looking and tackling the numerous challenges that continue to appear on the path towards the circular economy.

behaviour. For instance, it allows having a better picture of lighting needs in buildings and other infrastructure. Furthermore, Philips itself may become a provider of “big data” with positive fallout effects on other businesses.

Another intriguing trend lies in ongoing changing consumption patterns and how to deal with them. The implications are numerous and far-reaching. For example, the shift from owning a product to accessing a product affects both product development and product maintenance. Besides, it implies moving from the concept of transaction to that of relationship. All of this has led to considerable testing of possible innovations and about ways to do business differently.

As a consequence, and as will be described later, a very strong need to foster collaboration and partnerships has arisen. Moreover, this is only a starting point.

Moving from the notion of “product” to that of “product as service” represents a fundamental change in the direction of reducing resource use.

Accordingly, Philips has identified four essential enablers to make it happen.

1. Change the business model. As already pointed out, moving from a product sales model to “use as a service” model has far reaching implications. The main shift is in thinking in terms of five, ten, maybe even fifteen years long contracts. This is very new ground for a manufacturing company. For instance, it is important to understand what happens in terms of warranties. Also, monitoring what kind of impact your novel service-product has over time, and verifying the service you provide meets the requirements of the customer, needs that appropriate key performance indicators (KPIs) be developed. In turn, the new KPIs need to be built-in the new business model.

2. Reinforce design. Yes, the second key enabler is about design. If you start selling a product as a service, you have to be able to verify whether you are selling the right product. Since Philips owns the product over its entire lifespan, it needs to know if it has enough details about its performance and its usage over time, if it knows how to maintain it properly, if it can later come up with a different technology or solution.

Again, all of these issues need to be solved in the product design phase.

3. Foster partnerships and collaboration.

A practical example will best describe such enabler. Take the case of parking lighting or office lights. Generally, Philips products are sold to an installer who mounts the product in a building, then the owner of the building has some sort of facility management contract with a company, which in turn has some kind of contract with a maintenance company

to take care of the product and its performance.

By offering a lighting service, Philips enters that market and suddenly becomes a much more important player. One that may affect the other companies. Hence the need to develop a mutually beneficial partnerships through collaboration. The issue becomes: who are the right partners? Thus, it becomes essential to develop criteria to establish who the right partner is, what a right partner is, and how to maintain the relationship in the long run.

At least this sounds familiar! So it comes as no surprise that, to achieve this, it is imperative to be open and transparent with its partners. This includes the customer who needs to fully appreciate the short and long term benefits of having the best quality of light on his premises.

4. Develop reverse logistics. The fourth enabler lies in talking upfront a very new business issue, namely that of reverse logistics.

A product lasting 10 to 15 years poses a completely new set of questions: what happens at the end of life of the product? Can it be taken back for upgrading? Can the product be reinstalled later? Eventually, may it be installed in a different location? What can be done with its components, and how does this tie in to the innovation cycle?

To what extent can critical components be recovered, and can these be used within a new product, or will they sent back into the material recycling loop? These are some of the issues Philips is dealing with. To make things even more challenging, not every customer can be satisfied with the same solution. There is no standard fits all.

Philips is pretty much learning by doing, this whilst looking and tackling the numerous challenges that continue to appear on the path towards the circular economy.

Over thirty years down the road since the creation of the Product Life Institute, the novel business models Giarini and Stahel had put on the drawing boards are now being refined, implemented and diffused by all forward-looking companies. Coupled with the digital revolution and based on partnerships, these models are paving the way for the advent of a mixture of sharing economy and green economy, one that takes responsibility for its impacts, whether they are social or environmental. Such are the business models adopted by the companies that have no intention to be swept away by the legacies of the linear economy.

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renewablematter 04. 2015

Ecological Debt’s Hidden War Increases Tensions in the MEDITERRANEAN AREA From 1961 to 2010, the ecological footprint of the entire region increased by more than 211%. At best, its biocapacity only provides half of the natural resources and services used, meaning that the rest must be imported.

There is another public debt resting on our shoulders. It is neither less dangerous nor lighter than the financial one. Above all, it is completely out of control. It increases every year, especially because we are partly not aware of it or largely underestimate its importance, thus persisting in adopting choices that cause and worsen it.

by Alessandro Farruggia

This public debt, hidden to most, is the ecological debt. Its evaluation is possible thanks to the introduction in the early 90’s by Mathis Wackernagel and William Rees of the Ecological Footprint Accounting (EFA): a tool to calculate the ecological balance sheet of our nations and the entire planet. Ecological footprint and biocapacity are just two components of the ecological balance sheet. It is a simple mechanism. A country’s ecological footprint is determined by its average consumption level, by how heavy such consumption is in terms of natural resources and services and population. In other words, the ecological footprint in an indicator of the anthropic stress.

On the other hand, a country’s biocapacity is determined by two factors: the surface of its biologically-productive land and water and their

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William Faden, Composite Mediterranean, 1785

Policy

Alessandro Farruggia is a member of the editorial staff of Quotidiano Nazionale in Rome where he deals mainly with the environment and foreign affairs. Since the late 80’s, he has covered the main international meetings on environmental issues. For his report on Antarctica, he won the Saint Vincent Prize for Journalism.

level of biological productivity. In fact, a vast land surface and coastline do not guarantee a high biocapacity. They must be in good conditions and biologically productive.

It is clear that a hectare of forest or agricultural land at medium latitudes is more productive than a hectare of savannah or steppe.

A vast expanse of desert has a very low biocapacity. Anyway, the relationship between ecological footprint and biocapacity is unescapable. If a country’s consumption of natural resources is greater than the capacity of its biological systems to replenish them, an ecological deficit occurs, comparable to what happens with a financial deficit when costs exceed revenues.

Galli A., H. Martin, N. Grunewald, “Physical limits to resource access and utilisation and their economic implications in Mediterranean economies”, Environmental Science & Policy, v. 51, August 2015; doi:10.1016/j. envsci.2015.04.002

The studies carried out by Wackernagel and Rees show that a country can end up in an ecological deficit for three reasons: excessive use of resources, import of renewable resources that it does not produce sufficiently or disruption of the carbon footprint. Only if its ecological footprint is lower than the capacity of its ecosystems to regenerate natural resources and services the country does not end up in an ecological deficit. Otherwise, the “fuel warning light” comes on. And this is true for most of our planet. Particularly in the most populated areas, those in sensitive

ecosystems or with energy-intensive societies.

This is the case with the Mediterranean area that, as shown by a study by Alessandro Galli, Martin Halle and Nicole Grunewald for the Global Footprint Network in Geneva, is characterized by a worrying trend towards a structural ecological deficit. “Our conclusions” the authors remark, “are that the Mediterranean region actually uses two and a half times more natural resources and ecological services than its ecosystems are able to produce.

When consumption exceeds the local natural systems’ capacity, the only possible solution where people are not prepared to cut consumption is to import to meet demand.

This is precisely what the Mediterranean region has been doing for some time now.”

Anthropic stress is very high. In the countries bordering the Mediterranean Sea, from 1961 to 2010, the per capita demand of resources and services increased by 24%. At the same time, the region’s ecological footprint of production increased by 54% and its population by 102%: a real boom, especially in the Southern Mediterranean countries. This caused an increase of the entire region’s footprint of more than 211%.

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renewablematter 04. 2015 Of course, not all indicators are negative. Thanks to improvements in agricultural practices, the net biocapacity increased, but only by 59%. However, the population increase frustrated this progress because per capita biocapacity decreased by 21% from 1961 to 2010. Our natural systems are more productive but not enough to sustain us. Some could argue that in the long period a biocapacity increase is not always a positive result because it entails using unsuitable and marginal lands as well as detrimental agricultural practices. This means that what (as little as it might be) looks good in the short run is not necessarily so in the long term and could lead to a productivity decline. But even leaving this aside and taking into consideration the positive increase of the biocapacity, the Mediterranean region is in dire straits.

“The Mediterranean region” the authors affirm, “was already in a deficit situation in 1961 and now its deficit has grown considerably. Currently, the region’s biocapacity only provides at best half of the natural resources and services used. This means that the rest must be imported, first of all from the US, China and other non-Mediterranean European countries”. Of the 24 countries analysed in Galli, Halle and Grunewald’s work, the 5 countries that contribute the most to the ecological deficit are France, Italy, Spain, Turkey and Egypt; together they are responsible for 73% of the demand. Despite the marked effects of the financial crisis, noticeable in the comparison between 2007 and 2009, stress is still very high.

Ecological footprint of production activities in countries overlooking the Mediterranean (1961-2010)

1961

2010

+54% in 49 years

Moreover, the crisis and the ensuing GDP collapse are certainly not a structural solution to this problem. When the economic cycle will turn, stress will start increasing again if different policies are not adopted.

In 2010, all the countries of the Mediterranean region were in ecological deficit. Those with the biggest ecological footprint are France (4.7) followed by Slovenia (4.6), Italy and Portugal (4.5), Greece and Malta (4.4) and Cyprus (4.2). At the other end of the spectrum, we find the virtuous ones: Palestine, Morocco, Syria and Montenegro.

As we can see, all these countries are less developed. They use less not because they have decided so but because they cannot afford too much consumerism.

The other factor is biocapacity. The countries with the highest biocapacity are France, Croatia, Slovenia, Bosnia Herzegovina and Montenegro, while those with low biocapacity are Palestine, Israel, Jordan, Cyprus and Lebanon penalized by water scarcity. But even the virtuous ones have very little to celebrate. In fact, it must be pointed out that from 1961 to 2010, ecosystems’ capacity to satisfy the demand at per capita level decreased in all 24 countries and can only satisfy it in percentages that vary from 84% in Croatia, to 64% in France, 58% in Turkey, 35% in Spain, 32% in Greece, 22% in Italy and less than 10% in Cyprus, Israel and Lebanon. The dependence on resource imports jumped from 21% in 1961 to the current 50%. It varies from 29% in Turkey, to 32% in Morocco, 33% in Albania, 35% in Croatia, 39% in France, 53% in Spain, 60% in Greece, 72% in Italy, jumping to 85% in Lebanon, 88% in Israel and 90% in Malta. And it is not just a strictly ecological problem. This situation exposes Mediterranean countries, especially those relying heavily on imports, to market volatility and price dynamics, particularly those of raw materials that over the last decade have shown a marked upward trend. From 2000 to 2008, the World Bank commodity price index more than tripled in real terms for food, produce, metal and minerals.

Countries with an ecological deficit are more exposed.

The need to reduce the ecological footprint is both an environmental and financial necessity.

The environment health and correct balance of resources exploitation prevent the loss of assets that we should hand down to future generations, but at the same time they are a means to avoid being exposed to price shocks and geopolitical crisis caused by the overreliance on imports of goods – for example energy and minerals – concentrated in some countries. The price for the unscrupulous use of resources is twofold.

It is both environmentally wrong and financially reckless and unstainable in the long term.

Economists should understand that even with natural resources “there ain’t no such thing as a free lunch.”

Case Histories

Case Histories

by Giorgio Lonardi

$655 Million for Fairtrade Food This is the amount allocated to food sustainability by the Global Alliance for the Future of Food, a coalition of 20 of the most important global philanthropic foundations. “Today, philanthropy makes all the difference not so much for the economic resources it allocates but for the innovation it brings” Giuseppe Guzzetti, Fondazione Cariplo Chairman, explains.

Giorgio Lonardi is a financial and economic journalist.

Big global philanthropic foundations are determinedly committed to support research promoting sustainability in the agricultural and food industry of the future. This has been highlighted in a study commissioned by the Global Alliance for the Future of Food (GAFF), a coalition bringing together 20 of the most important global philanthropic foundations.

GAFF coalition (including Bill and Belinda Gates Foundation, W. K. Kellogg Foundation, French Agropolis Fondation and Italian Fondazione Cariplo) commits $5.13 billion yearly for their activities of which 12.8% – amounting to $655 million – is allocated to sustainable food and agriculture initiatives. A range of activities, based on pure circular economy

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renewablematter 04. 2015

Carlo Mango

70% of the world’s poor people lives in rural areas. […].

The issue of the sustainability of the future food system is important for a big slice of the world’s population.

logic, not limited, albeit very important, to deal just with issues such as food waste, separate collection and waste reuse. It raises the bar, adopting more ambitious goals: from economic and environmental sustainability in the agriculture of the future to educating people to a culture linking food and health.

Presented in Milan on 18th and 19th May within the “Global Alliance for the Future of Food International Dialogue” hosted by Fondazione Cariplo, GAFF research highlights that 70% of the world’s poor lives in rural areas.

It is also impressive to discover that at global level there are 500 million small farms sustaining 2 billion people. If we add the fact that there are 564 million women working in agriculture, we understand how important the issue of the sustainability of the future food system is for a big slice of the world’s population. But this is not enough. Two days later, always in Milan and thanks to Fondazione Cariplo, there was a meeting of the European Foundation Centre attended by its 270 European members and 700 delegates to discuss sustainable growth.

And so?

The two meetings in Milan determined the role of what is internationally known as the “Milan’s Model”, built piece by piece by Cariplo.

A system based both on scientific research for a sustainable agricultural and food industry and on the ability to spread the research’s results in order to “change people and operators’ behaviour for the better”, Giuseppe Guzzetti, Fondazione Cariplo Chairman, explains. In addition, he states, “Today, philanthropy makes all the difference not so much for the economic resources it allocates but for the innovation it brings. In a period when the international community’s attention is focused on Milan for Expo 2015, GAFF Dialogue is also an opportunity to give prominence to the contribution that foundations can give in shifting

“AGER’s aim was to support research in those sectors representing Italian food excellence: from grains to fruit and vegetables, wine and livestock industries.”

food and agriculture systems towards greater sustainability, security, and equity”.

Guzzetti’s words are based on a series of experiences that have enriched the Foundation’s body of knowledge. “The latest example” recounts Carlo Mango, Head of Fondazione Cariplo Scientific Research Area, “is the partnership with Milan’s Municipality to define the food policy for the City of Milan.

Starting with mapping the city’s services and sectors dealing with food and diet”.

An analysis that involved the Foundation researchers together with other actors such as the Association for Economy and Sustainability (Està). It is a very specialized job that on the one hand helped to single out all major stakeholders amongst the citizens in the agribusiness production and food distribution, and on the other focused on the fruition of food by citizens.

It thus creates a complex panorama where 78% of Milanese prefer to shop in supermarkets, a choice that lives side by side with over 80 ethical purchasing groups, as emerged from the research. In Milan, 100,000 households live in relative poverty, while, on average, every family wastes nearly €400 of shopping a year. Let alone childhood obesity, involving 7.2% of children aged between 8 and 9.

In this context, as Mango states, “The role of research has not just been to look into the fabric of society, thus highlighting the role and contribution that stakeholders can play and offer, but also to give Milanese the tools to partake in the definition of city policies”. The objective, therefore, is not only to ask ourselves what the future role of Milano Ristorazione (the largest public European catering company able to cook 85,000 meals a day) will be, but to involve the Milanese civil society in this and other issues. Between 2014 and 2015, they gathered together on various occasions to single out problems and suggest solutions for the definition of the urban food policy. Target: to approve

Case Histories

a strategy defining the way in which food will be produced, distributed and consumed in Milan in the next coming years.

The urban food policy is a major piece of the puzzle to embrace the international challenge. On 16th October 2015, World Food Day, in Milan, The Urban Food Policy Act will be signed an international pact involving over 40 cities. An important achievement led by mayor Giuliano Pisapia, with an aim to make the urban food system more equitable and sustainable. Of a certain importance is also a series of challenges about the Foundations’ system. But now let’s take a step back to 2008, when the AGER project was launched by Fondazione Cariplo.

“Seven years ago”, Mango recalls, “we coordinated the launch of AGER, a partnership made of as many as 13 Italian foundations. Its aim was to support research in those sectors representing Italian food excellence: from grains to fruit and vegetables, wine and livestock industries”. AGER planned to grant over €25 million through public competitions to 16 projects involving 46 national universities and research centres. From the very start, the strategic objectives of the initiatives included the development of technologies able

Info www.fondazionecariplo.it/it/index.html

to combine high yields and environmental and health protection. As a result, for example, a new process for the production of ham was adopted, employing 25% less salt. This is further corroborated by a package of innovative solutions for pear cultivation, with a low environmental impact disease protection system.

The success of the first initiative paved the way for AGER2, a second project created by 9 foundations that allocates €7 million to four sectors: aquaculture, olives and oil, mountain agriculture and dairy products. The first calls for tender for such initiatives will be presented on 16th July at Expo 2015. But there is more.

At an international level, Fondazione Cariplo is collaborating with other European foundations to launch a new initiative supporting the agribusiness sector in the Mediterranean area. The foundations include French Agropolis “with which we have already promoted two calls for tender for research projects on grains over the last few years” concludes Mango, “with an aim to improve grain production while safeguarding environmental as well as human resources. Thanks to these initiatives we allocated €4 million to 8 projects, involving 43 institutes from France, Italy and developing countries”.

On 16th October 2015, World Food Day, in Milan, The Urban Food Policy Act will be signed an international pact involving over 40 cities.

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renewablematter 04. 2015

The Bioeconomy Gets to the Fridge: Packaging is 100% Biobased Food packaging becomes green too – with benefits for consumers, the environment and businesses. Northern European countries are leading the way, but big American companies like Coca-Cola and Heinz are also playing their part.

ŠTetra Pak

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Mario Bonaccorso is a finance and economic journalist. He works for ASSOBIOTEC, the Italian Association for the development of biotechnology.

Beer in wooden bottles, milk in cartons produced with residues of sugar cane, drinks in PET cans made from organic resources.

The future of packaging – and in some cases the present – is 100% biobased.

This revolution led by the food industry is based on reducing the environmental footprint, developing ecofriendly products and increasing recycling.

It looks like the system is a win-win for all: the industry abandons the use of fossil fuels and reduces the volumes and weight of products on supermarket shelves, consumers are happy with the increased ecosustainability, governments obtain results in the reduction of greenhouse gases.

Info www.tetrapak.com

Northern European countries are the leaders in this new era of packaging made from renewable sources. Swedish Tetra Pak has recently introduced on the market Tetra Rex®, which comes entirely from renewable sources: a packaging produced exclusively with paper and polymers derived from vegetable sources, which was also honoured by the Italian Packaging Institute for its innovative

©Tetra Pak

by Mario Bonaccorso

composition. Just as with certified paper Forest Stewardship Council™ (FSC™), the polymers’ origin can be entirely traced and this has gained the packaging the highest biobased certification level by Vinçotte, an internationally renowned certification body. The vegetable-derived polymers used by Tetra Pak are produced by the Brazilian biochemical company Braskem, which obtains the raw material from sugar cane grown on degraded soil.

Tetra Pak Rex® cartons are already used by big dairy companies such as the Finnish Valio and the Danish Arla to sell milk-based drinks.

This is just the first step, since Valio decided to use 100% renewably-sourced Tetra Pack sealing systems for all its gable top packaging.

Tetra Pak is already negotiating with dairy companies in different parts of the world to launch this container. “We estimate – the Danish multinational states – that, considering the whole life cycle of the product, the choice of bio-polyethylene compared to fossil fuel derived polyethylene reduces our carbon footprint by 20-35%”.

The Dutch FrieslandCampina, one of the world’s five biggest dairy companies with an annual income of 11.3 billion euros, plans to introduce to the market a new biobased carton for drinks in the next year and a half. The cap and coating will be made with material derived from certified organic waste, which will add to an already renewable carton. This innovation – the company promises – will make the new drink packaging the most sustainable on the Dutch market, with a carbon footprint 20% lower than current packaging.

“In the last few years – says Berndt Kodden, CEO of FrieslandCampina – our drink cartons have gone through a sustainable evolution.

We are now proud to reach a new target: a biobased milk carton through which we invest in the transition towards the use of renewable raw materials and the achievement of a circular economy”. The biobased packaging is provided by Norwegian company Elopak, property of Ferd Group, one of the biggest private Norwegian industrial groups. Its biobased cartons are ISCC PLUS certified (International Sustainability and Carbon Certification System), an international certification system for biomass and biofuels.

Moving from milk to beer, we remain in Scandinavia. Carlsberg has recently announced that the packaging line for its new beer will be made with sustainable wooden fiber.

Thanks to a collaboration with EcoXpac – a company which develops and produces sustainable packaging systems – with the Danish Innovation Fund and with the Technical University of Denmark, the Danish company will bring to the market the first biodegradable bottle of its kind: the “Green fiber bottle”.

Its main characteristic is that all of it,

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renewablematter 04. 2015 including the cap, can be recycled or will decompose naturally.

Beer fans however can rest assured: the new container will not alter taste and quality.

On the contrary – Håkon Langen, senior Packaging Innovation Manager promises – beer will stay fresh longer than the traditional aluminium can permits.

As far as plastic is concerned, we are coming close to a bottle that is made entirely from renewable sources. Big American multinationals such as Coca-Cola and H. J. Heinz are working on it, and in 2012 they formed – together with Ford Motor, Nike and Procter & Gamble – a strategic working group (Plant PET Technology Collaborative) to speed up the development and use of 100% biobased PET in their products.

The traditional PET (polyethylene terephthalate) used to produce normal plastic bottles is today used in many other products: from clothing to shoes, to textiles for the automotive industry. That is why Nike and Ford are also interested in the development of a biobased PET. The collaboration is based on the packaging technology PlantBottle developed by Coca-Cola, which is already partly produced from an organic source and has shown to have

a minor environmental impact compared to traditional PET plastic bottles.

In 2013, those American companies were joined by European companies Unilever, Nestlé and Danone, to form the Bioplastic Feedstock Alliance together with WWF. The aim is to develop a bioplastic which is respectful of the use of soil, food security and biodiversity.

Together with Coca-Cola, Danone has started a partnership with Dutch biotech company Avantium to produce biobased plastic bottles from renewable material, which do not represent a threat to food resources.

Avantium, a spin-off of oil company Royal Dutch Shell, uses a chemical-catalytic technology called YXY to convert organic-based materials into chemical substances from renewable sources and in bioplastics like PEF, a 100% biobased polyester with better blocking, thermal and mechanical characteristics than packaging materials currently on the market.

Trials in a pilot plant have proved positive.

The next step is to create the first plant on a commercial scale. This target is not far away, thanks to a €36 million funding received a year ago by a group of investors, including Danone and Coca-Cola.

For detailed information on “Green fiber bottle”: tinyurl.com/ocamhx9

Info www.bioplasticfeedstock alliance.org

Interview

“These are the Results Achieved in only four Years”

©Tetra Pak

Mario Abreu, Vicepresident for the Environment, Tetra Pak

When we talk about food packaging the first thing that comes to mind is Tetra Pak. The Swedish giant is the world leader in solutions for food treatment and packaging.

In 2013 it sold over 178 billion containers in over 170 countries worldwide.

In this interview Mario Abreu, Vicepresident for the Environment, talks about Tetra Pak’s commitment towards an ever more sustainable packaging, bioeconomy and circular economy.

What is the business of Tetra Pak within the bio-based packaging?

Tetra Rex® Bio-based is the world’s first fully renewable package for liquid food. Following its successful introduction with Finnish dairy Valio, Tetra Rex Bio-based is now being rolled out to Tetra Pak customers worldwide. This includes the likes of Arla, which has already launched its Eko brand of milk in Tetra Rex Bio-based cartons.

Tetra Rex Bio-based is manufactured using paper, itself a renewable material, which is coated with polyethylene layers made from low-density polyethylene (LDPE) sourced from sugar cane.

The package also incorporates a high-density polyethylene (HDPE) cap made from sugar cane.

Like the Forest Stewardship Council™ (FSC™) certified paperboard, the plastics can be traced back to a renewable origin. This has resulted in the package receiving the highest category of bio-based certification from Vincotte, the internationally-recognised assessment body according to the OK Bio-based scheme.

What are your goals for the coming years?

We started our journey to bio-based plastics with the introduction of bio-based caps in 2011 and the bio-based laminate of our packs produced in Brazil. Then, last year we launched the Tetra Rex® Bio-based for chilled products.

We will continuously look at ways to increase the use of bio-based plastics across our portfolio of products. We are also planning further launches of the new Tetra Rex Bio-based in other regions, based on demand.

Is there now a demand from consumers for new forms of more environmentallysustainable packaging?

ŠTetra Pak

Case Histories

Info www.okcompost.be

The use of bio-based plastic produced from sugar cane, instead of petroleum-based plastic, contributes to the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions.

Our portfolio is largely based on renewable resources given paperboard makes up the biggest proportion of each of our packages. By introducing a fully renewable package, we took another step towards our commitment for renewable products, reducing the use of fossil-based materials.

We prioritised Europe as a region which has strong demand for both chilled packages and sustainable packaging. Customer interest in the new Tetra Rex has been very high, reflecting the growing demand from consumers for environmentally friendly packaging. By providing packaging made from bio-based plastic we can help our customers in meeting their needs and achieve their goal towards sustainable growth, while also providing consumers with products that have a strong environmental profile.

Consumers want to know that the package in their hands is truly sustainable. For the Tetra Rex Bio-based, the physical contents of the package can be traced back to their origin and consumers can see that each package is derived almost entirely from plants.

The FSC certification also provides consumers with assurance that the paper fibres come from well-managed forests and other controlled wood sources.

Is it possible for the food & beverage industry to be sustainable and continue to be competitive?

By increasing the use of renewable materials in our products, we are ensuring the availability of materials in the future, thereby securing future supply of raw materials and reducing the total environmental footprint of our products. The use of bio-based plastic produced from sugar cane,

instead of petroleum-based plastic, contributes to the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions.

Today’s market price for bio-based plastic is higher than fossil based plastic, due to higher raw material costs and limited availability from suppliers. However, over time we expect bio-based PE prices to come down to the same level. This will help us to deliver long term growth and sustainability, rather than short term profits. It is our goal to offer our customers packages using bio-based materials at the most competitive prices possible.

What is the bioeconomy in your opinion?

And what is the circular economy?

The bioeconomy involves production using renewable resources to create food, materials and bio-based packaging and bio-energy.

Renewable resources, such as oxygen, fresh water, solar energy, wood, and biomass are all naturally occurring and replenish themselves.

Responsible sourcing is crucial for the Circular Economy, and we are very active in this area.

We have very clear certification systems for our paperboard through FSC Chain of Custody and we are currently looking at ways to expand the uptake of credible certification for bio-polymers. In the area of aluminium, we participate in the ASI (Aluminium Stewardship Initiative), alongside 14 other companies and a number of NGOs, to set credible standards for the production of aluminium.

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renewablematter 04. 2015 Interview

From Biobased Packaging to a Tomato-Based Ford As far as the food industry is concerned, the commitment towards the bioeconomy and circular economy is not limited to the use of packaging that comes entirely from renewable sources, but is also related to the reduction of food waste and its use for new bioproducts. Heinz is a model in this respect: the American Ketchup multinational (650 million bottles sold every year) – which last march announced its merger with Kraft Foods to create a giant with a 28 billion dollars global revenue – is, on the one hand, working towards the use of completely biobased plastics, while on the other, together with Ford, is involved in developing engine protection parts through mixing plastic matter with residues of processed tomatoes.

In this interview, we talk to Massimo Zonca, Group Leader – Global Packaging and Execution, of the company whose headquarters are based in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

When will we be able to go to the supermarket and buy a ketchup bottle 100% made from renewable sources?

“At the moment, 30% of the material of Heinz ‘plant-bottle®’ comes from renewable materials (residues from sugar cane processing), with which the ethylene glycol is produced. The remaining part necessary to produce the 100% biobased PET

©Heinz

©Heinz

Massimo Zonca, Group Leader – Global Packaging Innovation and Execution, at H. J. Heinz

is already available in theory, as its processes have been defined. However, at the moment the costs and complexities are such that it is not possible to launch it in the short term. Given the current economic context, it is likely that by 2020 the launch of a plant bottle completely produced from renewable sources will be sustainable from all points of view.”

Heinz is heavily investing to obtain an ever more biobased packaging. What are the main objectives that you have in mind?

“In addition to the important commitment on rigid plastic (ketchup bottle) we are evaluating areas of intervention for flexible material (flow pack for biscuits, snacks, pasta, flours, food powders) and for lids sealed on the jars and plastic bottles’ necks (sauces, meals, babyfood, fruit juices, drinks). Our trials have provided interesting results in relation to shelf life, taking into account that it is necessary to abandon traditional barrier materials (foil and other polymer barriers).

In this case, the difference will be made not only by the biobased market (which needs to reach a critical mass so as to guarantee an economic return) but also by a change in consumers’ habits, by logistics and retailers, provided that it will be impossible to guarantee the same shelf life that barrier materials provide today.

In November 2013, you created the Bioplastic Feedstock Alliance together with Nestlé, Danone, Unilever, P&G, Ford, The Coca-Cola Company, Nike e WWF. What unites industrial groups from such different sectors?

“What unites us all is the awareness that the use of oil to produce plastic materials has a significant impact on biodiversity, the climate and other natural systems. A more sustainable management of natural resources is therefore necessary (given that they are finite): finding alternatives to oil has become an imperative for both businesses and the environment.”

What are the common challenges? What are the objectives of this alliance?

“The main challenge is to increase the critical mass for the use of biobased materials, thus increasing the opportunities for producing plastics from renewable materials. The main objectives of the alliance are reducing the cost of biobased raw materials and speeding up the development and use of 100% biobased material, PET in particular.”

©BBDO Guerrero, Proximity Philippines – WWF, 2011

Case Histories

“We need a more sustainable management of natural resources (which are finite): finding alternatives to oil is an imperative for both businesses and the environment.”

In the production process for your ketchup you use two million tons of tomatoes every year.

What can be done today with the residues of this process?

“This idea came up inside the Pittsburgh R&D, where drying and processing systems had been used for some time – in particular for skin – to reduce residues’ volume and weight and reuse them in agriculture. As part of the collaboration on the plant-bottle, other ideas were generated to potentially reuse waste.”

At what stage is the common project with Ford to use part of this waste to create tomato-based plastics for the American producer’s new cars?

“The trials for the production of engine protection parts through mixing plastics with processed/dried residues have produced good results. Today Ford has a technology that allows a reduction in the use of plastic materials for these car parts, replacing them with vegetable fibers obtained from residues of tomato processing.”

Is it really possible for businesses to be sustainable and continue to be competitive on the market? Is there a demand from consumers for biobased products? And are they willing to pay more to have them?

“For businesses, the environment and sustainability are fundamental factors: attention to the environment and the definition of sustainable industrial processes are not only a matter of complying to regulations, rather they have become an imperative in many productive contexts.

They are also a very interesting business, as they provide opportunities never explored before whose

primary result is the safeguard of the environment and natural resources. About 15% of consumers and different retailers are already highly oriented towards biobased products, even though we can’t deny that not everybody is willing to pay more for this. It is however a growing trend and we need to take that into account.”

Do you use a specific labelling system for biobased products?

“Yes, the label indications specifying the biobased characteristics are critical and represent an important communication part so that consumers get the positive message. All this is part of a proper marketing strategy: from images to descriptions to graphics, there is a whole new world out there.

And in a digital world like ours these comprehensive messages can be communicated through smartphones and social networks.

This will certainly help in stimulating consumers’ interest in environmental-ecological and sustainability aspects.”

In a nutshell, how do you imagine packaging in ten years?

“Light, essential/sustainable, smart and... flexible.

Yes, I believe that flexible packaging has better changes of growth compared to rigid packaging for reasons that have to do with services and transport convenience. Obviously, rigid plastic and glass will maintain their influence, but consumers will increasingly appreciate the essentiality of packaging. In terms of communication as well, flexible packaging will always offer better opportunities and I believe that marketing will use this possibility to its best.”

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by Sergio Ferraris

The MÖBIUS Strip Italy ranks fourth in Europe for the use of recycled paper and is pushing waste collection based on the proximity principle: the average distance from the recycling plant is 17.3 km. Italy is no longer an importer but rather an exporter of pulp paper.

Paper history is linked to resources.

Already in the 18th century, in Europe, paper experienced the “rags crisis” – the then raw material – and later the extraction of cellulose from wood was discovered. Since then the paper race has known no hurdles. From the first dailies to the mass distribution of books, from packaging to today’s special uses, paper has been one of the products that has characterized the past two centuries, albeit posing serious environmental problems.

Producing an ever-increasing quantity of paper has led to more and more chemicals being used, high energy costs, but more importantly to the need to extract great quantities of cellulose from wood to cope with the market demand. All this pushed the industry – occasionally anticipating the environmentalists’ appeals – to develop methods and practices to recycle paper.

M.C. Escher’s Möbius Strip II, 1963 ©2015 The M.C. Escher Company-The Netherlands. All rights reserved. www.mcescher.com

A Successful Story Paper recycling is a successful story, especially for Italy. Numbers speak volumes. Italy ranks fourth in Europe in the use of recycled paper, with 4.7 million tons of paper used every year (Assocarta data, 2013), 48.4 kg of paper and cardboard pro capita collected in 2013: an increase of 1% compared to the previous year.

A significant improvement if we consider that, over the same period, the production of urban waste plummeted by 3.2%.

The cellulose-based packaging sector is the most virtuous one, since 93% of it is recycled: more than nine packages out of ten are re-injected into the cycle. Such figures stem from the scarcity of forest resources in Italy, which pushed companies to equip themselves with technologies and processes for paper recycling.

A Matter of Fibre Today pulp paper is the main source of fibre for paper products. But not all fibres are the same. Over the years, industrial processes

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Waste that Saves Energy Waste deriving from paper processing, such as cellulose fibres like cotton wool and staple fibres, if treated in a natural way can become very good insulation for the green building industry going from waste to resource.

This is happening in Piedmont where Nesocell, a Turin Polytechnic’s startup of Ip3 incubator, has devised a process, based on natural liquid additives coating the single fibres, in order to improve durability

have been developed to optimize the use of cellulose fibres from recycling, which differ according to their end use. The EN 643 standard by CEN (European Committee for Standardization) identifies 95 different types of papers and cardboards to recycle, specifying the maximum percentages of other acceptable non-paper materials and those forbidden, i.e. they must never be traceable in pulp paper for recycling.

Proximity Recycling In Europe as well as in Italy, in order to avoid environmental distortions with regard to recycling from countries outside the EU, proximity recycling is being developed, aiming at reducing transport-related CO2 emissions and creating jobs locally. Paris offers a good example of best practice, where paper and cardboard are sent for recycling to four plants near the city. Besides, Syctom – the city agency for household waste – includes a proximity clause in its sales contracts of recycled paper and cardboards, binding the assignee company to process the secondary raw material within the national boundaries or at worst in the neighbouring ones.

But then again, in this respect things are looking good in Italy as well. The average distance from the recycling plant is 17.3 km, while the national industry has a rate of utilisation of pulp paper of over 55.2%. Basically, every 100 tons of paper produced in Italy, 55 come from recycled paper.

Taking Care of Collection In Italy, the collection of secondary fibre has two channels. The first is the downstream processing companies receiving paper mills’ production waste and unsold papers and packaging from the large-scale retail trade and companies. It is secondary raw material selected at source and ready to be used in the paper mill.

The second channel is separate collection of urban waste that needs to be selected before getting to the paper mill. Without recycling, all this paper would just be sent to the landfill

and insulating properties. The product obtained lasts for 50 years, it is resistant to humidity and is perfect as insulation for building with air chamber cladding by injection. It is better performing – with lower costs and equal usability – compared to other oil-based products, such as EPS (Sintered Expanded Polystyrene ) and polyurethanes derived from minerals, like mineral wool or glass wool.

as waste: every year, its reuse avoids building 20 middle-sized extra landfills.

In Italy, separate collection of paper and cardboard has now been an established practice for quite some time. Comieco – the national consortium for the collection and recycling of cellulose-based packaging – has been active for years and many producers, importers, cellulose-based products processing plants and recyclers have joined. Its tasks include

Italy ranks fourth in Europe in the use of recycled paper, with 4.7 million tons used every year.

©Sergio Ferraris

Sergio Ferraris, an environmental and scientific journalist, is director of QualEnergia.it.

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renewablematter 04. 2015 Easier to Separate Flexible polylaminate packaging is one of recycling’s biggest problems, especially for drinks made of cardboard, aluminium and plastic. In the Lucart Group paper factories, for the first time in Italy, devised a system to separate the three materials to be sent for recycling.

The cellulose fibre obtained, 74% of the packaging, is used as raw material for the company’s main products as well, while plastic and aluminium are given to other companies utilising them as raw materials in the packaging and building industries. Such system enables many municipalities to collect flexible polylaminate packaging for drinks together with paper, thus streamlining the separate waste collection process and avoiding incineration or disposal in landfills.

drawing up agreements and managing the cellulose-based collection and recycling system in the various municipalities. Today Comieco covers 70.7% of all municipalities, 83.9% of the population, and has collected within the agreement 1.5 million tons of paper and cardboard, providing the participating municipalities with €88 million (according to the 2013 data).

The Efficiency of Paper Mills Any mention of the Möbius strip must include what happens in the sector, besides recycling.

75% of virgin cellulose fibre used by Italian paper mills is certified, as opposed to only 10% of global forests. In the treatment of this virgin fibre, paper mills do not use chlorine gas and in 40 years they have managed to reduce the use of water by 66%. More importantly, over the last 18 years paper factories have improved their energy efficiency by 20%, utilizing cogeneration, since in order to produce paper both electricity and heat are needed.

Therefore, if the economy is to become circular, paper stands a very good chance to become a cutting-edge material, to come full circle.

Interview

Secondary Raw Materials Massimo Medugno, Managing Director of Assocarta

Info www.assocarta.it

How important is paper recycling in the paper industry?

“Pulp paper is the main raw material of the industry.

Paper recycling is an efficient system. Today a newspaper sent for recycling comes back in production after 7 days, a corrugated cardboard box, in 14 days.”

What are the main problems?

“The Italian paper industry has invested considerably in paper collection and it now risks being penalized just for its ability to manage the situation in a proactive way. The main competitors outside the EU, such as China, have access to our secondary raw materials fields without meeting the costs and without the same environmental obligations.”

So, what happens?

“We are working in order to implement those principles according to which, in order to avoid environmental dumping, non-European companies

©Assocarta

©Assocarta

With regard to the paper supply chain and recycling, paper factories are at the forefront. We asked Massimo Medugno, managing director of Assocarta, to provide us an overview from a company point of view.

In Europe as well as in Italy proximity recycling is being developed, aiming at reducing transportrelated CO2 emissions and creating jobs locally.

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As far as collection is concerned, are companies satisfied?

“Collection is a key element for environmental sustainability. The national increase rate, which is a sign of improved infrastructure for the collection of paper, has occurred thanks to the contribution offered by Comieco, with its member paper mills and processors. This has reduced the disposal in landfills, expanding the flow of separate collection of urban waste, while lowering imports, now relegated to particular types of pulp paper not available in sufficient quantity in our country.”

©Assocarta

must operate in line with the same European recycling practices, respecting environmental standards.”

Interview

Paper from the South Carlo Montalbetti, Managing Director of Comieco

Info www.comieco.org

How were such paper recycling high percentages made possible in Italy?

“Thanks to two key and synergetic aspects.

The first was the need to overcome waste disposal in landfills, since we were Europe back-markers.

The second is linked to the demand of the material: Italy is rich in ‘poor forests’ and over time the paper industry had first to resort to rags, then to agricultural waste and since the 50’s to pulp paper.

But that was not enough. In the packaging sector, up until 2005, we imported 1.2 million tons of pulp paper. Then, with the increase of separate waste collection, we cancelled such imports and we are now pulp paper exporters.”

Is there still room for improvement?

“Yes. We reckon there are at least 500,000 tons of cellulose fibre in urban waste that can still be used. The areas where this can be achieved are certainly Rome and most of Southern Italy, where we are focussing at the moment.”

How? “We launched a special plan for the South in which we invested money as well. For the first time we are investing €7 million to help the municipalities of the South to achieve an efficient collection system. This is in addition to the national contribution worth €100 million a year. It has to be said that the South boasts some positive examples as well: Bari, for instance, collects 68 kg of paper pro capita yearly, comparable to that of Milan.”

©Comieco

©Comieco

Comieco Consortium is a historic protagonist in the collection of pulp paper.

His managing director, Carlo Montalberti, explains how recycling developed in Italy and reveals to us the next strategies of his Consortium.

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renewablematter 04. 2015

GREEN PAPER

that Gives Agribusiness Waste a New Lease of Life

by Roberto Rizzo

When we were children we were told to eat up everything on our plates; wasting food was a big no-no. But perhaps our mothers did not worry about what happened to food before it reached our plates: they did not consider the generation of rejects (and sometimes waste) from the production chain of the agribusiness sector.

Roberto Rizzo is a science journalist.

He is specialized in energy and environmental issues and since 2010 teaches at Master of Scientific Journalism at SISSA of Trieste.

Rather than being sent to landfills or waste-to-energy plants, that waste can now become cardboard for high-end packaging, cards for wedding invitations or the paper of the magazine you are leafing through. And a number of other things. We owe it all to Favini, one of the most internationally active Italian paper factories in the field of research, paper development and production and innovative graphic designs.

Favini has also paid particular attention to the environment for several decades. Indeed it has been one of the first Italian companies to draw up an environmental balance sheet and it was the first paper mill in Italy to be accredited the ISO14001 certification for its environmental management system. Moreover, Favini carries on practical programmes to reduce water and energy consumption as well as polluting emissions of its own production plants.

“Our objective is to combine quality paper production with the reduction of our environmental impact” explains Michele Posocco, Favini’s Brand Manager. “So, it is no coincidence that Favini has been the first Italian paper factory to develop a whole range of green products. The opportunity arose in the early 90’s when the Venice Water Authority created a committee of experts to tackle the problem of too many algae in the lagoon, which posed many issue for tourism and navigation.

We enthusiastically joined this committee to find out if those algae could be used to produce paper. Thanks to a one-year research study sponsored by the European Union within the LIFE Programme, we developed Shiro Alga Carta, the progenitor of our sustainable projects, a versatile paper with characteristics comparable to other types of paper with an equivalent weight.” Algae contain little cellulose, so Favini had to develop an innovative industrial process, patented worldwide together with the product.

The heart of the industrial process consists in drying the algae, which are then milled in a micronizing mill. The resulting powder, made of 200-300 micron to 0.5 mm grains, replaces part of the cellulose for the paper pulp. In twenty years, 15,000 tons of Shiro Alga Paper have been produced with a number of applications:

Case Histories

The pages of this issue of Renewable Matter/ Materia Rinnovabile you are leafing through are printed on Crush Paper (from corn).

from the packaging for Armani specs to shopping bags, books, brochures and invitation cards. If initially algae came only from the Venetian lagoon, over time Favini started to import them from other parts of the planet (the last one in chronological order was Normandy), not least because, thankfully, the problem of algal bloom in the lagoon scaled down.

Crush Paper After Shiro Alga Carta, Favini embarked on a research study of by-products of the agribusiness sector similar to algae but with a higher fibre content. Several research trends were created as well as some pilot products.

In 2012, Favini came to Crush Paper, which is an improvement on Shiro Alga Carta. With Crush Paper, Favini ennobles waste otherwise destined for landfills, animal feeding or energy production, making them compatible with high-quality ecopaper production.

15% of Crush comes from the Italian agribusiness sector. It contains no GMOs, it is recyclable and compostable. Waste from the industrial processing of cacao, olives, coffee, citrus fruit, wine, distillates, grappa, are all used

and processed with a micronizing mill. Residues from the main ingredient are visible to the naked eye, with a pleasing to the touch texture along the whole of the paper surface. “A 15% content is the most we can currently achieve without compromising colour, printability, white point and mechanical paper characteristics” explains Flavio Stragliotto, manager of Favini’s production plants. “Occasionally, we managed to increase such percentage, with grape marc for example we reached 30% and with CartaCrusca (from bran) (20%) which we developed with Barilla last year to make high-end gift boxes for ‘Accademia Barilla’. Not all waste is suitable for the production of Crush Paper” continues Stragliotto. “For example, we were not able to use the dregs from coffee roasting because of the high fat and oil content of the film coating the bean (the so called ‘pergamino’), which, unlike cellulose have little affinity with water: the production of paper occurs in water, so a residue rich in oil can hardly be used.

Our in-house team of Research&Development, made of six people, is trying to find new residues for paper pulp and is also working on the improvement of our standard products in order to contain their impact on the environment.”

The difference in cost between Crush and traditional paper is about 5-10%, depending on the kind of waste. Every by-product must be worked differently: citrus and corn waste are low cost, unlike wine marc requiring more complex processing. “The machineries of our production lines are standard but we have adapted them to our productions” explains Flavio Stragliotto.

“The mill, which is at the heart of Crush Paper production, was bought from an Italian company to make Shiro Alga Carta and at a later stage it has been modified to accommodate our new needs.”

An Environmentally-Friendly Mix Crush Paper’s environmental advantages are not limited to agribusiness waste.

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renewablematter 04. 2015 Favini in Numbers •• Favini has been active in the paper market for over 270 years (founded in 1736) •• Two plants, both in Italy •• 450 employees •• €150 million turnover (about 70% due to export) •• 70,000 tons of paper produced every year •• One of the first companies in Italy to draw up an environmental balance sheet •• First paper factory in Italy to obtain ISO14001 certification

Crush Paper production’s contribution to greenhouse gas emissions is 20% less compared to that of traditional paper.

Info www.favini.com

30% comes from recycling paper and Favini owns three hydroelectric turbines, which have been operating since the 90’s, exploiting the water jump of a stream flowing into Lake Maggiore, with a total capacity of almost 2 MW. The power generation of such turbines enables 2,000 tons of paper a year, Crush Paper’s total annual consumption. The remaining portion of electricity needed to power the production plants comes from the electric grid (50%) and from a cogeneration gas plant (40%) that not only produces electricity but also heat to dry paper. Thanks to energy consumption from renewables and the use of agribusiness waste and according to actions taken in compliance with the LCA methodology inspected by DNV Business Assurance, Crush Paper production’s contribution to greenhouse gases is 20% less compared to that of traditional paper.

“With regard to the environment, I would like to point out that the virgin fibres we utilize (conifers, eucalyptus, beech, poplar) come from FSC (Forest Stewardship Council) certified forests, so they are grown according to sustainability principles. The forest is used as a plantation and as soon as trees are cut new ones are planted” confirms Flavio Stragliotto. “FSC is supported by high-calibre international environmental associations such as Greenpeace and WWF and managed to give the paper industry a facelift. Over the last 20 years it worked really hard to make the sector more sustainable and involve more and more producers. As for the use of chemicals, in the production of Crush Paper we usually utilize the standard ones of the paper industry.

The colour of Crush Paper is similar to that of the initial material otherwise we would lose in terms of environmental impact.” Favini owns two production plants: one in Rossano Veneto (Vicenza) (where Crush Paper is produced) and one in Crusinallo (Verbano-Cusio-Ossola).

Case Histories

“If in the late 90’s our water consumption was 80 litres per kilo of paper produced, at the end of last year we reached 15 litres and still falling, against a national average of 35 to 40 litres.”

Both plants are ISO14001 certified and the Crusinallo plant also benefits from the EMAS certification. This means that the company is carrying out programmes of environmental improvement with year-on-year updates.

“Compared to the national average, Favini is in the forefront for the protection of the environment” explains Flavio Stragliotto. “Just think of our water consumption for example: if in the late 90’s our water consumption was 80 litres per kilo of paper produced, at the end of last year we reached 15 litres and still falling, against a national average of 35 to 40 litres. All paper factories are taking actions to reduce their environmental impact and perhaps we are the ones doing it best since besides reducing the impact of traditional activities, we are developing a range of highly ecological products. Clearly, our production plants, like any other human activity, have an impact on the environment, but we do achieve carbon neutrality through buying credits for reforestation of a park in Uganda and we also sponsored the building of a wind farm in India. Moreover, we sponsor a project to protect a Madagascan forest through the activities of an Italian association.”

Crush Paper Applications “Initially we thought that Crush Paper would be used mainly only in the food and beverage sector, but it actually penetrated all sorts of sectors. Ours are emotional products that engage with users because of their up-to-date contents and today consumers are increasingly

aware of environmental issues” explains Posocco. “An interesting example is that of Yamamay fashion brand, producing underwear: it used Crush Paper from coffee for the cover of its latest brochure, devoted to the Caribbean, a geographical coffee-producing area.”

Recently, Crush Paper has been used for a new photography magazine thanks to its suitability for photographic material and for a series of cookery books published by Corriere della Sera.

This issue of Renewable Matter you are leafing through is also printed on Crush Paper (from corn). Crush Paper represents only a fraction of the whole Favini production but the product is widespread in 25 countries: it was the first Favini product to be distributed in Japan, a very difficult market to enter. Crush Paper has been awarded several prizes including the packaging Oscar and the Academia Barilla’s gift box made of CartaCrusca (made from bran), received the Sette Green Award in the packaging section and the first prize in the IPACK-IMA 2015 packaging Oscar.

Carta Crush Agrumi (Citrus Crush Paper) In Italy, to produce juices, about one million ton of citrus fruits are used every year. But after squeezing, only 40% becomes juice and 60% (600,000 tons) is processed to obtain other products: essential oils, bioethanol, tyres, pectin etc. The by-product of this new processing is called depectinated pulp and it is normally dehydrated and compressed to be used as supplement in feedstuff or to produce energy.

Or it is dumped in landfills. This is where Favini steps in, exploiting for the first time the depectinated pulp making it compatible with high-quality ecopaper production. This is how Carta Crush Agrumi (Citrus Crush Paper) is made.

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renewablematter 04. 2015

The Circular Economy at the Reach of Municipalities

At Zero Cost

Italian legislation is one of the most advanced in the world when it comes to waste oil management: it dictates that all available oils are to be regenerated. Today, in Italy, 30% of base oils used to produce lubricating oils is made up of regenerated products. However, a change in pace is needed. The collaboration between Viscolube and Ancitel, which aims towards the active participation of municipalities, goes in this direction.

by Roberto Rizzo

Top: Pasquale Domenico Cambiaso, Recreation Area of Filipino Priests in San Michael Church, Genoa, mid XIX century, city’s print collection

Let’s imagine that an Italian local administration wants to be an active part of the circular economy, for example through the Green Public Procurement (GPP), using environmental based criteria when buying goods and services. However, in these times of crisis, it probably wants to do it at zero cost, without added costs for the collectivity. Is this an impossible venture? Not at all.

An example is provided by the lubricating oils that public administrations buy for the engines of their vehicles: public transport, school buses and vehicles for urban cleaning. The lubricants are a mix of basic oils and additives, and today in Italy almost a third of the market is made up of regenerated base oil. Regeneration is a process which transforms exhausted oil, which is a hazardous waste, into a secondary raw material that generates new lubricants.

It’s an operation with considerable results: from a ton of used anhydrous oil it is possible to obtain about 750 kg of regenerated oil.

Viscolube is the leading company in Europe for the regeneration of mineral oils. In Italy it has two plants with a capacity to treat waste oil of about 190,000 tons a year. Viscolube has also designed, in collaboration with ANCI (National Association of Italian Municipalities), an awareness campaign in local administrations on the use of regenerated lubricating oils through a circular economy approach. “Together with the biggest additive company in the world (Lubrizol), a few years ago we developed a lubricant entirely based on regenerated base oil, Revivoil, which has been approved by the main engine producers,” explains Marco Codognola, director for trade, purchases and business development at Viscolube. “Even though the trading of the product is a responsibility that rests with our

Case Histories clients, three years ago we wondered whether we should disseminate information among public administrations, which are told to follow the GPP normative but cannot find lubricants based on secondary raw materials on the market. Starting from this idea, we decided to conduct a survey in some municipalities, including Savona, which has been particularly receptive: we signed a memorandum of understanding and we went ahead with the first trial on their vehicles during the period 2011-2012. After the experience

of Savona, we started trials in Genoa and Perugia.”

The First Municipalities Involved in the Project Revivoil is 100% made up of regenerated base oil (15W-40) and can be used as it is in heavy diesel vehicles, while it needs to be added in variable percentages to all commercial lubricants, used for example in petrol vehicles and in diesel cars. According to the agreements

Table 1 | Regenerated base oil: a proved reality Municipality of Savona (October 2011 - July 2012) Traditional oil

Oil with regenerated base oils

Km run

9,222

10,963

Increment in viscosity at 40°C between waste and new oil, level of thermo-oxidative stress and contaminatione

+ 11.4%

+ 5.5%

Presence and quantity of wear and tear metals (ppm)

Iron 285

Iron 152

Source: tests by Laboratorio Ssog- Milan.

Note: Comparative evaluation between traditional lubricant and lubricant with regenerated base oil (Revivoil) for 100,000 km or 1 year.

Municipality of Genoa (June 2012 - March 2013) Hydraulic oil ISO 46 traditional

OHydraulic oil ISO 46 with regenerated base oils

Length of exercise (hours)

1,537

1,703

ASTM Colour D 1500 Start End

L1 L4

L1 L 3.5

Wear and tear of metals at end of run (ppm) Iron Chrome

61.6 10.0

Absent Absent

Kinematic viscosity at 40°C (mm2/s) Start End

47.0 38.4

44.5 39.1

Note: Comparative evaluation between two hydraulic oils ISO 46 on two different hydraulic presses, which are identical in terms of building characteristics.

Municipality of Perugia (July 2012 - March 2013) Traditional oil

Oil with regenerated base oils

Km run

5,216

10,856

Wear and tear metals

Absent

Absent

Percentage absorbance FTIR between waste oil and new oil Nitration Oxidation Particulate Sulphating

Note: Comparative evaluation between two lubricating oils on two different vehicles with equal engine size.

+ 21.8% + 51.2% + 54.9% + 19.8%

+ 31.7% + 10.5% + 125% * + 6.1%

* The negative estimate of particulate (generated by diesel combustion) in oil with regenerated base oil is a direct consequence of the higher accumulated mileage of the vehicle.

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renewablematter 04. 2015

According to the agreements with Viscolube, the municipalities have committed to use lubricants made with a certain amount of regenerated oil for their own vehicles or those of their subsidiaries.

with Viscolube, the municipalities have committed to use lubricants made with a certain amount of regenerated oil for their own vehicles or those of their subsidiaries. In the cases of Savona, Genoa and Perugia, two identical vehicles have been used: one using the 100% regenerated Viscolube lubricant – Revivoil – and the other using a traditional lubricant, made from oil refining. This way, it was possible to compare the two performances and the equivalence between the two lubricants was proved through chemical-physical tests carried out in external laboratories (see table 1). More than that: for some parameters it appeared that the lubricant with regenerated base oil was superior. Furthermore, if a local authority decides to use lubricants with regenerated base oil, it does not have to face additional costs: no ad hoc infrastructure needs to be created, it is sufficient to buy the lubricant from the distributor, exactly as in the case of conventional lubricants.

Italian Legislation Over the years, Italy has introduced one of the most advanced legislations for the correct management of waste oils. Italy is under the obligation to lead all waste oil to regeneration, unlike what happens in other European countries, where incineration is still possible (in the UK, almost the totality of waste oil is burnt). The matter of green purchases by public administrations is a different story.

“Italian legislation provides a framework but does not set up specific regulations”, explains Marco Codognola. “The initiative

that we are carrying out with ANCI aims at stimulating bottom-up virtuous examples and we hope that the legislator will translate these actions into a national law. I give you the example of the Unites States of America, where by law the lubricants used by public administrations need to contain at least 25% of regenerated base oil. The norm also applies to the American army that, as we can imagine, is one of the biggest consumers of lubricants in the country. Such a simple rule has transformed the American market of waste oil recycling, as until a few years ago all the oil was burnt. The Democratic administration has made a complete change in paradigm possible: today in the Unites States there are many lubricants’ refineries and regenerated base oils cost more than virgin ones as their environmental value is acknowledged.”

The commitment by Ancitel Energy and Environment – ANCI’s operational body which supports municipalities in the development of new solutions for the environment – is to involve the administrations in the design of a memorandum of understanding, with the aim to adopt a “standard” invitation to tender for the purchase of green products, such as lubricating oil formulated with regenerated base oil. “Ancitel is active in all the macro-sector which comprises separate collection and effective recycling” says Filippo Bernocchi, delegate from ANCI Energy and Waste. “Even though there exist voluntary codes and regulations regarding GPP, it is necessary to support local administrations on the issue of the circular economy. When it comes to inserting regenerated oil into bidding rules, the local administration needs technical supports

GPP: Public Administration’s Green Purchases In Italy – according to data from ISPRA (Istituto superiore per la protezione e la ricerca ambientale, Italian National Institute for Environmental Protection and Research) – purchases by public administrations represent 17% of GDP. This value shows the importance that public administration can have in orienting the market of goods and services, including towards sustainability. The instrument of environmental policy that, by acting on the demand, helps public administrations choose low impact products and services is the Green Public Procurement (GPP). GPP consists in inserting environmental criteria into public administrations’ tenders. This way, tender procedures are guided not only by monetary criteria, but also by the environmental and health impacts generated by the whole cycle of life of goods and services. Among the GPP objectives are: •• efficiency and saving in the use of resources, in particular energy, with a consequent

containment of CO2 emissions; •• reduction in the use of hazardous substances; •• reduction in the amount of produced waste: thanks to the rational use of purchases and the definition of environmental criteria aimed at favouring reusable, recyclable products with a longer life and a reduced packaging volume.

The tool to maximize the use of GPP is the Action Plan for environmental sustainability of public administration’s consumption (PAN GPP). This action plan includes the definition of minimum environmental criteria by the Ministry of Environment. They are national point of reference for green public purchases for several product categories: from the construction industry to waste management, from energy services to catering, from cleaning to transport.

Info www.viscolube.it www.ea.ancitel.it

Case Histories Hartmann Schedel, Perugia, 1493, from Liber Chronicarum

Lorenzo Centurione, Savona, XIX century

as well as somebody who can explain how to manage a tender in the best possible way.

We have done a first selection of the municipalities that are going to be involved in the project, as some are more sensitive than others. In some cases, even though the administration is sensitive to the issue, the bureaucratic-administrative part is not: the work needs to be done on a double front.”

Collaboration with Ancitel “Response from the public administrations that have collaborated with us so far has been very positive, as they see our initiative as a way of transmitting virtuous values to citizens at zero cost” says Marco Codognola. “But we can’t go to every single Italian municipality to recommend our base oil: it is not our job. Our objective is that lubricant-producing companies insert regenerated base oil products in the market and recommend them to public administrations. Let’s bear in mind that today 30% of base oil used by producers is made with regenerated oils, but what is missing is awareness among users, including public administrations, of such a positive market trend. The collaboration with ANCI emerges in this context, in particular that with Ancitel Energy and Environment. After the positive trials in some municipalities, we met with ANCI delegates, to whom we explained how our initiative can value the role of public administration in the circular economy. ANCI’s response to our proposal

was enthusiastic.” As of today, Ancitel has managed to involve about 200 municipalities in a series of communication and training initiatives and some groups of municipalities are starting to join the programme, through the adoption of invitations to tender where a lubricant with a minimum value of regenerated base oil is indicated as preferential criteria. The “standard” invitation to tender has been prepared by Ancitel, while Viscolube has provided technical support on minimum environmental criteria and on the rewarding system. “I have greatly appreciated Viscolube’s environmental sensitivity.

It is a company that, despite being leader in its sector and not facing competition, has decided to support local administrations in this virtuous journey” explains Filippo Bernocchi.

“We are committed to use secondary raw materials also in other supply chains, such as tyres and packaging. There is a strong debate between those who would like GPP to become compulsory by law, with sanctions being applied, and those who do not share this approach.

The issue is complex and it is necessary to examine case by case and see, for each secondary raw material, to which point there is equivalence between virgin and regenerated raw materials according to their technical performance.

I therefore believe that today the best investment is raising awareness among local authorities on secondary raw materials’ advantages for the environment, the economy and, not the least, Italian industry.”

If an Italian local authority decides to use lubricants with regenerated base oil, it does not have to face additional costs: no ad hoc infrastructure needs to be created.

Today 30% of base oil used by producers is made with regenerated oils, but what is missing is awareness among users, including public administrations, of such a positive market trend.

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renewablematter 04. 2015

Made in

by Marco Capellini

FOOD WASTE

Edible Project, Food Nests

Impasto

Eliminating food waste completely is certainly a difficult target to reach in the short term; however, there are more and more technological solutions to transform these residues into resources.

Here is how to create new materials from fruit, eggshells, vegetables and coffee grounds to produce bowls, bags, textiles, shoes and lamps.

Marco Capellini was one of the first people in Italy who worked on design for sustainability.

He is the CEO of Matrec – Sustainable Materials & Trends, and a freelancer at his own study MarcoCapellini | sustainable design & consulting.

Expo 2015 has certainly brought to the international attention different aspects related to the safeguard of food resources.

Among various issues, food waste is particularly important from many points of view. For years several countries have carried out initiatives aimed at reducing food waste, both for ethical reasons linked to a disparity in food distribution between different areas of the planet, and for environmental reasons, as food waste is one significant cause of CO2 emissions.

As of today though, despite more accurate studies and research that describe the problem, significant results are yet to be seen, as final consumers have not become an active part in this system.

From a practical point of view, zero food waste is not an easily reachable target in the short term, as the current productive process and consumption models do not contemplate precise management rules for food waste. However, luckily things are partly changing.

In the last few years, we have witnessed a move towards projects that value waste, also thanks also to research, technology and trials more and more oriented towards environmental sustainability. The main credit goes to companies that transform food waste into new resources, both as a market opportunity and to follow the principles of the circular economy.

This was exactly the objective of Made in Food Waste, a publication which was the result of international research by the International Observatory of Matrec in collaboration with the University of Architecture and Design of Chile: to explain how food waste can become a resource for new industrial products.

If properly treated, and in some cases mixed with natural components, food residues have a big potential use and become new materials with traits and properties that can be used in different applications.

Case Histories

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Combine

Mondongo Shoes

Info www.matrec.com

to be stressed – this valuing process cannot and must not be interpreted as a justification for a weaker commitment in the effort to reduce the amount of food waste: it is necessary to initiate immediately actions aimed at reducing waste along the whole of the supply chain and activate projects that value the possible final residues.

Nook Toy Car

Fruit, vegetables and cereals, after a phase of natural or mechanical drying, are the most widely used products in the production of lamps, bowls, sheets of paper and home accessories. In some cases, the texture of the product imitates designs and shapes of the original fruit, while in other cases the use of a mechanical process and the addition of natural binding materials allows for a printing process for the realization of the final product.

Besides being highly innovative, all these products are in most cases very functional, pleasant looking and their natural origin guarantees, almost all the time, a virtuous disposal thanks to their biodegradable and composting characteristics.

Research has also shown how other food waste can be used as natural colouring for textiles and leather. However – it needs

Crush

Pirarucu Shoes

Coffee grounds too, mainly recovered from cafĂŠs, have been used in different ways and for tests in the production of lamps, vases, bowls, cups and yarns for textiles. The coarseness and the colour of the material give the final products a texture, sometimes a dishomogeneous one, which is however very pleasant to the eye and touch.

In the last few years, particular attention has been given to fish skin which, when recovered at an industrial level and properly treated, has found many uses in the fashion industry and is also used by big luxury brands to produce bags, shoes, accessories and clothing items.

There are also products derived from milk casein or from bagassa; shoes, packaging and objects made with coconut fibre; dishes made with bamboo residues, bagassa and sugar cane; sponges in agaves fibre and shoes produced with offal obtained from different parts of a bovine stomach.

Clothes in Milk

Those recovery processes that from this kind of waste produce a series of yarns used for making clothes are particularly interesting.

Instead, with tea leaves, eggshells, sugar, rice waste, mushroom mycelia and nutshells we can make bowls, vases, brushes, shoes and objects for the house.

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renewablematter 04. 2015 Sustainability Scenarios

Cocolok Shoes

Matrec, thanks to the International Observatory for Sustainable Innovation, has been collaborating for years with companies, applying development and sustainable innovation strategies to new materials and products. International research and investigation show that, while buying, consumers pay greater attention to products’ social-enrvironmental values, raw materials’ origin and production processes.

COCOLOK SHOES: shoes in coconut, latex, bioresin and wool. The coconut sheets are sprayed with natural latex in order to be molded.

The bioresin is used to give structure, while the sock in contact with the skin is made with wool felt (United Kingdom).

Coconut Bowls

WASARA: biodegradable and compostable single-use tableware line made of 100% renewable materials as bamboo, reed pulp, bagasse and sugar cane scraps from the extraction of juice (Korea).

Wasara

Footglove, Earth Sustainable Shoes

COCONUT BOWLS: colorful bowls suitable to contain foods, made of coconut shells smoothed and laquered by craftsmen (USA).

FOOTGLOVE Earth Sustainable Shoes: collection of casual shoes made of 35% of natural rubber and 10% of rice husk for the sole, recycled PET bottles for internal reinforcement and seams and 57% of recycled coffee for the insole (United Kingdom).

Artichair

ARTICHAIR: a series of indoor furniture made of a 100% biodegradable material derived from parts of cardoon. These wastes, reduced to a pulp, are not used in the biofuel production process (United Kingdom).

Case Histories AGRICOLA: biodegradable and compostable lamps made of waste coming from production and consumption of fruit, vegetables and cereals, treated with different natural binders (The Netherlands).

Cocoform

Blanket, Project Saccharum

Saccharum Project

Agricola

SACCHARUM PROJECT: collection of tableware made of refined sugar, bagasse, sucrose, sugarcane fibre and sugarcane ash. All products developed as result of sugar production (United Kingdom).

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COCOFORM: eggs packaging made of recycled coconut fibres from coconut husk derived from food industry waste combined with natural latex (The Netherlands).

BLANKET: embroidered and knitted blankets made of bagasse residues of sugarcane processing. Bagasse is chemically broken down and extruted to form fibre (United Kingdom).

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renewablematter 04. 2015

WATER, ENERGY, MATTER and EMPLOYMENT from End-of-life Tyres In 2014, the equivalent of 28 million car tyres was recovered.

This prevented the emission of 344,000 tons of CO2 and generated a saving of 377,000 tons of mineral resources and fossil fuels as well as 1.8 million litres of water.

Case Histories edited by the editorial staff

It is all very well to talk about sustainability reports. But not all reports are equal.

One thing is carefully choosing some data (perhaps overshadowing the less palatable ones) to use them skilfully at the communication table and quite another is handing over one’s papers to an independent third party, relinquishing any kind of filter. The latter has been the choice adopted by Ecopneus, a non-profit limited liability consortium made of tyre producers and importers whose aim is to guarantee collection, recovery and treatment of end-of life tyres.

“We went down the road of total transparency” points out Giovanni Corbetta, Ecopneus managing director. “We handed over the keys of our records to the analysts of Foundation for Sustainable Development (FSP) so that they could draw their report independently.”

The transparency choice is an important element helping us to understand Ecopneus’ philosophy, a limited liability consortium managing over 65% of ELTs in Italy. Indeed, the new report does not merely show the company’s environmental performance. And it does not only operate within a circular economy rationale according to which the consortium must comply with the law by guaranteeing the recovery of ELTs in the most efficient manner. On the contrary, the report describes a green strategy in its own right, aiming at building a sustainable production supply chain from an economic, social and environmental viewpoint. “Our final goal” Corbetta explains, “goes beyond the solution of a problem and the ‘disposal’ of ELTs. The idea is to generate an industry that creates sustainable jobs, knowledge and products, contributing to the sustainability of the national economic system”.

In order to understand what we are talking about we need to take a step backward and remind ourselves that the iron and steel industry as well as other sectors have been using scrap and waste since Etruscan times.

But this is not enough since steel scrap is a noble product, with its own market value that gives it access to the production chain in its own right. While the plastic, paper and glass sectors have been going in this direction for quite some time, it has not been the case for the tyre industry. Only since September 2011, with the introduction of the Extended Producer Responsibility, which Ecopneus adopted fully, the exploitation of ELTs has been planned in a systematic way. So, ELTs have become precious matter to exploit as secondary raw material, as opposed to waste.

Perhaps it is appropriate to stress how the main results highlighted in the Ecopneus’ Sustainability Report, albeit positive, must be assessed against a bigger picture. But first of all let us consider data. In 2014, Ecopneus collected over 255,000 tons of ELTs, equivalent in weight to over 28 million car tyres from over 27,000 tyre dealers and other operators in the “replacement” sector: 165,000 tons (64%) have been sent for energy valorisation and a little over 91,000 tons, equal to 36%, have been used to recover matter. But there is more to it. In the report, it emerges that if steel, oxides and ashes that after energy recovery return to steel plants or are used as components for cement are taken into account, the recovery of matter soars to 59% and that of energy accounts for 41%, including textile fibres that after tyre crushing to obtain granules or rubber powder are sent to energy valorisation plants.

As Corbetta points out, Ecopneus, while favouring matter recovery, it also sends the bigger-sized pieces from the tyre crushing process to cement factories that use them as alternative fuel. This energy source replaces fossil fuels such as coke. However, the 2014 environmental balance sheet is broadly positive: 344,000 tons of CO2 equivalent prevented, 377,000 tons of raw materials and 1.8 million litres of water saved.

Anyhow, Ecopneus, in line with the European Union targets, promotes the recovery of matter really hard. It’s no coincidence that the EU requires that by 2020 two thirds of recovered ELTs be sent to matter recovery and the remaining one third to energy recovery, thus reversing the current figures. Against this backdrop, as it emerges from the report, one of the strong points of the system is the “network of partners all over Italy” collaborating with Ecopneus through “contracts for the supply of services”. A supply chain made of “operators in the sector of crushing and logistics selected through public tenders through an IT platform and based on advanced management and technical prerequisites that are constantly ameliorated”. In this regard, the report continues, “environmental sustainability is a strategic component constantly integrated into every business choice”.

As a matter of fact, Ecopneus goes well beyond what is required by law. A behaviour that does not serve economic purposes, but rather an ethic code. For example, in 2014, Ecopneus exceeded by 13% the collection target required by law.

If it were a business company, this would be a positive result and would be accompanied by considerable revenue. But this is not the case for Ecopneus. Let’s have a look at why. By law,

Ecopneus collected over 255,000 tons of ELTs, equivalent in weight to over 28 million car tyres.

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Ecopneus goes well beyond what is required by law. A behaviour that does not serve any economic purpose, but rather responds to an ethic code.

the consortium must guarantee a collection equal to the number of new tyres put on the market by its members the year before the collection and the revenue is calculated on this, which stays the same even if a higher number of tyres is collected. In 2014, the target established by law was of about 222,000 tons while 255,000 were actually collected. Such result was achieved thanks to a widespread network and good management of the collection enabling a recovery of 30,000 tons of ELTs in excess of the legal requirement.

Ecopneus’ green strategy emerges also in the recovery and reuse of ELTs. So, between 2013 and 2015, the consortium invested over €14 million in projects and activities supporting the market and companies of rubber products and applications of ELTs. Target: to improve the knowledge of a material whose technical characteristic and possible applications are often ignored. The drafters of the reports add: “The asphalt rubber surfaces for example,

are obtained by mixing bitumen and traditional conglomerates with ELTs rubber powder.

They are extremely long lasting and with a high performance and despite their popularity in other countries are still very much frowned upon by experts in the field. This problem can be overcome with experimentations at local level”.

“Ecopneus in Italy” comments Corbetta, “is working really hard – this is partly required by law from consortia and partly by our strategic approach, to support the development of a circular economy, to open up new markets and applications for products, granules and rubber powders, derived from ELTs recycling.

Meanwhile we are trying to steer the supply chain towards social and environmental sustainability, helping the companies within our network to monitor, optimize and reduce consumption, to improve the quantity of products and their placing on the market, to represent even from an employment viewpoint a healthy supply chain”.

As to Ecopneus’ figures, two strategic elements have emerged from the report. The first one is about the benefits for Italy: €105 million, thanks to the reduction of demand of virgin raw materials, over 90% of which is linked to the recovery of rubber. As for the second, “the management of resources supporting the system”, the report shows that “Ecopneus works with the utmost thoroughness and transparency: in 2014, the distributed economic value was €66.7 million, 90% of which distributed to the companies in the sector for their collection, transport and treatment services of ELT’s”.

Columns

Columns The Blue Yonder

A Marketable Seaweed Production Ilaria Nardello is an Industry Research Specialist at the National University of Ireland, Galway. A biological oceanographer with thirteen years of research experience spent between the USA and EU, her interests are now focused on Industry-University collaboration for sustainable innovation, with a special interest in the marine bio-resources sector.

The European Seaweed Production and Marketability workshop took place in mid May, in Oban, Scotland. Inserted among the events celebrating European Maritime Day, hosted on the grounds of the Scottish Association for Marine Science, in the North West of Scotland, possibly on the sunniest two days of the year, the workshop was a unique gathering of five European projects debating practices and expectations in seaweed harvesting, cultivation, product extraction and analysis. Quite extraordinarily for an audience composed 50% by scientists, the agenda was the marketability of these marine bioresources.

The global demand for seaweed biomass is rising. According to recent figures from the FAO (2014), about 25 million tonnes of seaweeds and other algae are utilized annually: used as food, in cosmetics and fertilizers; or processed to extract thickening agents for the food industry and additives to animal feed. This volume has increased by more than 30% since the previous estimates (2012), demonstrating a swelling global interest in the marine bioresources. On the other hand, the large companies using algae in their products require a regular and reliable supply of the material, in terms of both quantity and quality. This is a problem when suppliers are small producers, located in different geographical regions and offering products with varying characteristics, due to both different production practices and natural variability of environmental conditions.

These issues, as well as sustainability concerns for our natural resources, can largely be addressed by adopting seaweed aquaculture over wild harvesting. From the west coast of Ireland to Indonesia, and on to Eastern Canada, the rural communities of the coastal areas of the world, who have harvested their seaweed for centuries, are now adopting a more reliable and sustainable approach, through cultivation. It is therefore not surprising that the biomass marketed through these practices covers as much as 95% of the global commerce, for a value of $6.4 billion (FAO, 2014).

Nuclear pollution of marine waters in areas

of high production, such as Japan, and concerns related to the uncertain quality standards of other major producing countries in Asia, such as China, are bringing customers in large numbers at the doorstep of Europe, where stringent regulations, at the European and national level, are forcing even the smallest of our producers to comply with very high quality standards for the use of natural ingredients in products intended for human consumption or our environment.

This unsought large attention is providing a real development opportunity for the coastal areas of Western Europe, where a pristine marine environment and heritage practices of sustainable seaweed utilisation are combining with purposely-deployed scientific capacity. As demonstrated during the small workshop held in the northwest periphery of Europe, this synergy is providing novel solutions for the whole value chain of the sector, from improved cultivation and harvesting techniques to continuously pushing the field of application’s boundaries further afar.

Unleashing the development potential of this marine economy sector, the second most important marine harvest after fisheries, urgently requires bringing the small producers to understand the needs of the bigger industry.

The presence of scientists in the very backbone of our production lines is a very encouraging sign for the sustainability and reliability of the sector and a very dignified salute to the European Blue Growth agenda.

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Bioeconomy and Environment

Beach Umbrellas Surrounded by Litter Stefano Ciafani is national Vice Chairman of Legambiente.

He was an advisor for the Commission’s enquiring committee on the waste cycle of the XIV legislature and member of the Steering Committee on the management of EEEW.

The Beach Litter research can be consulted on Legambiente website www.legambiente.it/ contenuti/dossier/beachlitter-2015-indagine-suirifiuti-spiaggiati

In Italy, carrier bags are very rare, partly thanks to the ban on traditional plastic bags.

Not only do many Mediterranean beaches share a beautiful sea and sunshiny days, but also garbage along the coast. Trash in all shapes and sizes. This year too, plastic is the undisputed star of beach litter, as emerged from the Beach litter investigation by Legambiente, within the campaign “Spiagge e Fondali puliti – Clean up the Med 2015”.

The investigation was carried out – from April to May 2015 – by Legambiente volunteers, in line with the monitoring protocol set up by the Ministry for the Environment and ISPRA, over a 136,330 m2 area, where 22,114 items of beach litter have been found, namely 17 waste items every 100 m2, 5 more per 100 m2 compared to last year investigation.

The investigation went beyond the 29 Italian beaches to include 25 locations in other countries overlooking the Mediterranean Sea, monitored by the associations that joined Clean up the Med initiative: Algeria, Croatia, Greece, Spain, Turkey and Tunisia. An area of 87,200 m2, where 8,147 waste items have been found, specifically 14 items per 100 m2.

Excluding fragments, plastic and polystyrene residues smaller than 50 cm, which are the most popular ones (23.5%), leading the top ten of intact waste items found by Legambiente on Italian beaches are plastic beverage bottles (10.3%), plastic and metal caps and lids (6.9%), fish pots, nets, fishing gear and fish crates (6.5%), while cigarette butts rank fourth with 5.4%. Waste items that failed to be treated are in fifth position (4.9%) such as cotton buds, sanitary towels, blisters, WC deodorants. Then there are disposable plastic tableware (4.8), building materials (4%), detergent bottles (3.8%), glass bottles (3.3). Packets of crisps and lollipop and ice cream sticks (1.9%) are at the bottom of the list.

It is worth mentioning the huge presence of waste that escaped sewage treatment that on the one hand is the result of the bad habit of “disposing of” them by throwing them down the toilet and on the other it signals the inefficiency of wastewater treatment systems which are unable to filter even fairly large objects. It is no coincidence that 83% of such waste items have been found on the beaches situated less then one kilometre away of a river mouth or very close to drainpipes or ditches. And the problem does not seem to diminish: compared to last year the presence of such waste items went up by 5%.

But there is also waste linked to production

activities. For example, on the beach in Eboli – in the protected dune area managed by Legamabiente – 25% of waste found is made up of expanded polystyrene sowing trays from local agricultural activities. In Trieste, in a transept in the Canovella de’ Zoppoli Beach, 44% of waste found was made up of mussel nets: it is no coincidence that mussel growing ropes are just off the beach.

Even on foreign beaches, plastic is one of the top ten waste items, although the percentage is lower, 52% against 80%. Top of the list are plastic bottles (12.5%), followed by plastic and metal caps and lids (8.6%), plastic carrier bags (7.3%), cigarette butts (5.5%), fishing waste (3.8%), glass bottles (3%), aluminium cans (2.4%), small food-grade plastic bags (2%), plastic containers (1.9%) and syringes (1.6%).

Amongst waste items on foreign beaches, there are two novelties compared to the Italian list: carrier bags (third place with 7.3%) and syringes (1.6%). In Italy, carrier bags are very rare, partly thanks to the ban on traditional plastic bags.

First place for the highest waste concentration went to Turkish beaches with 33 waste items per 100 m2 (double compared to Italy). Turkey is closely followed by Algeria and Croatia, 28 and 21 waste items per 100 square metres respectively. The situation is better in Tunisia (8 waste items per 100 m2), Greece (4), Portugal (3) and Spain (2).

As we know, waste on beaches causes extremely serious damage to the environment, fauna, the economy and tourism. Sea turtles, birds and mammals can get trapped in fishing nets and in professional catching devices. Or they can suffocate to death if they accidentally ingest waste (especially plastic bags) they mistake for food. According to several studies, in the Western Mediterranean, waste ingestion causes 80% of sea turtles’ deaths and damages the entire marine ecosystem. Moreover, microplastic ingested by marine organisms, is the main cause of plastic introduction into the biota and thus of the imbalance in the food chain.

Beach litter is a common problem to be solved as soon as possible. A concerted effort involving all affected subjects and regions is needed.

By banning plastic bags, Italy has become a leader. Now synergic actions in the whole Mediterranean Basin are needed.

Columns

Innovation Pills

Edible Films?

Courgettes Invented Them!

Federico Pedrocchi is a science journalist.

He directs and presents the weekly programme Moebius broadcast by Radio 24 – Il Sole 24 ore.

He supervises Triwù, a web TV devoted to the culture of innovation in Italy. He also teaches New Media at the Master’s Degree in Science Communication and Sustainable Innovation at Bicocca University in Milan.

To find out more on edible packaging patented by the University of Foggia please consult tinyurl.com/odnevh4

Undoubtedly, a species feeding on rubbish would be an excellent solution for the circular economy. Could it be the aim of a planned Darwinism? I am afraid that we would receive many negative signals from several research fields, not least because the main information available is that the evolution of the species occurs with disheartening slowness and before feeding on the mobile phones replaced by the new ones (one of the most serious modern problems with regard to waste management), 2 million years may go by. But there is a need to act before.

Well, we could eat food containers, by designing them edible, of course.

There are some interesting results with mineral water algae-based containers.

A solution that could prove very fruitful and that has already been widely experimented is edible films for wrapping bakery products, such as the widespread snacks. Carla Severini from the University of Foggia, has been working on it with a valid patent since January 2015.

There are two main aspects to bear in mind with regard to edible packaging, in order to minimize our amazement at this new innovative scenario.

First, in nature, what we eat that can be found inside, is always surrounded by something covering it on the outside, that is made of matter which is not totally different from its content.

Although more and more “human cubs” tend to think that the plastic wrapping of sandwiches is the same as the orange peel, we know this is not the case. Organic matter is able to express itself in a number of variations and very often we already eat everything: courgettes, aubergines, plums, grapes, cherries. Indeed, we do not peel them.

The second aspect – to be handled avoiding delusions of grandeur – could be defined as that of transversality. Materials science is currently exploring a territory – whose vastness is hardly predictable – in which ingredients mix in manners that are in no way inferior to the most astonishing food blendings.

After the iron and plastic ages, the so to speak single-theme years, are finished. Materials science is now producing food migrations towards objects that have little to do with nutrition.

In other words: fabrics are being designed from orange peels. Why should we be amazed, then, if certain molecules from a particular type

of food are used as protective packaging for another?

In addition, edible films for bakery products have other advantages. They last longer compared to current containers, they offer enhanced protection and avoid the use of preservatives, allowing only the use of one bag to safeguard it from dust. Moreover, they manage to keep higher organoleptic values.

As a result, a muffin will be softer and more fragrant. As for preservatives: a very important factor is that bakery products on the supermarket shelves, if they have to be low-calorie foods – and it would be appropriate to expand such kind of foodstuffs – are highly perishable, while with edible films, their shelf life is extended.

By way of conclusion, we are faced with a kind of innovation showing many advantages indeed.

It will have to be submitted to field evaluation, but the preconditions are undoubtedly promising. Yes, perhaps some of you may have heard that edible plates and cutlery have been designed. That is true, and the idea is in line with the reduction of the waste volume and, in this case, of pollutants (detergents) which the entire food cycle feeds into the environment.

Of course, if in a coffee shop you will order a muffin wrapped in an edible film and served on an edible plate – it is obvious how humans still carry within their code merely sedated behavioural patterns – waiters may receive funny looks. This is because certain drifts are difficult to stop.

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PASSIONATE ABOUT. PHILANTHROPY! Discover our activities 2015. www.fondazionecariplo.it

Philanthropy Means Supporting a Project with Passion.

Making it grow strong until it produces its fruits for the common good. Modern philanthropists are not an ATM but organizations made up of competent men and women with a vision for the future and social innovation.

Fondazione Cariplo Has Engaged in Philanthropy for over 20 Years.

We are passionate about art, culture, scientific research, social commitment and the environment and we are increasingly focusing on supporting young people, community welfare and people’s wellbeing.

Always behind non-profit organizations. Always there.

THANKS TO CONAI, TRASH NO LONGER ENDS UP IN LANDFILLS, BUT IN SHOP WINDOWS. Steel, aluminum, paper, wood, plastic, glass. For over 15 years, Conai has coordinated and promoted the efforts of companies, municipalities and citizens to recycle packaging waste and give it new life. It’s a virtuous cycle that creates beauty and is economically sound. In Italy, in 2013, 77.5% of packaging from purchased

goods was recovered, with a recycling rate of 67.6%. With 3 out of 4 packages sent for recycling and recovery from all over the country, in 15 years, the Conai system has generated an environmental and economic gain to the tune of 15.2 billion euros, also reducing CO2 emissions by a total of 125 million tons.

Consortium for the recycling of packaging

THINGS BORN OUT OF THINGS. www.conai.org

FSC ® C007287

Laura,

Marketing Manager energy company

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