Renewable Matter #10

RENEWABLE MATTER INTERNATIONAL MAGAZINE ON THE BIOECONOMY AND THE CIRCULAR ECONOMY 10 | May-June 2016 Bimonthly Publication Edizioni Ambiente

Kate Raworth vs Giorgos Kallis: The Term Degrowth Does (not) Convince Me •• Carl Folke: We Are Living in a New Renaissance •• Tidyman, the Story of a Little Man Coming from Afar

UK Dossier/Bioeconomy: An Uphill Struggle •• When Repairing a Washing Machine Becomes a Crime •• United by a Desk •• Utrecht: It is Time to Pass from Words to Action •• Circular Economy and EPR: A Match that Can Work

Euro 12.00 - Download free online magazine at www.renewablematter.eu

Who Said Flies Are Useless?

•• Aluminium Letters •• Earthworms vs Ecomafia •• Follow That Waste!

•• Water Boundaries

How to Plan the Recovery of the Useless •• We Cannot Lose the Sea

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They have reduced noise in offices, transforming themselves into sound-absorbing walls. They have protected thousands of children as shock absorbent rubber on playgrounds. They have covered kilometres of roads with rubberized asphalt and mitigated the vibrations of numerous tramway lines. They have given sustainable energy to companies in Italy and abroad.

But most of all, they have done something priceless: they have made our country a more liveable place for future generations.

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Events

Editorial

Renewability across the Board

by Antonio Cianciullo

While we are completing this issue of Renewable Matter, from New York we learn that, at the UN headquarters, the leaders of 175 nations signed the Paris agreement.

This is a tangible step forward because, as it had happened with the father of this document – the Kyoto Protocol – the pact to protect climate stability will be effective only when ratified by a minimum of 55 countries representing at least 55% of greenhouse gas emissions. In the case of the Kyoto Protocol, it took over 7 years for the European diplomacy, at the time very insular, to make the agreement enter into force.

Now the situation is totally different, a much tighter schedule is to be expected. A first assessment of the first voluntary objectives by the member states will occur in 2018, in 2020, the agreement will be effective with a five-year revision to improve on the focus of the strategies. According to Todd Stern, Obama’s top climate negotiator, this is a historic breakthrough because it “establishes the first universal regime, rather than a transitional one, on climate.”

Much has been said about weaknesses and strengths of such agreement. The former include the lack of sanctions against countries in case they should not meet their commitments (they were already present in the Kyoto Protocol); too generous deadlines (scientists demand rapid and radical actions); insufficient targets (even if everyone reached the declared objectives, global temperature would still rise by 2.7-3 °C globally compared to the pre-industrial era).

The latter category, that of positive aspects, include the fact that for the first time all governments decided to state the objectives for the protection of climate (in Kyoto only the OECD committed to this); the clause forbidding every country to deny for at least 4 years the signed agreement (in such a way a political change is avoided, able to cause a rapid about-turn); the radical nature of the objectives established (to do our utmost so that the temperature rise does not exceed 1.5 °C by the end of the century).

The positive interpretation of the Paris agreement is exacerbated by strong economic

signals. A $100 billion fund has been approved to develop technologies with a low environmental impact in countries with little industrialization.

Moreover, in 2015, investments in renewable energies marked a new record, reaching $286 billion, as opposed to 130 billion for fossil fuels.

So – thanks also to the increasingly dramatic evidence of the on-going climate change – the debate is taking for granted the technical aspects of the issue and is concentrating on the political difficulties that could hinder the path to the agreement. For instance, the risk linked to the election of a Republican to the White House in 2017.

But there is a positive aspect that has been neglected, thus risking producing asymmetry in the climate cure: the recovery of tens of billions of tons of wasted matter every year.

The concept of renewability cannot be understood as a one-way process: there is a lot – and rightly so – of attention on energy.

Little – too little – on matter. Renewable Matter was created just to fill this gap, because in order to regain a climate balance, the attention must be refocused.

The package for a circular economy – presented by the European Commission in a symbolic coincidence with the UN conference on climate – is the opportunity to reduce the delay because the linear economy, even if carried out with a lower use of fossils, is not compatible with the culture and production leap indicated by the Paris challenge. We need to go from disposable energy and the burden of materials to be landfilled to an economy that keeps on recycling energy, matter and intelligence, by creating networks and opportunities for a collective growth. The horizontal development, depending on the involvement of local areas and a fairer distribution of benefits, represents another condition for giving up the highly hierarchical model characterizing the fossil and waste era.

It is a global battle but it is fought in each country individually. Getting there first means gaining competitiveness.

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10|May-June 2016 Contents

RENEWABLE MATTER INTERNATIONAL MAGAZINE ON THE BIOECONOMY AND THE CIRCULAR ECONOMY www.renewablematter.eu ISSN 2385-2240 Reg. Tribunale di Milano n. 351 del 31/10/2014

Antonio Cianciullo

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Renewability across the Board

Kate Raworth

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Why Degrowth Has Out-Grown Its Own Name

Giorgos Kallis

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You’re Wrong Kate.

Degrowth is a Compelling Word

Emanuele Bompan

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The Resilience Renaissance Interview with Carl Folke

Mauro Panzeri

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Little Men Grow up

edited by Antonio Cianciullo

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Gardens and Barren Rocks Interview with Giovanni Curatola

Alessandro Farruggia

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When Repairing a Washing Machine Becomes a Crime

Sofia Mannelli

26

Dangerous Short-sightedness

Giovanni Corbetta

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Circular Economy and Producer Responsibility: A Match that Can Work

Mario Bonaccorso

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It Is Time to Pass from Words to Action

Mario Bonaccorso

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Dossier: United Kingdom An Uphill Struggle

Silvia Zamboni

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United by a Desk

Editor-in-chief Antonio Cianciullo

Contributors Emanuele Bompan, Mario Bonaccorso, Ilaria N. Brambilla, Giovanni Corbetta, Giovanni Curatola, Giuliana Da Villa, Alessandro Farruggia, Sergio Ferraris, Paola Ficco, Carl Folke, Alessandro Gandini, Giorgos Kallis, Ilaria Nardello, Sofia Mannelli, Mauro Panzeri, Federico Pedrocchi, Antonio Pergolizzi, Simone Raskob, Marco Ravasi, Andrea Razzini, Kate Raworth, Matteo Reale, Roberto Rizzo, David Röttgen, Alessandro Russo, Brieuc Saffré, Maggie Smallwoood, Gianluca Tettamanti, Simonetta Tunesi, Silvia Zamboni

Think Tank

Editorial Director Marco Moro

Acknowledgments Dario Bolis, Ilaria Catastini, Raffaella Ciceri, Matteo Colle, Riccardo Porro, Angelika Siepmann, Luca Zocca Managing Editor Maria Pia Terrosi Editorial Coordinator Paola Cristina Fraschini Editing Paola Cristina Fraschini, Diego Tavazzi

Layout Michela Lazzaroni Translations Laura Coppo, Franco Lombini, Mario Tadiello

Policy

Design & Art Direction Mauro Panzeri

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Executive Coordinator Anna Re

Simonetta Tunesi

Marco Moro

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How to Preserve Value in Waste Management

External Relations Manager (International) Federico Manca

Aluminium Letters

External Relations Managers (Italy) Federico Manca, Anna Re, Matteo Reale

Columns

Case Studies

Press and Media Relations press@renewablematter.eu

Emanuele Bompan

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Water Boundaries

Sergio Ferraris

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Pulses are Circular

Antonio Pergolizzi

62

Earthworms vs. Ecomafia

Brieuc SaffrĂŠ

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Circulab, the Circular Economy Business Game

Ilaria N. Brambilla

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Who Said Flies are Useless?

Sergio Ferraris

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Follow that Waste!

Ilaria Nardello

78

The Blue Yonder Missing the Blue

Federico Pedrocchi

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Innovation Pills Cunning and Lateral

Contact redazione@materiarinnovabile.it Edizioni Ambiente Via Natale Battaglia 10 20127 Milano, Italia t. +39 02 45487277 f. +39 02 45487333 Advertising marketing@materiarinnovabile.it Annual subscription, 6 paper issues Subscribe on-line at www.materiarinnovabile.it/moduloabbonamento 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 ŠEdizioni Ambiente 2015 All rights reserved

Cover Image by Panma Bolec

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renewablematter 10. 2016

WHY DEGROWTH Has Out-Grown Its Own Name

by Kate Raworth

Not very clear, inadequate and a source of misunderstandings: this is why according to Kate Raworth the word degrowth – once its provocative effect is over – should be abandoned in favour of a positive alternative definining this economic theory in a positive way.

Here’s what troubles me about degrowth: I just can’t bring myself to use the word.

Don’t get me wrong: I think the degrowth movement is addressing the most profound economic questions of our day. I believe that economies geared to pursue unending GDP growth will undermine the planetary life-support systems on which we fundamentally depend. That is why we need to transform the growth-addicted design of government, business and finance at the heart of our economies. From this standpoint, I share much of the degrowth movement’s analysis, and back its core policy recommendations.

It’s not the intellectual position I have a problem with. It’s the name.

Here are five reasons why.

Kate Raworth is a renegade economist teaching at Oxford University’s Environmental Change Institute. She is currently writing Doughnut Economics: seven ways to think like a 21st century economist, to be published by Random House.

Courtesy of the author; originally published on Oxfam’s blog From Poverty to Power; www.oxfamblogs.org/ fp2p/?s=Kate+raworth

1. Getting beyond missiles. My degrowth friends tell me that the word was chosen intentionally and provocatively as a “missile word” to create debate. I get that, and agree that shock and dissonance can be valuable advocacy tools.

But in my experience of talking about possible economic futures with a wide range of people, the term “degrowth” turns out to be a very particular kind of missile: a smoke bomb.

Throw it into a conversation and it causes widespread confusion and mistaken assumptions. If you are trying to persuade someone that their growth-centric worldview is more than a little out of date, then it takes careful argument. But whenever the word “degrowth” pops up, I find the rest of the conversation is spent clearing up misunderstandings about what it does or doesn’t mean. This is not an effective advocacy strategy for change. If we are serious about overturning the dominance of growth-centric economic thought,

the word “degrowth” just ain’t up to the task.

2. Defining degrowth. I have to admit I have never quite managed to pin down what the word means. According to degrowth.org, the term means “a downscaling of production and consumption that increases human well-being and enhances ecological conditions and equity on the planet.”

Sounding good, but that’s not clear enough.

Are we talking about degrowth of the economy’s material volume – the tonnes of stuff consumed – or degrowth of its monetary value, measured as GDP? That difference really matters, but it is too rarely spelled out.

If we are talking about downscaling material throughput, then even people in the “green growth” camp would agree with that goal too, so degrowth needs to get more specific to mark itself out.

If it is downscaling GDP that we are talking about (and here, green growth and degrowth clearly part company), then does degrowth mean a freeze in GDP, a decrease in GDP, being indifferent about what happens to GDP, or in fact declaring that GDP should not be measured at all? I have heard all of these arguments made under the banner of degrowth, but they are very different, with very different strategic consequences. Without greater clarity, I don’t know how to use the word.

3. Learn from Lakoff: Negative frames don’t win. The cognitive scientist George Lakoff is an authority on the nature and power of frames – the worldviews that we activate (usually without realizing it) through the words and metaphors we choose. As he has documented over many decades, we are unlikely to win a debate if we try to do so while still using our opponent’s frames. The title of his book,

Think Tank

You’re Wrong Kate.

DEGROWTH

is a Compelling Word Today, the ideology of degrowth is more popular than ever.

This is why – replies Giorgos Kallis to Kate Raworth – it is still useful to talk about degrowth: it reminds us that you can’t have your cake and eat it.

My friend Kate Raworth “cannot bring herself to use the word” degrowth. Here are nine reasons why I use it.

1. Clear definition. “Degrowth” is as clear as it gets. Definitely no less clear than “equality”; or “economic growth” for that matter (is it growth of welfare or activity? monetised or all activity? if only monetised, why would we care?). Beyond a critique of the absurdity of perpetual growth, degrowth signifies a decrease of global carbon and material footprint, starting from the wealthy.

The “green growth camp” also wants such a decrease, but it argues that GDP growth is necessary for – or compatible with – it. Degrowth, not: in all likelihood GDP will decrease too. If we do the right things to thrive, such as capping carbon, if we transform the profit economy to one of care and solidarity, the GDP economy will shrink.

Kate too calls for “an economy that makes us thrive, whether or not it grows” and to “free ourselves” from the growth “lock-in”.

The Germans named this “post-growth” and I am fine with it. But somehow it beautifies the scale of the challenge: reducing our energy or material use in half and transforming and stabilizing a shrinking (not simply “not growing”) economy. With its shock element “de”-growth reminds that we won’t have our cake and eat it all.

2. Right conversations with the right people. Know this feeling “what am I doing with these people in the same room?”

Hearing the words “win-win” and looking at graphs where society, environment and economy embrace one another in loving triangles as markets internalize “externalities” (sic)? Well, you won’t be invited to these rooms if you throw the missile of degrowth. And this is good. Marx wouldn’t be concerned with sitting

by Giorgos Kallis

at the table with capitalists to convince them about communism.

Why pretend we agree? I’ve never had a boring or confusing conversation about degrowth (witness the present one).

Passions run high, core questions are raised (did we loose something with progress? what is in the past for the future? is system change possible and how?). But to have these conversations you need to know about – and defend – degrowth.

3. Mission un-accomplished. Kate asks us to imagine that the “missile” “has landed and it has worked!. Problem is the missile has landed, but it hasn’t worked, so it is not yet “the time to move on”. Microsoft spellcheck keeps correcting degrowth into “regrowth.”

Degrowth is anathema to the right and left. Economists turn ash-faced when they hear “degrowth.” Eco-modernists capture the headlines with a cornucopian future powered by nuclear and fed by GMOs. A recent book calls degrowthers “Malthusians”, eco-austerians and “collapse porn addicts.”

A radical party like Syriza had as slogan “growth or austerity.” The ideology of growth is stronger than ever. In the 70s its critique was widespread, politicians entertained it and at least economists felt they had to respond.

4. There is a vibrant community and this is an irreversible fact. In Barcelona 20-30 of us meet frequently to read and discuss degrowth, cook and drink, go to forests and to protests. We disagree in almost everything other than that degrowth brings us together. In the fourth international conference in Leipzig, there were 3,500 participants. Most of them were students.

After the closing plenary, they took to the shopping streets with a music band, raised

Giorgos Kallis is ICREA professor of ecological economics in Barcelona and Leverhulme visiting professor at SOAS, London. He is the editor of Degrowth.

A vocabulary for a new era (Routledge, 2015).

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renewablematter 10. 2016

Prosperity without Growth: Economics for a Finite Planet by Tim Jackson (Earthscan)

Don’t Think of an Elephant, makes this very point because it immediately makes you think of a you know what.

How does this work in politics? Take debates about taxes, for example. It’s hard to argue against “tax relief” (aka tax cuts for the rich), since the positive frame of “relief” sounds so very desirable: arguing against it just reinforces the frame that tax is a burden.

Far wiser is to recast the issue in your own positive terms instead, say, by advocating for “tax justice”.

Does degrowth fall into this trap? I had the chance to put this question to George Lakoff himself in a recent webinar. He was criticizing the dominant economic frame of “growth” so I asked him whether “degrowth” was a useful alternative. “No it isn’t”, was his immediate reply. “First of all it’s like ‘Don’t think of an elephant!’ – ‘Don’t think of growth!’

It means we are going to activate the notion of growth. When you negate something you strengthen the concept.”

Just to be clear, I know that the degrowth movement stands for many positive and empowering things. The richly nuanced book Degrowth: a vocabulary for a new era edited by Giacomo D’Alisa, Federico De Maria and Giorgos Kallis, is packed full of great entries on Environmental justice, Conviviality, Co-operatives, Simplicity, Autonomy, and Care – every one of them a positive frame. It’s not the contents but the “degrowth” label on the jar that makes me baulk. I’ll adopt the rest of the vocabulary, just not the headline.

4. It’s time to clear the air. Just for a moment let’s give the word “degrowth” the benefit of the doubt and suppose that the missile has landed and it has worked. The movement is growing and has websites, books and conferences dedicated to furthering its ideas.

That’s great. These debates and alternative economic ideas are desperately needed.

But there comes a time for the smoke to clear, and for a beacon to guide us all through the haze: something positive to aim for.

Not a missile but a lighthouse. And we need to name the lighthouse.

In Latin America they call it buen vivir which literally translates as living well, but means so much more than that too. In Southern Africa they speak of Ubuntu, the belief in a universal bond of sharing that connects all humanity. Surely the English-speaking world – whose language has more than one million words – can have a crack at finding something equally inspiring. Of course this is not easy, but this is where the work is.

Tim Jackson has suggested prosperity, which literally means “things turning out as we hope for”. The New Economics Foundation – and many others – frame it as wellbeing.

Christian Felber suggests Economy for the Common Good. Others (starting with Aristotle) go for human flourishing. I don’t think any of these have completely nailed it yet, but they are certainly heading in the right direction.

5. There’s too much at stake, and much to discuss. The ongoing debates under the banner of degrowth are among the most important economic debates for the 21st century. But most people don’t realize that because the name puts them off. We urgently need to articulate an alternative, positive vision of an economy in a way that is widely engaging. Here’s the best way I have come up with so far to say it.

We have an economy that needs to grow, whether or not it makes us thrive.

We need an economy that makes us thrive, whether or not it grows.

Is that “degrowth”? I don’t actually know.

But what I do know is that whenever I frame it like this in debates, lots of people nod, and the discussion soon moves on to identifying how we are currently locked into a must-grow economy – through the current design of government, business, finance, and politics – and what it would take to free ourselves from that lock-in so that we can pursue social justice with ecological integrity instead.

We need to reframe this debate in a way that tempts many more people to get involved if we are ever to build the critical mass needed to change the dominant economic narrative.

So those are five reasons why I think degrowth has outgrown its own name.

I’m guessing that some of my degrowth friends will respond to this blog (my own little missile) with irritation, frustration or a sigh.

Here we go again – we’ve got to explain the basics once more.

If so, take note. Because when you find yourself continually having to explain the basics and clear up repeated misunderstandings, it means there is something wrong with the way the ideas are being presented.

Believe me, the answer is in the name.

It’s time for a new frame.

Think Tank placards against consumerism and blocked a coal factory. Young people from all over the world want to study degrowth in Barcelona.

If you experience this incredible energy, you find that degrowth is a beautiful word.

But I understand the difficulty of using it in a different context: Half a year a visitor in London and I feel I am the odd and awkward one insisting on degrowth.

Monbiot put it capitalism can sell everything, but not less. Could degrowth be coopted by austerians? Plausible, but unlikely; austerity is always justified for the sake of growth.

Capitalism looses legitimacy without growth.

By anti-immigrants? Scary, but not impossible, it has been tried in France. This is why we cannot abandon the term: we have to develop and defend its content.

5. I come from the Mediterranean. Progress looks different; civilization there peaked centuries ago. Serge Latouche says that “degrowth is seen as negative, something unpardonable in a society where at all costs one must ‘think positively’.” “Be positive” is a North-American invention. Please, let us be “negative.” I can’t take all that happiness. Grief, sacrifice, care, honour: life is not all about feeling “better.”

For Southerners at heart – be it from the Global North or South, East or West – this idea of constant betterment and improvement has always seemed awkward. Wasting ourselves and our products irrationally, refusing to improve and be “useful.” has its allure. Denying our self-importance is an antidote to a Protestant ethic at the heart of growth. Let’s resist the demand to be positive!

8. It is not an end. It is as absurd to degrow ad infinitum as it is to grow. The point is to abolish the god of Growth and construct a different society with low footprints.

There is a “lighthouse” for this: the Commons.

A downscaled commons though.

Peer-to-peer production or the sharing economy use materials and electricity too.

Degrowth reminds that you cannot have your cake and eat it all, even if it’s a digitally fabricated one.

6. I am not a linguist. Who am I to question Professor Lakoff that we can’t tell people “don’t think of an elephant!” because they will think of one? Then again, a-theists did pretty well in their battle against gods.

And so did those who wanted to abolish slavery. Or, unfortunately, conservatives for “deregulation.” By turning something negative into their rallying cry, they disarmed the taken-for-granted goodness of the claim of their enemy. The queer movement turned an insult into pride. This is the art of subversion.

Is there a linguistic theory for it?

This is different from what Lakoff criticized US democrats for. Democrats accept the frame of Republicans, providing softer alternatives (“less austerity”). “Green growth” is that; degrowth is a subversive negation of growth: a snail, not a leaner elephant.

Guardian’s language columnist Steven Poole finds degrowth “cute”. When most people agree with him, and find the snail cute, we will be on the path of a “great transition.”

7. Cannot be co-opted. Buen vivir sounds great. Who wouldn’t like to “live well”?

And indeed Latin Americans took it at heart: the Brazil-Ecuador inter-Amazonian highway with implanted “creative cities” in-between; Bolivia’s nuclear power programme; and a credit card in Venezuela. All in the name of buen vivir. Which reminds me of “Ubuntu Cola.” No one would build a highway, a nuclear reactor, issue more credit or sell colas in the name of degrowth. As George

9. Focuses my research. I spend effort arguing with eco-modernists, green growthers, growth economists, or Marxist developmentalists about the (un)sustainability of growth.

This persistence to defend degrowth is productive: it forces to research questions that no one else asks. Sure, we can in theory use fewer materials; but then why do material footprints still grow? What would work, social security, money, look like in an economy that contracts? One who is convinced of green growth won’t ask these questions. Kate is not; she agrees with our 10 degrowth policy proposals: work-sharing, debt jubilee, public money, basic income. Why in the name of degrowth though she asks? Because we cannot afford to be agnostic. It makes a huge difference, both for research and design, whether you approach these as means of stimulus and growth anew or of managing and stabilizing degrowth.

Degrowth remains a necessary word.

Degrowth is seen as negative, something unpardonable in a society where at all costs one must “think positively.”

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Think Tank

The Resilience

RENAISSANCE Interview with Carl Folke

by Emanuele Bompan

We need to go back to a holistic approach to reality, taking into account existing interactions amongst human economy, biosphere and climate. In order to understand such complexity, rationality is not enough, intuition and creativity are also needed.

Carl Folke is a trans-disciplinary environmental scientist and a member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences.

He is a specialist in economics, resilience, and social-ecological systems. He is Science Director of the Stockholm Resilience Centre and the Director of the Beijer Institute of Ecological Economics of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences.

Few have applied integrated thinking and cross-disciplinary approach to environmental studies as Carl Folke.

Author of 12 books and over 200 scientific papers, including 15 in Science and Nature, he is considered among the 10 most cited scientists worldwide in the area of Environment/ Ecology and serves as Editor in Chief of Ecology and Society.

Renewable Matter has joined him in his Stockholm studio to understand the deep interconnection between humans, biosphere systems, resilience, art and science.

The Earth in the last 11,000 years humanity has seen an unusual stable phase.

This has allowed us to thrive. But now we are the ones destabilizing it. What could happen if we moved out of this stable phase?

“We have at least reached a level of activity, which is quite impressive for single species of Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, www.kva.se/en more than seven billion beings (probably around 9 or 10 by Stockholm Resilience Centre, 2050), living in a globalized www.stockholmresilience.org society. We are really pushing the envelope for our own future Beijer Institute of Ecological Economics, on Earth. Of course earth will www.beijer.kva.se

always continue to have evolution of its organism as long as the sun is where it is, in the biosphere there, but the question is, whether we’ll be around or not, and it is up to us to some extent. It’s been an exception in the climate history of the Earth, many people think it can continue for a very long time provided we don’t push it too hard, unless we start to shuffle around with the basic operations of the earth system.”

Which is the weakest link on earth for the stability of our Planet?

“We have a portfolio of sensible elements.

So if we simplify the whole surface of the Earth into big mono-country I’d say that the food production system that we have, has taken away a lot of the capacity to adapt to unexpected changes. During these 11,000 years, food production has been supported by fairly stable climate, we have been able to predict rain year by year. We had a fine-tuned system of crops that we sell on the global market.

And we simplify the whole ecosystem so it became more vulnerable to changes, has less resilience.

Understanding transformation and how to become resilient to it implies analyzing complicated interactions between human

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renewablematter 10. 2016 economy, biosphere, climate, water system, and culture system.”

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

How do you model those interactions?

“I think it is still in the very explorative phase to combine these different domains. Of course a lot of progress has been made, in many fields, but combining them it is difficult.

I think we are doing something similar to what medicine has done before. If you go back a couple of decades, people were only specialised in some diseases. Today we look at the body as an integrated system, we have much more interdisciplinary perspective on these things than we had during the last hundred years.

Understanding all the interconnections is almost impossible. What we should do is find the ways that we shouldn’t go, pathways of development that actually are not very sustainable.”

Is the scientific community working in a multidisciplinary fashion to solve these issues?

“In my perspective there are a lot of good scientist and research teams that are doing that.

But I think the university system is not really adapting fast enough to these changes, actually.

It is the same in Italy, it has been divided up in social sciences, humanities and natural sciences. We have to fix this.”

We are right now in a sort of new Renaissance or a new Enlightenment era, when we are starting to re-connect to the planet we are living on.

We should be more like 17th century scientists, when specialization was rare, while scientists tend to have an holistic approach to reality?

“Exactly. We are moving in that direction so probably in a few decades it will be very obvious. The scale of humanity today is global. And we need to understand any sort of connection. I don’t think you can find any spot on earth, which is not connected in one way or the other. And the next element is the speed of transformation; it’s a new type of speed that has not been there before. The last point is really on how the speed of connectivity makes things go tremendously fast and it would be good to use that capacity that we have developed to be able to redirect our future to much more sustainable pathways fast.”

So resilience also means acknowledging this speed and this interaction in order to react. Can you tell me your definition of resilience?

“We look at resilience as basically how you can sustain change, how can you continue to develop with change, if you are on the pathways where you’d like to be you try to adapt with change.

But if you are in a bad path, you try to shift direction and create a new development path: that’s what we call transformations.

So to us resilience is really a ‘forward looking’ concept. You have to have capacities: whether it is knowledge, is money, culture,

tradition or whatever. It allows you to create new things or to innovate. Because you can’t just innovate out of nothing, you have to have a legacy or different legacies that you can combine for innovations.

That’s the core of resilience: persisting, adapting and transforming. In the scientific community, if we want to live up to 9, 10 billion people on earth sustainably we have to transform our current pathways into more sustainable ones and those have to collaborate with the planet we are living on, we have to integrate economic development, social, with the capacity of the biosphere to sustain us.”

So, if a government approaches you for advice and asks you what steps should be undertaken to make the State more resilient what would you tell them?

“Try to make these integrations in any policy, relating the economics, the social and the biosphere. Second: put up institutions and structures that can create innovations for resilience. Third: we are finally coming along in the energy sector, there’s a lot of green energy coming up. Countries are starting to phase out fossil based sources for more green ones. For example, when I was a kid in Stockholm all the houses were heated by oil tanks that people had in their basement.

And now there are no oil tanks around, people use geothermal energy or wind energy or sun energy. That’s a shift that has been happening in my lifetime. These types of shift are all happening and I think we are right now in a sort of new Renaissance or a new Enlightenment era, when we are starting to re-connect to the planet we are living on.”

What should a private company instead do to embed resilience in its long-term development strategy?

“I think that for many companies now it is becoming a real strategic issue. Someone in business once said: ‘you can’t do good business on a dead planet’, but I think this has to do with keeping your options alive and if you are in business you have to have flexibility to respond to changing circumstances, be them financial crash, shifting government, etc. And for that you need resilience, the capacity to live within changes.

When it comes to the planet, a lot of companies, especially the larger ones, are really deeply realizing that this is not just CSR marketing but a strong conviction that we can’t continue to have a prosperity on earth, unless we collaborate with the planet we are part of.

Our study on marine company globally shows that only 20% works to reduce environmental risks. When you lose really interest in sustainable production. Especially those engaged with aquaculture, how can they

contribute to prosperity for humanity on the longer run? But I am positive: we are starting to see growing awareness and engagement by companies, that wasn’t present before. All this did not exist 30 years ago, it would have been costly to clean the emissions. It’s not even a mind shift, it’s deeper: for many people we can’t go on like this.”

One of the key issues with resilience is communicating the importance of resilience thinking…

“Resilience requires complexity thinking and especially complicate adaptive system, which can involve science from physics to archeology. To understand this complexity you can’t use only rational efficient thinking but you need to activate the other side of the brain, which is connected with intuition.

We need a lot of work on exhibitions with creative artists from films to paintings and installations and journalism, things get people to be reconnected to the planet we are living on actually.”

Do you think art and storytelling can achieve that?

“I think it is part of this long-term change process that we are in right now.

This interview is an example of it: that you asked about resilience, an example of this transformational process that is happening right now.”

So you are positive about this transformation, do you think that this Renaissance is happening and will happen throughout the world?

“If I were not positive it would not be so nice to be here actually. You can easily dig yourself down into depressive things.

But I believe we can mobilize our intuitive and collaborative capacity and create new paths with development and benefit for many people as possible on earth.”

Resilience Alliance, www.resalliance.org

You work inside the Resilience Alliance: what’s the goal of this group?

“We want to raise our understanding of the interactions between people and the environment. There are about 20 research teams involved, research networks that were set up about 20 years ago.

Resilience is not something that has been invented theoretically but it has derived from observation of how the world works, which is very important to communicate because many people think it’s a theoretical concept but it’s actually an interpretation of how in reality the world works.”

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renewablematter 10. 2016

LITTLE MEN

Grow up Tidyman, a good citizen that contributed to a clean environment, was a very successful graphic invention and a simple symbol recognized by everyone.

Today it is landfilled. But many little men have been part of our visual culture for a long time now, like the infographics dotting this magazine: a brief history of pictograms and symbols for educational purposes.

by Mauro Panzeri

Keep Britain Tidy, www.keepbritaintidy.org

Tidyman was born in the 50s and, as far as we know, in the United States, popularized by a beer producer, with the educational intent to promote both empty bottle collection and virtuous behaviour models.

Tidyman soon became a real character with an international vocation: he is affable and talks to everybody, young and old alike, with no need of supporting texts.

A symbol of any kind of waste, in the 70s it became the Keep Britain Tidy’s (a Charity Organization) icon and it was used in its social campaigns. The author, as it happens, is unknown: a certain Sarah Williams, in a post traced online, ascribes the drawing to her father Raymond, appointed by Robert Worley, Keep Britain Tidy Group’s chairman.

But had it not already been there in the United States in the 50s? Perhaps the point – for once – is not in tracking down the author. Because very

soon and long before the design of logos and symbols promoting responsible behaviour, Tidyman is de facto everybody’s symbol and its appropriation is collective, with no real author.

This stylised little man with a ball-shaped head, a pictogram, stoops while gently dropping rubbish into an old-fashioned waste container, it becomes a playmate in public areas, you find him in every street corner and wherever it can be shown. It is a sign of modernity and civic-mindedness. And its popularity increases as it is printed on food products’ packages, which not all of us would remember.

Tidyman is a public domain symbol and has had a long life almost up until today, amongst uses and misuses, such as the numerous and free re-elaborated versions and parodies.

Its vagueness, though, in the separate waste collection era, made it a little obsolete.

So, in 2010, Keep Britain tidy decided to abandon it. Brand Catalyst, the association’s

Think Tank

The new Tidy: www.peterberrecloth.com/?project=04-tidyman

Left: Tidyman new version, ©Keep Britain Tidy Left page: Tidyman old version, ©Keep Britain Tidy

Bottom: The evolution of Tidyman, in the drawings by its author Peter Berrecloth

senior designer, suggests a variation as a replacement, less invasive but jollier, while Brand Catalyst coordinated its new identity.

The little man became green, he stands next to a rubbish bin but in an upright posture, then he changes position, he becomes alive, he “specializes” and a big heart beats in his chest. The new symbol is part of the current public awareness campaign Love Where you Live.

Actually, Keep Britain Tidy is not scrapping the old symbol but it is rather revising its mission and adjusting its actions, because according to the data collected it is still necessary to raise awareness while social behaviour requires new ways of communication and vice versa.

So, it is all about the transformation of a new mode of communication, not just an icon.

Keep Britain Tidy’s website, which we suggest you visit and navigate, is a big world of initiatives and organizational qualities, so far unequalled.

The little man appears here and there on the

The old Tidyman is landfilled, an anonymous online illustrator

Anti-Nazi Tidyman

Polish graphic designer Lex Drewinski interprets Tidyman, turning the meaning upside down. Poster’s detail

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renewablematter 10. 2016 Left: An Isotype table describing the phenomenon of the work transformation of the English textile industry from 1820 to 1880.

The black men work at home, the red in the factory.

The literacy index is shown by the blue book line

Isotype, www.gerdarntz.org/isotype

website in its brand new form, but it is merely a trace in the context. While the old symbol, the black one, although landfilled, will always be found on the web and around the world, especially that “mixed waste” world that desperately needs it. And because it belongs to everyone, nobody will ever be able to erase the old Tidyman.

But where did this idea to draw such abstract little men/symbols, useful to a simple and direct kind of communication originate?

It dates back to a long time ago, to be precise to the Wissenschaftliche Weltauffassung (The scientific conception of the world: the Vienna Circle). We are in Vienna in the 20s, a melting pot of modernity and political project of social emancipation.

The idea to invent pictograms belongs to Otto Neurath – a scientist, philosopher and sociologist with a socialist worldview – who, in 1936, wrote: “Words divide, images create contacts.” Neurath invented a very ambitious language made of images: the idea is clear, legible and international.

He calls it ISOTYPE, an acronym for International System of Typographic Picture Education. The project, later developed with his wife Marie and graphic designer Gerd Arnts who designed thousands of symbols, has a mission: to offer, in a simple and effective way, those with little or no education an easy read and visualization of socially

Left: Gerd Arntz, men and professions according to Isotype

Left: Gerd Arntz, human races according to Isotype

Bottom: Graphic reconstruction of the Isotype logo

by Otto Neurath

Think Tank

Bottom: Visual perception: It can’t be a toilet.

What is it?

“Words divide, images create contacts.”

Bottom right: Otl Aicher, 1972 Munich Olympic Games’ daily programme

Right: Otl Aicher, pictograms for the 1972 Munich Olympic Games

and historically important themes. Indeed, a supporting visual language, a utopia.

This idea would then find its way into the heart of post-war modernist panorama and the whole world would embrace it, stripped of its more social and innovative connotations in favour of the International Style. Just think of the road signs (the US Department of Transportation is a good case in point), of the signs for public and work places, sports’ symbols (Otl Aicher’s ones for the 1972 Munich Olympic Games were amongst the most charming ones), up to today’s infographic data.

It is an ongoing process, if we consider how many designers are still devoting their time to its development and optimization. Neurath wrote: “An image that makes good use of a system must convey all relevant information about the represented element. At first glance, one notices the most important elements, at the second, the less important and at the third, the details.

At the forth, nothing should be noticed anymore.”

Right, let’s have a little test, to see whether this “universalist” project actually works: let’s consider a symbol that everybody knows, the toilet pictogram. This couple divided by a vertical line, what on earth could it mean?

“Toilette”, of course, you may say, for men and women. That’s true, we are used to reading it like so (and often we are desperate to locate such sign at an airport), but if we absurdly imagine someone who might never have seen such sign (a Martian), why should he think of a toilet and not of a divorce or God knows what?

Try and play with your imagination: what if there were two men and a woman or two men only?

So the story of our little man comes to an end.

Symbols are not always adequate and easily interpreted: a lot depends on their widespread and conventional use, on context and on the designer’s ability. This applies to all images, that are not a universal language, whatever the good old Neurath might have thought. And while infographics become so pervasive in every visual field, in this magazine where we care about clarity and quality of writing and graphics we often wonder if, beyond the trend of the moment, all this designing new little men and data is at all always effective. Perhaps Tidyman, a forerunner of a dominant visual culture, will offer us cause for reflection.

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and Barren Rocks Photos ©Giovanni Curatola

GARDENS

Think Tank

edited by Antonio Cianciullo

In Islamic culture, man is the administrator of natural assets.

The abundance of water and the return of life cycle are the reward for correct behaviour; desertification punishes those who make mistakes. There is a link between this and the Laudato Si’, as shown by Giovanni Curatola.

Giovanni Curatola is an orientalist who studied at Ca’ Foscari in Venice and specialized in London and Oxford.

A professor at the University of Udine and Catholic University of Milan, is one of the leading expert of Islamic art and an expert of Iran culture.

Is there a connection linking opposites?

On the one hand, European aspiration to a government in flux, to a circular economy where matter and energy enter a virtuous circle through the creation of a technological paradise.

On the other, the Islamic vision of a stable universe, as pronounced once and for all by Allah’s will, enshrined in the Koran, a world where the light of goodness comes from behind us. The “sun of the future” of workers’ fights and the unchanging word of the Prophet. Can they be in agreement?

“Firs of all we cannot talk about Islam as if it were one block. There are many kinds of Islam, one for every history, for every culture, for every tradition. In order to understand what has happened and what is occurring the Middle East, it is more appropriate to read adherence to this religion in identity terms,” replies Giovanni Curatola, a life devoted to the knowledge of the Islamic world. Curatola is Professor of Islamic Art History and Archaeology, a UNESCO consultant, curator of important exhibition on Islamic art and an essayist. He accepted to guide us through the research into a bridge between two apparently differing sensitivities.

“Of course today the topic of Islam is linked to the Daesh attack, but in order to try to

understand if the environmental issue divides the two banks of the Mediterranean we need to look at the bigger picture,” continues Curatola.

“In 2003-2004, when I was in Baghdad to work on the two damaged museums by the second Gulf war, the environmental disasters caused within the space of a little over a decade were one the the most recurrent themes. Saddam had used chemical weapons in Northern Iraq, in Kurdistan, while in the the South, to hit the not so aligned Shiites, he had devastated an extraordinarily important area from an ecological and historical viewpoint, the marshes where the Tigris and Euphrates meet. Having almost destroyed what some regard as the model inspiring the idea of paradise is one of the main accusations against the former Iraqi dictator.”

In the Middle East is there an environmental consciousness that goes beyond the controversies of a single act?

“If we want to talk about a spiritus loci, we have to say that the local spirit of this part of the Middle East goes beyond a single faith. This is the birthplace of the three monotheistic religions, offspring of the desert, of an infinite space that takes us back to communion: billions and billions of grains of sand form a unity.”

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renewablematter 10. 2016

When, at the beginning of the 20th century, Kemal Atatürk started Turkey’s secularization, one of the reforms he introduced was the positioning of a public clock in the squares.

Before, the day was scanned by the five prayers. The time of prayers was that of nature.

In the West, the theory of oneness, applied to ecosystem, produced the idea of a living planet, Gaia, but it did not prevent more and more invasive forms of pollution from occurring, up to the global threat of climate disruption. Now it is imperative that we curb the disaster occurred and the Laudato Si’ encyclical contains a powerful message going in that direction. Is there a similar push in that direction within Islamic communities?

“From a doctrine point of view, we need to bear in mind that the Koran has a greater impact than that of the Bible in the West: there is a direct reference to the word of God and there is less room for interpretation.

From a current awareness perspective, the Middle East’s kinds of Islam are experiencing a huge contradiction. On the Northern bank of the Mediterranean, there is modernity as a possible help for redressing the balance in the process of industrialization. On the Southern and Eastern bank it is more difficult to cherish this hope because modernity, wherever it has arrived, often strengthened disparities, imposed a pace and a lifestyle perceived as unnatural, besides being harmful for the environment: now it is not easy to reassess the process by offering a more promising direction. Such difficulties are obvious in Iran too. This is a country with its peculiarities, with a great pre-Islamic culture.

A hinge country, of the very few great civilizations that was born by a river and that later spread out over a vast territory because since its very beginning it was interested in exchanges and dialogue. When Iran converted to Islam it did so keeping its distinctive feature, namely the Sciite belief, as opposed to the Sunni majority: a split that still underpins most problems experienced in the area.”

The fact that Islam is still lagging behind in the separation between religious and temporal power: Christianity has put religious wars behind it for a few centuries now.

“Up to a point, if we thins that the war between catholic and protestant people in Ireland only ended a few years ago. But, going back to Iran, I wanted to point out that the Khomeini-led great revolution in 1979 was a reaction to fast and forced modernization that augmented social inequalities.”

What were the main characteristics of this forced modernization?

“One of the key elements was time alteration, that did not involve only Iran. When, at the beginning of the 20th century, Kemal Atatürk started Turkey’s secularization, one of the reforms he introduced was the positioning of a public clock in the squares. Before, the day was scanned by the five prayers. The time of prayers was that of nature, determined by sowing, harvesting and the big events of an eternal cycle.

The natural dimension was part and parcel

of a traditional world that could afford to observe: Islam was born in a nomadic culture where space and time are fundamental.

Movements occurred with caravans, they were slow, people travelled in close contact with animals and the desert.”

So, by contrast, the idea of a paradise full of water was born.

“Not just water: the Persian word for paradise is firdaws, a garden defended by a wall keeping out the desert where a body of water runs through it. The image of a Koranic garden where four rivers flow, making up a cross, one of water, one of honey, one of milk and one of wine, found its application in the 16th and 17th centuries in the gardens built around the great mausoleums, the Indian ones in particular. Their composition is very interesting: every square, separate from the cross formed by the rivers, represents a season. But within every square there is a space dedicated to the other seasons: winters hosts summer, spring and autumn. And vice versa.

Macrocosm and microcosm talk to each other.

The result is very dynamic: it becomes a circular mechanism in eternal flux, where life emerges all the time.”

A powerful connection between force of nature and that of man’s administration.

“Absolutely, even from an emotional perspective.

Such gardens are a triumph of the senses: colours, smells, birdsong, water flowing. Every sense is stimulated. It is a contest that helped promote a perception of closeness to nature that is still currently felt. In Iran, for instance, there is a book for historic trees. I remember that once I noticed a beautiful cypress, and being from Tuscany I am particularly sensitive to them; I got nearer and I noticed that it had a plate classifying and protecting it.”

Islamic tradition considers men as God’s vicars, custodians of the Earth, a very similar viewpoint to that of Christianity.

“Yes, man as the administrator of natural assets.

This teaching is well established in traditions.

In the 70s, walking around Iran, I visited villages in the middle of nowhere. When they offered me tea, they had to prepare cups, so they brought water to the boil and poured it from one glass to the next, without changing it. From an hygienic point of view it was not the best option, but nothing was wasted: full respect of natural resources.”

In what way Islamic art reflects tradition?

“If we consider the most commonly genre identified with Islamic art, miniatures, we realize that by the time in Italy the Renaissance flourished, in Islam perspective was not in use.

They knew about it, but it was not applied since making representations too realistic, confusing art with reality, was regarded as disrespectful towards God, as if men were vying with

Think Tank

the author of creation. Instead of using perspective, the object was broken down and seen from different viewpoints: for example, bird’s-eye view and then from the side. Unity through a variety of images.”

Almost cubist painting “Very early on, though and with a different purpose. It is a vision that distances itself from the object: the world is left in the hands of God, showing through the visual medium the path to follow. God is represented by the universe, by nature, that gives aplenty to those able to interpret it and punishes those abusing

its resources. In parables, this link with nature emerges in extremely topical ways. For instance, when in the Koran we read ‘or his parable is that of a smooth rock with [a little] earth upon it – and then a rainstorm smites it and leaves it hard and bare. Such as these shall have no gain whatever from all their [good] works: for God does not guide people who refuse to acknowledge the truth. Instead of those donating their goods, only eager to satisfy God and confirm themselves, it will be a garden on high ground, hit by a downpour and producing twice as many fruits. And if a downpour will not hit it, dew will lightly cover the surface.’”

In Iran, for instance, there is a book for historic trees.

I remember that once I noticed a beautiful cypress […] I got nearer and I noticed that it had a plate classifying and protecting it.

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renewablematter 10. 2016

When Repairing a Washing Machine

BECOMES A CRIME The excess of rules creates confusion and uncertainty harbouring mistakes and bad practices to the point where virtuous behaviour is sanctioned. Many discarded materials have become resources, but according to the law they are still waste.

by Alessandro Farruggia

For that Italy dreaming of the circular economy, life is not at all simple.

Consumers, companies, recycling managers and consortia must meander through a jungle where the good will to anticipate and regulate everything creates very detailed, sometimes even artificial barriers and divisions. But also treacherous gaps where bad practices can embed themselves.

Alessandro Farruggia is a journalist, whose spheres of activity are mainly environmental and foreign issues.

Since the late 80s he has dealt with the most important international conferences on environmental issues.

His reports from Antarctica won him the Saint Vincent Prize for journalism.

In waste management, there are virtuous practices liable to sanctions that are now almost tolerated. And many worse practices that are not.

There are too many rules, some contradicting each other. And citizens and people operating in this sector risk paying the price. In some cases, a solution was found. Historically, batteries for small appliances represented a problem.

In order to help their customers and collect a pragmatically dangerous waste product, some dealers had created de facto temporary storages, made legal without registration and authorization only by art. 6 of DL 188 in 2008 adopting Directive 2006/66/EC. For a solution found, many problems still go unsolved.

An issue still unsolved is the question of toner and cartridges collection points, technically exhausted special waste from digital printing, that in reality could not be carried out without authorization by shops selling office “consumables”. So, when there is no authorization, it is a punishable offence

although it is actually tolerated. It is noteworthy that private citizens can use recycling centres while companies and VAT-registered individuals cannot. In fact, by law, VAT-registered people must use authorized treatment regenerators and recuperators: it does not matter whether it is a professional studio using only three toners a year or a company using a thousand.

The Court of Cassation (Ruling n. 23971/2011) confirmed the co-responsibility of waste producers “who do not use authorized parties, do not comply with the preventive verification of all authorizations and do not ascertain the effectiveness and veracity of produced waste recovery and disposal as provided for by Art. 178, paragraph 3, Dlgs 152/2006.”

But for now, at least for private citizens, it is still possible to leave used toner cartridges in shops where they buy new ones.

Another interesting case is that of virtuous behaviours running the risk of being sanctioned thanks to the creation of ecopiazzole (recycling areas) provided for by Ministerial Decree 8/04/2008. Section 37 of the decree established that inert waste (mixtures of cement, bricks, ceramic debris) can be taken to recycling areas only in case of “small removal jobs done directly by the renter of the property.” Why the renter and not the landlord? This is a mystery.

Section 38 is also open to broad interpretation.

It establishes that, still in case of “small removal jobs done directly by the renter” it is possible to confer mixed waste deriving from demolition and building activities. This includes a lot of

Free vector: Jhavelka/C.C. attribution license

Policy

There is an excess of regulations for which there is no need. But it is now an irreversible process: it complicates what could be simple.

things. All this creates confusion, and confusion gives rise both to virtuous people and profeteers.

A tricky problem for recycling areas’ managers.

A case in point is the recovery and disposal of tyres. The relevant decree establishes, and rightly so, that only tyres from private users can be taken to recycling areas. But if an unscrupulous citizen abandons 2 tyres outside the gates of the recycling area, the operator or the municipality cannot dispose of them in the recycling area, they must call an authorized disposal company. Even if the tyres are right in front of the entrance.

But the whole system suffers from lack of flexibility deriving from the stratification of laws and decrees that, by trying to regulate everything, have created a jungle of micro categories and regulations where making mistakes is very easy.

“There is an excess of regulations – points out Paola Ficco, an environmental legal expert, former member of the Ecolabel Ecoaudit Committee – EMAS Italy, as well legal expert for the Ministry of Industry, the Ministry for the Environment and a member of the Environmental Operators Register, “for which there is no need.” But it is now an irreversible process: it complicates what could be simple. And there is nothing indicating that this trend can be reversed. There is a draft decree on WEEEs and other definitions of storage in the pipeline.

Problems multiply. There is a gap between what the law provides for and lifestyles. Legislators often do not understand the difference between industrial conduct and private citizens’ behaviour: they are two different levels that should be regulated differently.

Let’s have a look at bicycles. An abandoned bicycle is considered waste and so it can be used only after having been checked, cleaned and prepared. Things that non-professional operators do not do. Household appliances represent another delicate question. A washing machine without its plug is considered WEEE. If it is taken care of by a disposal company, all is good. But if it is taken in by a small workshop that repairs it and fits it with a plug, it is illegal and not everybody is aware of such thing. It is noteworthy that the new directive 2012/19/EU on WEEEs, regulating the disposal of waste from electrical and electronic equipment, tends to encourage as much as possible the disposal through authorized companies, establishing the principle of “one vs. zero,” that is the opportunity for the consumer to return lamps and small household appliances to shops without having to buy new ones. And for consumers this is certainly an advantage because it reduces the use of unauthorized companies.

But sometimes, as is the case with used clothes, it is a very thin line.

Courts have often dealt with this matter, trying to provide innovative interpretations. In a ruling, the criminal Cassation (30/07/2013, n. 32955)

has confirmed the existence of the crime of illegal waste trafficking in the case of “illegal behaviour of a plurality of individuals that had organized the collection of discarded clothes and accessories, products such as urban waste from private parties and after taking them to transport companies acting as sorting centre, they sold them on the domestic and foreign markets without the treatment provided for by the law on matter of recovery, amounting to the crime of criminal association, organized activity for the illegal trafficking of waste and falsity.” The same ruling also established that used clothes can be regarded as waste only after separate collection and in general by disposal by previous owners. In all other cases, in which a will to dispose of them is not present – but on the contrary they a reused in different consumption cycle – they cannot be considered waste but actual goods. This means that contextualization is needed. “The notion of waste,” as clarified by the European Court of Justice in 1997 (Tombesi Ruling) “must be interpreted dynamically. This means that the notion of waste must be interpreted in a broad sense.”

But this should also be adopted by the law, especially if we really want to kick-start the circular economy. “To kick-start virtuous cycles,” Paola Ficco points out, “rules must change. Today waste can only be disposed of or recovered, this means that it has to undergo preparation authorized though a complex procedure taken on by Regions and Provinces.

Guaranty must be paid, forms must be produced and authorised hauliers used. This is good for the recycling industry. But for small companies, for small quantities, this is not practicable.

Especially because it exposes those staking their all in perfectly good faith to a very high risk. It is clear,” Paola Ficco continues, “that the definition of waste, if we really want a circular economy, must change and we must go back to the concept of abandonment. The boundaries of the question must be repositioned, we must be happy with waste, considering it an actual resource. And rules are far too chaotic: rules must be made clearer, without an endless series of exceptions. Legal and illegal behaviours must be made clear and known in advance.”

Once again, Europe represents a problem: in the draft directive on the circular economy the definition of waste remains unchanged.

So, on the one hand it says that many materials are resources and not waste, but by law they are still waste. And the suspicion is that, at the moment, the only circular aspect of waste management is red tape.

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DANGEROUS

European and Italian laws do not seem to keep up with the development of green chemistry, constantly drawn towards research and innovation. It is running the risk of clashing with the very concept of waste reuse and that of cascade use.

by Sofia Mannelli

Sofia Mannelli, President of Chimica Verde Bionet since 2012.

She has been dealing with bioenergy and green chemistry since 2012.

She co-edited the sector Plan within the the national blueprint on bioenergies promoted

by MIPAAF and she was councillor of bioenergies for three ministries for agricultural policies.

Whichever way you look at it, the very concept of biorefinery involves innovation: from the choice of production location – often in decommissioned industrial areas – to the type of raw materials, whether from specific supply chains or from waste use, from cultivation methods to at least partially renewable packaging.

Not only that. The whole production chain is drawn towards constantly searching new solutions to lower waste in the processes, to use incoming materials to the plant according to the “cascade” principle so as to extract in sequence all possible high added-value compounds and only at the very end, use the final by-products to recover energy and heat.

There is now a host of examples testifying the strong level of innovation in the production technologies of green chemistry: fragmentation through mechanical or microwave pre-treatment,

Illustration by Michela Lazzaroni

Short-sightedness

fractionation through mechanical and physical (for example through steam explosion) or biological (enzymes) treatments, liquefaction through enzymatic or acid hydrolysis, hydrothermal (or not), catalytic (or not) liquefaction, slow (carbonization) or fast (flash) catalytic (or not) pyrolysis. All technologies developed over a relatively short period of time and specifically adapted to the development of the biobased industry.

Italy is amongst the most advanced countries in this sector, both for technologies and patents and for innovative products and abilities of smart purchases by consumers. Such formidable development is not accompanied

by European regulations enabling the sector to grow or at least not to hinder it. It must be said, though, that in Europe, at least with previous Commissions, big steps forward have been taken and Member States have been spurred with

Policy

This legislative short-sightedness collides directly with the concept of waste reuse, with the innovative criterion of the “cascade” use, with all those technologies used for extracting high added-value molecules with nothing of the normal industrial practice.

innovative and progressive strategies. Sadly, the current Commission has largely abated such emphasis. Strategies such as “Lead markets: An Initiative for Europe” in 2007 or the “2009 Energy and Climate Package” or again “A Strategy for a Sustainable Bioeconomy for Europe” in 2012 have been extremely important measures to remove the veto to the development of the bioeconomy imposed by many lobbies still clinging to the past.

Italy already experienced a magic moment in 2006 when, thanks to an amendment of the then senator Francesco Ferrante to the 2007 Budget Law (n. 296/2006), the ban to sell non biodegradable and non compostable carrier bags was passed. In the same period many incentives were offered to the first supply chains of power production from distributed renewable sources. These are far-sighted laws, promoted with great determination against many obsolete industrial sectors, necessary to give the first stimulus to a whole sector, which is now boasting extremely competitive achievements and technologies. Some mistakes were made, but then the system was improved and things did work. One of them was the attempt to pass a decree on bio refineries, badly drawn up and useless, which certainly has not helped the sector. After that, nothing at all.

But now what stage are we at in Europe and Italy?

I will only mention briefly an issue, that of the so called by-products, because I deem it crucial especially in the light of the new directive on waste put forward by the European Commission within the EU strategy on the circular economy, called “the missing link”.

Despite Europe having openly expressed its will to reduce and reuse food and other kinds of waste, Italian laws for a correct classification of by-products are very ambiguous, and this has led to great difficulties for many production chains, causing in many cases even glaring implications for agricultural entrepreneurs.

The definition of by-product appears for the first time in terms of positive right in article 5 of the new directive 2008/98/CE. In short, a substance, in order to be defined as by-product, must properly derive from a production process where it is not the primary product; its reuse must be certain; it must not undergo any “treatment other than what is the normal industrial procedure”; and, lastly, its use must not harm the environment or humans in any way.

The most controversial aspect in such definition is precisely the principle of “normal industrial practice”, which is the root cause of many conflicting interpretations.

Depending on the dominant interpretation, the classification of what is a by-product and what is not changes.

According to most legal experts, the treatments of the “normal industrial practice” can be

defined as the set of operations or production phases characterizing a certain cycle of goods on the basis of a “well-established routine” in the specific sector. Such operations must not affect the identity, environmental and commodity-related qualities of the by-product.

Such qualities do exist, by definition, from the very moment of its production (and therefore from an earlier stage). We are then in hot water.

Over the last few years the Ministry for the Environment tried to draw up two draft decrees, born under different governments – it seems that one is being assessed by the Prime Minister’ office – to assist the business sector with the use of by-products. But none of them shows an understanding of the importance of the concept of innovation, intrinsic to the criterion of biorefinery. The normal industrial practice, mentioned in the law, recognizes only the practice normally in use in the plant using the by-product and the operations allowed can only be identified with those the company normally carries out on the traditional raw materials.

There are even more restrictive interpretations according to which any allowed potential treatment of the waste must never imply a transformation of the substance and object.

Unfortunately, even the new package of measures on the circular economy put forward by the European Commission and published in December 2015 does not detect this problem, despite the European strategy being “focussed on the promotion of the technologically-advanced circular economy able to use resources effectively.”

Actually, it makes it worse because it removes the intervention by Member States, that will no longer have the opportunity to “adopt measure to set the criteria to meet in order for specific substances and objects to be considered by-products and not waste,” which was the legal tool the Ministry for the Environment used in its attempt. In practice, the Commission takes it upon itself.

This legislative short-sightedness collides directly with the concept of waste reuse, with the innovative criterion of the “cascade” use, with all those technologies used for extracting high added-value molecules with nothing of the normal industrial practice and that very often are the recent result of long and costly R&D processes. After a treatment with these new technologies, the by-products in a biorefinery are ready to be used in sequence in other interconnected plants, organized in an “industrial symbiosis” to be transformed in a wide range of bio-products.

Now, in the light of the regulation, every residue deriving from some processing could potentially be waste, since it will definitely be submitted to treatments other than the normal industrial practice. Such waste involves bureaucratic compliance, costs and very strong restrictions to its use.

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renewablematter 10. 2016

Circular Economy and Producer Responsibility:

A Match that Can Work

The maker of a product must manage its entire life cycle, dealing with it even when it becomes waste. This is the only way to avoid distortions and inefficiencies that could jeopardize the objective of creating a circular economy model.

by Giovanni Corbetta

Over the years, managing end-of-life tyres has confirmed that, in order to achieve the objective of an effective total recycle thus creating a circular economy model by minimizing resorting to consumers’ economic contribution, responsible and scrupulous management is needed.

In particular, all producers must pay attention to their goods and to the clients who buy them (and guaranteeing them the best price).

Giovanni Corbetta is General Manager of Ecopneus.

The concept of Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) is the answer to an integrated vision: from designing to reusing recycled materials in new applications, through the production and marketing of products and their collection and recycling at the end of their life.

EPR represents a very advanced approach able to support not only increasingly more sophisticated technological development in ecodesign, production and recycling methods – ensuring at the same time that business choices fully respect environmental and people safety – but also the development of potential markets.

The last link of the waste treatment chain, that is every single recycler, must often tackle the problem of finding sound market outlets for materials deriving from recycling. For obvious reasons of recycled material flow balancing and valorisation, their market of reference must be increasingly represented by the industrial sector that designed and made the product which turned into waste.

A necessary condition to become a “facilitator” of the creation of a well-working and profitable chain is that the producer must be enabled to organize and control the management of its endof-life products.

This is the only correct way to implement EPR deriving, as it is clear from the expression, from the need to invest the producer with responsibilities not only on the most traditional aspects of marketing a product (performance, respect of technical standards, guarantee) but also on the sos-called “end of life” aspects, according to the principle that “those who pollute must pay”.

So EPR cannot be confined to producers only, thus to the relevant industrial sector, that after

Illustration by freepik.com

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Policy

EPR derives from [...] the need to invest the producer with responsibilities not only on the most traditional aspects of marketing a product (performance, respect of technical standards, guarantee) but also on the so-called “end of life” aspects, according to the principle that “those who pollute must pay.”

designing, making and marketing a product are required to manage the end of life.

It seems contrary to the principles of EPR to transfer responsibility for the management of end of life to a subject other than the makers of a specific product. The assignment of this role to subjects who are not directly involved in the production of an item, such as organizations and consortia managing other waste on behalf of their members, not only would mean to exclude the “real” producers from the management of the end of life of their products but it would also cause a series of other risks.

The first risk would involve the achievement of an optimal level of cost efficiency. The greater the specialization of a Producers Responsibility Organization (PRO) in managing its product at the end of life (and thus finding a single waste type), the greater the capacity of this PRO to find, thanks to its deep knowledge of its sector, optimal solutions able to have positive effects on cost management, on the amount of environmental contribution, as well as on the price of the product. Even more so, where the PRO is managed by the sector that produced the item now at the end of its life cycle.

The achievement of an optimal level of cost efficiency is the real interest of a product’s maker since no one is in a better position to reduce the amount of environmental contribution to ask its clients to manage the end of life phase.

There can also be risks of conflict of interest: a PRO, dealing with waste X, when it can deal with waste W, Y and Z it would not be any different from an ordinary multi-waste recycler from whom waste is a the heart of their company’s operation. As such, they tend to be interested in antagonistic prevention of waste generation.

Moreover, managers of waste supply chains have an opposite interest compared to manufacturers.

While for the former, the financing of EPR systems represents a source of income, the same financing causes a negative effect for manufactures since it impacts on the product price without generating any income for them.

There is also a risk for ecodesign effectiveness, an aspect that only concerns the manufacturing sector and is at the same time closely linked to EPR: the allocation of end of life management to subjects other than producers who do not represent a direct link between designing and end of life management.

Organizations managing waste show multiple levels of maturity and different market positions.

Letting them deal with waste not produced by members can lead to competition distortion in favour of more experienced players on the market that would expand their ambit to other waste types thus gaining an indubitable advantage compared to new PROs. Mixed management of multiple waste types by the same operator can also cause risks with management transparency, such as transfer of costs and profit, criticality and advantages and disadvantages and benefits.

The circular economy relies on the correct management of waste and this leads immediately to two important points: impacts connected with a strong social (environmental) responsibility and the responsibilities deriving from the delicate management of economic contributions (sums that the consumer must pay by law). It is therefore essential to outline specific behavioural obligations for Producers Responsibility Organizations such as reporting, transparency, ethical and environmental performance indicators; non distortion of competition; nationwide coverage; mechanisms to prevent cherry picking; respect of the waste hierarchy and no mechanism, even indirect, to generate substitute profit or benefits.

This implies the existence of an efficient control system: supervision authorities, regular checks on organizational models and business processes, regular audits on competence flows and economic indicators.

Most probably, it will be the very EU legislation to make compulsory very soon the creation of regulatory national mechanisms for the various EPR schemes present in different countries.

Given the variety and different evolution stages of these schemes, the European Commission, in the recent proposal for the revision of Directive 2008/98/EC on waste put forward in December 2015, suggested the necessary contents to define unequivocally this concept.

Italian legislators also recognized the need to control and monitor EPR systems. Art. 29 of “Collegato ambientale alla Legge di stabilità 2014” (law n. 221, 28 december 2015) assign now to the Ministry of the Environment and Sea and Land Protection the task to supervise and control such aspect, in line with the dictate of the proposal for the revision of waste directive put forward by the EC. Obviously, the time is ripe in Italy as well.

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renewablematter 10. 2016 Waste: Different Forms of Responsibilities

by David Röttgen, Partner of Ambientalex Law Firm/Member of the IPCC Committee of the Ministry for the Environment

Legislative Decree of 3rd April 2006, n. 152 “regulations regarding the environment”, www.camera.it/parlam/ leggi/deleghe/06152dl.htm

When dealing with waste, it is necessary to pinpoint the appropriate subject in charge of managing it.

Apart from a few exceptions, the Italian law opted for joint responsibility for all those involved in the waste production and management processes, envisaging that the initial producer, or whoever holds some waste, is to be held responsible for the whole chain of waste treatment (art. 188 Dlgs 152/2006).

However, there is another kind of responsibility, the so called “Extended Producer Responsibility,” which was recently introduced (Art. 178-bis, Dlgs 152/2006), addressing those who materially produced the goods, extending their responsibility to the “end-of-life” phase of their products, i.e. when it becomes waste.

Nevertheless, one should not confuse the “extended producer responsibility” with the “classic” responsibility of those producing waste and the subjects involved in its treatment (governed by article 188 of the same Dlgs 152/2006).

Not only are they different from a legal perspective, but the interests of a manufacturer and those who manage waste are often different. A producer responsibility aims at reducing the amount of waste generated with his/her products, while those involved in waste management would most certainly not profit from a waste reduction, since it is their “raw material.”

Nevertheless, in the daily debate, the role of manufacturers is often confused with that of subjects who materially manage waste disposal (collectors, recyclers, etc.).

Such confusion stems from the often-misused term “shared responsibility.”

Actually, in some cases, the concept is used to state that all subjects in the waste management chain are jointly and severally liable in case of bad waste management. In other instances, it is referred to in order to justify the need for collective systems to act together, i.e. they collaborate with subjects involved in waste collection and management.

Lastly, for some it would justify the right of participation of collectors, recyclers, etc. to collective systems set up in accordance with extended producer responsibility, in their capacity as partners.

Those claiming this distort the meaning that this very law gives to the concept: as a matter of fact, Italian legislators recognise “shared responsibility” solely in the packaging sector. On the contrary, the “general rule” (art. 178-bis) on “Extended Producer Responsibility” does not mention it at all.

But even in the specific sector of packaging, the recipients of “shared responsibility” provided for by law are not those operating in the waste sector but solely “operators in the respective packaging sectors” [see Art 217, paragraph 2]: that is manufacturers (providers of packaging materials, producers, transformers and importers of empty packaging and packaging materials) and users (traders, distributors, packaging fillers and users of packaging and importers of empty packaging).

In brief, the following conclusions can be drawn: •• “Shared responsibility”, solely referring to the manufacturer of a product (and not to the waste producer as well), must be kept clearly separate from “joint responsibility” of all subjects concretely taking part in the waste production and management cycle.

•• The notion of “shared responsibility” does not require the collaboration amongst collective systems and subjects operating in waste collection and treatment.

•• Least of all, it is able to justify the fact also those who physically manage waste have the right to take part, as partners, in collective systems (consortia etc.), institutions as provided for “extended producer responsibility.”

It is contrary to the principles of “extended producer responsibility” to transfer it to subjects other than the producers of a specific product.

However, excluding operators of waste management from the governance of collective systems, we do not generate the risk of excluding from the system of extended producer responsibility the industrial sector dealing with waste management. As a matter of fact, the production sector, subject to “extended producer responsibility” needs the waste management sector to meet its obligations anyway. But all this by keeping the respective roles and functions clearly separate.

“Carbon Tracker has changed the financial language of climate change�.

The Guardian, May 2014

arbon Tracker

Initiative

Financial specialists making carbon investment risk visible in the capital markets today. www.carbontracker.org @carbonbubble

Policy

It Is Time to Pass

FROM WORDS TO ACTION

by Mario Bonaccorso

The 4th European Bioeconomy Stakeholders’ Conference was held on 12th and 13th April in Utrecht. It launched the new Manifesto that will be at the heart of the new Union’s strategy. The challenge must be on an equal footing: the crux is fossil fuel subsidies.

Mario Bonaccorso is a journalist and creator of the Bioeconomista blog. He works for Assobiotec, the Italian association for the development of biotechnologies.

From words to action. In a nutshell, this is the challenge launched by the EU at the 4th Bioeconony Stakeholders’ Conference held in Utrecht (The Netherlands) on 12th and 13th April, in the state-of-the-art Rabobank Nederland Headquarters.

We need policies with a capital “P” able to take even inconvenient decisions quickly within a medium-long term framework to tackle climate change – the biggest threat facing humanity today – while promoting the transition to a post-fossil fuel society.

“We need a real leadership” the introduction to the Manifesto reads, the legacy of this conference to the benefit of the EU. But as we know, Adenauer, Schuman and De Gasperi era has gone, and today politics only focuses on the short term, to get votes and win elections. It feeds on polls and emotions.

And so it is no accident that public education and information were the main subjects of the Dutch conference.

More than 400 people – representing SMEs, clusters, universities and industrial and agricultural associations – gathered under the Dutch Presidency of the EU to discuss the bioeconomy. Objective: elaborating

European Bioeconomy Stakeholders Manifesto, bioeconomyutrecht2016. eu/Static/bioeconomy utrecht2016.eu/Site/ Manifest.pdf

a Manifesto that will be at the heart of the new European strategy, expected by the end of the year.

While the 2012 Conference in Copenhagen was an opportunity to launch the strategy, Dublin and Turin – in 2013 and 2014 respectively – were two opportunities to take stock of the results achieved since its implementation, Utrecht undoubtedly represented a turning point to change gear, asking European and national institutions to take their responsibilities: “The enormous transition from fossil-fuels based economy to a sustainable economy,” the Manifesto reads, “requires ambitious efforts and coordinated actions. European governments and companies should invest wholeheartedly in research and development, sustainable production, market introduction, innovation, scaling up industries and smart regulations.”

But this transition requires society to take up a new active role, as called for by many people present. Starting from John Bell, Director of the EU Bioeconomy Directorate, who defined society as “the driving force of the bioeconomy”, to Catia Bastioli, Novamont CEO, for whom “the bioeconomy is a great opportunity to reconnect economy with society.”

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In Switzerland, at the very heart of Europe, the CO2 tax represents a crucial tool to achieve the national objectives in the fight against climate change.

How can it be done? “We need,” the Novarabased company manager stated, “educational programmes, involving private and public institutions and foundations, aimed also at creating green jobs combined with the support for the demand of new biobased products through a Green Public Procurement system.”

The introduction of new policies on the demand front was another highly debated subject in the Netherlands. Defined as “a necessary measure” even by Pekka Pesonen, Secretary-General of Copa Cogeca, the biggest farmer and agricultural cooperative association in Europe.

“At the current low oil price,” the conclusive Manifesto reads, “the bioeconomy has a little change to emerge. Introduce ambitious and mandatory targets for bio-sourced products in public procurement, together with voluntary labelling scheme, as in the US BioPreferred Program. Special attention should be given to SMEs, supporting their innovation, for example by public procurement policies.”

The Conference in Utrecht follows the Bioeconomy Investment Summit in Brussels and the Global Bioeconomy Summit in Berlin, held in November last year and that represent two important discussion summits between the EU and stakeholders laying down precise indications for policies and necessary investments needed to stimulate this sector.

Above all, it comes after the presentation of a packet on the circular economy by the European Commission and COP21 in Paris last December that represented, according to everybody, a great stimulus to accelerate the bioeconomy.

But now we must prevent the EU to drive with one foot on the accelerator and the other on the brake pedal. There are still many unresolved questions. “First of all,” the Manifesto stakeholders complain, “biobased and fossil products are not treated equally. [...] The IMF estimated the global subsidies on fossil fuels in 2015 at $5.3 trillion. We do not ask for a European equivalent to this subsidy, but we do plead for a modest fraction of that amount to be invested in the bioeconomy: €5 billion per year for the period 2017-2025 in a European investment agenda that includes flagships, pilots, research and innovation and mutual learning.”

But there is more. Not taking into account the cost of negative externalities caused by fossilbased products creates market distortions.

In other words, who pays for the damage caused

by CO2 emissions? The need for a carbon tax was put forward in Utrecht. The first person to bring up the matter was Bertholt Leeftink, DirectorGeneral Enterprise and Innovation at the Dutch Ministry of Economic Affairs.

This is a substantial step forward in the European debate.

In Switzerland, at the very heart of Europe, the CO2 tax represents a crucial tool to achieve

the national objectives in the fight against climate change. It is an incentive tax introduced in 2008 on fossil fuels, such as heating oil or natural gas. This tax sends up prices, stimulating a reduction of the consumption of these fuels and a greater use of products and energy without or with low CO2 emissions.

Each year, about two thirds of the money collected through this tax are given back to people and companies regardless of their consumption, while one third (maximum CHF 300 million) ends up in the Building Programme with aim to promote measure to reduce CO2 emissions (such as energy improvement and renewable energies) and 25 million more are invested in a fund for technologies.

The Swiss model is obviously not easy to replicate in the EU which is still lacking a single economic and fiscal policy and appears to become weaker and weaker on the political cohesion front.

A certainty came out of this Conference: Europe is not at the dawn of the bioeconomy.

It has agricultural and industrial sectors able to innovate and invest, as proven by the presence of the most important global second and third generation biorefineries.

The level of excellence of universities and research centres has never been questioned. Private-public partnerships launched in recent years, such as Bio-based Industries Joint Undertaking (€3.7 billion), have guaranteed a new and vigorous leap forward. And an increasing number of European regions and states are equipped with a strategy: as a matter of fact, last March, Spain published its strategy while France is expected to come up with its own before the summer.

Even on the other side of the Atlantic, Europe is very much admired. Even DSM, the Dutch biotech colossus, announced in Utrecht that many of its investments made in the USA will be bring back to the Old Continent.

“The transition towards the bioeconomy is irreversible,” stated John Bell, the man who has taken up a crucial role and leadership in the European bioeconomy. A concept shared by 400 stakeholders gathered in Utrecht.

Now society must be made aware as well as the political class.

Dossier:

UNITED KINGDOM Ranking fourth in Europe after Germany, France and Italy, the UK bioeconomy is currently worth ÂŁ153 billion with over four million jobs. The country has got all it takes to take off and become a world leading centre for innovation in this field, as long as it sets up a national strategy and an action plan.

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renewablematter 10. 2016

Dossier: United Kingdom

An Uphill

STRUGGLE

by Mario Bonaccorso

With regard to the bioeconomy, the UK still has a long way to go.

But – thanks to biotech – there is considerable growth potential. Besides, a vision and investments from the British government are already there.

C. Burns, Higson A., Hodgson E., “Five recommendations to kick-start bioeconomy innovation in the UK”, BIOfpr, v. 10, n. 1, January/February 2016; onlinelibrary.wiley.com/ doi/10.1002/bbb.1633/full

In the United Kingdom, there is no strategy supporting the development of the bioeconomy. Despite the fact that, potentially, it could be the world-leading country, there are still several political, economic and social barriers hindering innovation in this field. As Caitlin Burns, Adrian Higson and Edward Hodgson write in a document published in January 2016 entitled “Five recommendations to kick-start bioeconomy innovation in the UK,” “practical measures are needed to close the existing gap with the United States, Brazil, France, Italy, Germany and Scandinavian countries.”

Covers illustrating this dossier are successful prototypes of an unprecedented and unique communication model the world over. Great trendsetter and conveyor of taste and style, the United Kingdom played its cards with irreverence and unpredictability Top image: Joy Division, Unknown Pleasures, 1979.

Debut album of English new wave, design

by Peter Saville, Factory Records

Burns and Higson are two consultants fro NNFCC, a York-based company established by the UK government in 2003, specializing in the bioeconomy; Hodgson is a researcher at the Aberystwyth University in Wales.

Their recipe to make the bioeconomy thrive across the Channel is simple, at least on paper.

Here are the ingredients: a cross-sectoral and long-term approach; supporting a clustering process on the model of what has been done in Yorkshire with BioVale; technological transfer, from the laboratory to the pilot plant and up to marketing; a system of green public procurement. Lastly, raising public awareness and acceptance of bio-based products.

Tertiarization of the Economy Today, the United Kingdom seems to be paying the tertiarization of its own economy

in the bioeconomy field. The UK is the sixth economy in the world – the third in Europe – with a nominal GDP of $2,945 billion and a pro capita one of $45,000 in 2014.

The service sector is the main driving force, contributing for 4/5 of GDP, followed by the industry (around 20%), while agriculture participates only marginally, with less than 1%.

According to an analysis carried out in June 2015

by Capital Economics, one of the world’s main independent companies on macroeconomic research, the bioeconomy’s gross added value across the Channel is £153 billion, with over four million jobs, including satellite activities. This ranks the United Kingdom as Europe’s fourth country behind Germany, France and Italy. Another study conducted by Banca Intesa Sanpaolo’s research centre has estimated that the UK’s production value for the bioeconomy is around €171 billion, employing 888,000 people, thus placing it in fifth position in Europe, because in this case even Spain is ahead thanks mainly to the contribution of agribusiness.

Centrality of Industrial Biotechnologies However, thanks to innovation, growth potential is enormous. Chemistry Growth Partnership, a public/private initiative created within the strategy to boost chemistry launched by the government in 2013, estimates that the national economy would benefit from £8 billion by 2030, if the chemical industry used biomass as raw material. It would also grow by £4-12 billion a year if industrial biotechnologies were

Policy

Capital Economics, The British bioeconomy, June 2015; www.bbsrc. ac.uk/documents/capitaleconomics-britishbioeconomy-report-11june-2015/

Chemistry Growth Partnership; ukchemistrygrowth.com/ Partnership.aspx

employed. According to a governmental report, from 2009 to 2013, the turnover of the industrial biotech sector grew by 11% and employment by 5%, annually.

So, it is no coincidence that the main initiatives to create new businesses in Great Britain are linked to biotechnologies.

Two examples have gained considerable visibility over the last few years: Celtic Renewables and Biome Bioplastics. The former is a Scottish biotech company using whisky dregs to develop advanced biofuels and other biochemicals: in 2015, it was awarded the EuropaBio prize (European association for the bioindustry) as the most innovative SME in the field of industrial biotechnologies. The latter is a Southampton-based company producing biodegradable and compostable bioplastic.

Waiting for a National Strategy The Industrial Biotechnology Leadership Forum – an association bringing together industries, investors and institutions – carries out the functions of the government’s advisory body with regard to the bioeconomy.

Industrial Biotechnology Leadership Forum; connect.innovateuk. org/web/industrialbiotechnology

“The United Kingdom – continue Burns, Higson and Hodgson – has the potential to be a world centre of innovation in the bioeconomy, thanks to the presence of various factors: strong basic research, several cutting-edge companies from a technological viewpoint, active support by investors, networks and institutions.

It is imperative, though, that a national strategy and an ensuing action plan be established.”

We cannot deny, though, that there is a vision and initiatives by the government. Last year, the Minister for business, enterprise and energy published a document – “Building a High Value Bioeconomy. Opportunities from Waste” – which places the bioeconomy development within the circular economy paradigm.

The vision to 2030 is very clear: making the United Kingdom one of the world’s leaders in the field of the bioeconomy, thanks to the nationwide presence of waste-based commercial scale plants, to the ability to attract investments from the rest of the planet and to the availability of technologies and business models to export the world over.

As for the bioenergy sector, in 2012, London introduced a strategy (UK Bioenergy Strategy) envisaging the use of biomass as mandatory in order to meet the targets of the UK’s decarbonisation by 2050. “Excluding biomass from the energy mix – as the British plan reads – would significantly increase the cost of decarbonisation of our system. A cost estimated at around £44 billion (according to an analysis by the Energy Technologies Institute, editor’s note).”

In short, the government’s strategy, which will be reassessed in 2017, enshrines clear, transparent and enforceable sustainability criteria, supports the use of energy crops and wood as raw material, pays attention to avoiding negative impacts on food prices and on biodiversity, promotes research of new technologies.

The Scottish Initiative The Scottish government is not sitting idly by.

Scotland was the first UK country, and one of

BioVale: Yorkshire and Humber lead the British Bioeconomy “Building a high value bioeconomy.

Opportunities from waste”; tinyurl.com/kv28uut

UK Bioenergy Strategy; tinyurl.com/j5n2552

Yorkshire and the Humber is the leading region of the British bioeconomy, thanks to the BioVale project, the first cluster bringing together companies, universities and research centres committed to this meta-sector, which has also benefitted from funds by the European Regional Development Fund.

BioVale was set up in July 2014 with the aim to build an internationally-recognized centre for bio-based innovation, focused on renewable raw materials and agricultural technologies, able to attract investments and to promote sustainable economic growth.

Technological transfer, access to international funds and networks, specialized training and institutional relations are amongst BioVale’s main activities.

The Yorkshire and the Humber region is actually the UK’s most important cluster of the bioeconomy, representing about

10% of its total value with £9 billion and 105,000 people employed. According to some estimates carried out by the London government, by 2025, investments in BioVale should lead to the creation of 45,000 new jobs and an added value for the economy of £2 billion a year.

Overall, in this UK area, there are 14,000 companies, active within the bioeconomy, over 450 chemical businesses (10% of the UK total) and more than 11,000 companies in agriculture, forestry and fishing. Vivergo biorefinery and the Drax Group biomassoperated power plant, which, with 3,960 megawatts provide 7% of the UK electricity are based here. Here, there is also the greatest concentration of food businesses in the UK. Lastly, the port system on the Humber River estuary is the busiest in the UK and the fourth in Europe for tonnage.

BioVale, www.biovale.org

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renewablematter 10. 2016 The Scottish Industrial Biotechnology Innovation Centre Launched in 2014, the Industrial Biotechnology Innovation Centre (IBioIC), headquartered in Glasgow, was set up to bridge the gap between education and industry.

It is specialist in the industrial biotechnology sector, with a deep embedded knowledge and the technical expertise to help stimulate the growth and success of the industrial biotech industry in Scotland by connecting the dots between industry, academia and government.

Its vision is to create a truly distinctive, world-leading innovation centre for industrial biotechnology. IBioIC acts to accelerate and de-risk the development of commercially viable, sustainable solutions for high-value manufacturing in chemistry-using and life science sectors. By 2030 its target is to generate £1 to £1.5 billion of gross value added contribution annually to the Scottish economy, this represents a growth of revenue from today’s estimated value of £190 million, to between £2 and £3 billion.

The IBioIC has outlined five key themes that would be adopted as the initial areas of focus for the centre and the success of industrial biotechnology development in Scotland: 1. Feedstocks, using sustainable biomass to replace fossil fuels; 2. Enzymes and Biocatalysts, to increase the use of biocatalysts/enzymes for new product development and efficiency benefits; 3. Cell Factory Construction, develop facilities for optimisation of new strains; 4. Downstream Processing, the development of products to get easily recoverable product streams; 5. Integrated Bioprocessing, full utilisation of raw materials and production of several co-products.

Scottish Industrial Biotechnology Innovation Centre, www.ibioic.com

In the United Kingdom the First Bank for Green Investments In line with its role as Europe’s major financial markets, the United Kingdom can boast the first bank in the world entirely devoted to green economy. It is the Green Investment Bank, set up and completely controlled

by Downing Street and capitalised with public funds. The bank carries out a key role in the environmental sustainability strategy of the country, requiring – according to what has been disclosed by the bank itself – investments for £330 billion until 2020.

The Green Investment Bank deals with many sectors including waste and bioenergy.

Here are a few of the projects in which the British bank has invested in 2015: •• £47 million (for an overall investment of 107 million) for a domestic and commercial waste-operated energy plant in Northern Ireland able to provide electricity to 14,500 houses; •• £70 million, together with the Irish utility Esb Electricity Supply Board, in an overall project of 190 million for the construction of a renewable energy facility in the port of Tilbury in Essex (Tilbury Green Power Facility). It will be able to generate – from the beginning of 2017 – 300 GWh of electricity a year, serving over 70,000 households. The facility is powered by 270,000 tonnes of waste a year, recovered in the surrounding area, provided by Stobart Biomass company;

Vivergo’s aspiration is to become a biorefinery in sync with its surroundings, stocking up on the wheat it needs as raw material mainly from Yorkshire Lincolnshire farms.

•• £21 million for the biomass-operated renewable energy facility (for an overall investment of 138 million) of Estover Energy at Cramlington, in North East England. It is estimated that it will cause a reduction of greenhouse gases equal to withdrawing 25,000 cars from the UK streets for a period of twenty years. The plant will provide energy to local pharmaceutical companies and will be able to guarantee electricity and heating to the local community (213 GWh of electricity from renewable sources, enough for 52,000 households a year); On 3rd March 2016, the UK government expressed its will to privatize the Green Investment Bank. According to Downing Street, “A transfer to the private sector will allow the GIB to maximize investment into green energy projects by attracting greater private sector investment, which has so far been constrained by rules governing how public bodies can raise capital.”

Green Investment Bank, www.greeninvestmentbank.com

The Biorefinery Roadmap for Scotland; tinyurl.com/zdfhkmk

Policy New Bioproducts from Whisky Dregs, from Beer to Fish Scotland is known the world over for the quality of its single malt whisky, beer, fish and shellfish caught in its waters. All resources for the fledgling bioeconomy.

According to a study on the circular economy, focused on these commodity sectors (“Sector Study on Whisky, Beer and Fish, Final Report”), published in June 2015 on an initiative by the Scottish government, the total volume of production waste is high and can become raw material for the production of new biofuels o bio-based chemical intermediates. As many as 53,682 tonnes of beer, 4,371 million tonnes from whisky and 189,538 tonnes from fish and molluscs.

A high percentage of such waste has always been used as feed for local animals and for fish, or as fertilizers on the fields or to produce heat or energy. However, over the last few years, Scottish people started to use this waste also to produce advanced

the first in Europe, to present its own strategy for the circular economy. Announced last February by the Minister for the environment, Richard Lochhead, it will allocate €70 million between national and European funds to reduce considerably food and building waste (representing 50% of all Scottish waste).

As stated by Lockhead, reducing food waste by only one third – one of the targets by 2025 – could add £500 million to the national budget.

Top images: Led Zeppelin, Led Zeppelin, 1969.

Debut album by the English rock band, design by George Hardie, Atlantic Records The Beatles, Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, 1967.

Eighth album by the band, design by Jann Haworth and Peter Blake (countless parodies), Parlophone Pink Floyd, Dark Side of the Moon, 1973.

Eighth album by the English band, design by Hipgnosis, Harvest Records

In January 2015, “The Biorefinery Roadmap for Scotland” was presented, a document highlighting, with a ten year horizon, the action and support required to place Scotland as a country able to promote sustainable industries onto the global market. The key element of such document is the national Plan for industrial biotechnologies, aiming at increasing the turnover of such sector from £189 million of 2012 to £900 million in 2025 which – in order to achieve such goal – in 2014 led to the launch of IBioIC (Industrial Biotechnology Innovation Centre). Glasgow will be the city hosting the next edition of EFIB, the European forum for industrial biotechnologies and the bioeconomy, scheduled from 18th to 20th October 2016, thus showing how much attention Scotland is paying to industrial biotechnologies.

According to Alan Wolstenholme, Chairman of the Scottish Industrial Biotechnology Development Group, “the target for the next ten years is the exploitation of natural resources, of technologies and innovation, of basic skills and business networks to push the development

biofuels, bio-based chemical intermediates and food supplements for human health.

According to government’s estimates, the potential economic benefit for the Scottish economy linked to the use of such waste is of £595 million a year.

Against this backdrop, the most significant example is that of Celtic Renewables, a spin-off of Biofuel Research Centre of the Edinburgh Napier University, which developed a technology to transform whisky production residue into car biofuel.

The technology is now being experimented at the BioBase Europe Pilot Plant in Ghent, Belgium, thanks to the funds obtained of €1.5 million, of which over one million granted by the British government, aiming at a new market sector in the United Kingdom with an estimated turnover of €125 million a year.

Celtic Renewables, www.celtic-renewables.com

of the bioeconomy to lead the agenda for a low-carbon country. A robust and versatile bio-refinery sector – notes Wolstenholme – will spur Scottish manufacturing and will act as a beacon for European businesses looking for collaboration or rearrangement.”

Vivergo: The Biorefinery in Sync with its Surroundings This is the way Paul Mines sees it too, Biome Bioplastics CEO and a member of the management committee of Lignocellulosic Biorefinery Network (LBNet), a British government-funded network made of industrialists and academics, leaders in the generation of economic value through chemical processes, materials and innovative fuels using lignocellulosic biomass as an alternative to oil.

“With the rising production of biofuels and bio-based chemicals – claims Mines – lignocellulosic technologies are an important solution enabling to use non-food crops for such processes and the development of efficient and sustainable methods to satisfy chemical and material needs in the world.”

Today, the UK’s leading biorefinery is Vivergo, a joint venture created in 2007 by Ab Sugar, British Petroleum and DuPont, which in 2015 witnessed BP’s withdrawal, which sold its shares to Associated British Foods, thus making it the majority shareholder.

Indeed, BP, in June 2014 expressed its intention to invest in American advanced biofuels, complaining about the lack of consistency and stability of European legislation.

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renewablematter 10. 2016

EFIB 2016; www.efibforum.com/ news/2015/glasgowto-host-leadingbiotechnology-conference

Lignocellulosic Biorefinery Network; lb-net.net/

US-based Butamax Advanced Biofuels – the joint venture created in 2009 by the British oil colossus in partnership with DuPont for the commercialization of bio-butanol – has its commercial plant in Brazil.

The Vivergo plant – located within the Saltend Chemicals Park near Hull – in Yorkshire, started to produce in 2012, becoming fully operational in December 2014. It is one of Europe’s leading plants for the production of bioethanol, meeting about a third of the UK’s demand for its blending with petrol.

Moreover, such plant produces up to 400,000 tonnes a year of high-protein feeds. Such quantity is enough to feed over 340,000 milking cows daily, i.e. 20% of national dairy livestock.

Vivergo’s aspiration is to become a biorefinery in sync with its surroundings, stocking up on the wheat it needs as raw material mainly from Yorkshire and Lincolnshire farms. The plant, according to what the company itself claims, saves over 50% of greenhouse gases compared to normal petrol, equivalent to current annual emissions of over 180,000 cars in the United Kingdom.

“Our business – points out David Richards Vivergo’s general director – is a great example of sustainable economic growth, because we ensure precious raw materials such as bioethanol and feeds which we would otherwise have to import.

“Our location just on the Humber river – adds Richards – is ideal: we are at the heart of the UK’s wheat belt, with the world’s best yields. Moreover, our distribution channels for bioethanols, by boat or road, to warehouses where it is blended with petrol are second to none.”

Green or Bio: It’s a New Economy Waiting for a new strategy on the bioeconomy – clamoured by those in the field – that launched for the green economy in 2011 will do, where the government stresses the need for the UK to move away from the use of fossil sources: “The UK is becoming increasingly dependant on fossil fuel imports.

By 2020, we will be able to import 45-60% of our oil and 70% of our gas. At the same time, global demand will probably rise, causing restrictions on the supply and price volatility. The United Kingdom must become more resilient to these price variations, developing alternative supply sources and using natural resources more efficiently.”

If this is not a strategy, it is certainly a manifesto favouring the bioeconomy.

Interview

edited by Mario Bonaccorso

We Have More than One Trump Card Maggie Smallwood, BioVale Director

The UK Bioeconomy is based on its world leading knowledge base.

Maggie Smallwood talks to Renewable Matter.

An interview with the Head of BioVale, the cluster which promotes Yorkshire and the Humber as a thriving centre of successful innovation for the bioeconomy and helps regional enterprise profit from the valuable business opportunities in this high growth sector. With her we talk about the bioeconomy in the United Kingdom, its strengths and its weaknesses.

As far as you’re concerned, what are the strengths of the bioeconomy in the UK? “Probably one of the UK’s greatest advantages is its world-leading knowledge base. This should

allow us to innovate our way to new biobased products and services. In Yorkshire, we already have examples of spin-outs from our higher education system which are doing this.

For instance Keracol, a company based in the University of Leeds, has developed methods to extract natural molecules from vine wastes; Starbons, a spin-out from the University of York, has patented technology to make a biomaterial from starch with wide ranging applications; Floreon has developed a biobased additive that makes bioplastic more robust based on technology developed at the University of Sheffield. We also see global leaders coming to the UK to access the knowledge base: for instance Brazil comes to the University of York to access their world leading expertise

Policy in the plant cell wall to accelerate their development of advanced biofuels.

Another advantage is that the knowledge base is reasonably well connected to industry through Innovate UK’s knowledge transfer network, the BBSRC (Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council, editor’s note) Networks in Industrial Biotechnology and regional networks such as BioVale. Industry can access scientific equipment and innovative scale up facilities which even large companies can not afford through centres such as the Biorenewables Development Centre in York and the National Industrial Biotechnology Facility on Teeside.

The UK is also fortunate in being home to major multinationals such as Unilever and Croda who understand the opportunity which the biobased economy offers as well as innovative SMEs such as Biome, a company which is working to make bioplastic from lignin, a residue from the paper and advanced biofuel industries.”

And the weaknesses?

“A weakness in the UK is perception of the bioeconomy. First people often don’t understand what it means and second there is a lack of appreciation of its scale: a study by Capital Economics estimated the annual gross value added arising from the UK bioeconomy in 2012 at £153 billion. This value is spread across the country, unlike some industries that are highly concentrated geographically.

Because the use of bioresources for manufacture of chemicals, fuel and materials is an emerging sector, connections are missing between industries in these new supply chains.

The UK is a small country and we do not have the type of biomass resources that other countries enjoy, such as the vast forests of Scandinavia.

This means that we need to focus on adding value to byproducts and wastes.”

Top images: The Rolling Stones, Sticky Fingers, 1971.

Album signed by Andy Warhol and design

by Craig Braun, Rolling Stones Record (self-produced) Sex Pistols, Never Mind the Bollocks, Here’s The Sex Pistols, 1977.

The only official album by the punk rock band, design by Jamie Reid, Virgin Records The Clash, London Calling, 1979.

Double live album by the band, self-produced design, it evokes Elvis Presley’s first album cover. CBS Records

Some people in UK complain about the lack of a specific strategy on the bioeconomy?

Is it a subject on the agenda of the government?

What measures should contain the plan to give practical support to the bioeconomy, from your point of view?

“The Biological and Biotechnology Sciences Research Council, BBSRC, and UK government departments have commissioned a review to look at just this question. BioVale is working with the Biobased Industries Association (BBIA) and with several of our network’s innovative SMEs to analyse the type of policy support they need to grow.

Policy stability is probably the most important factor to support development of a strong bioeconomy.

Production of chemicals and materials from biomass is often both environmentally beneficial and adds more value that the use of biomass for bioenergy or biofuel. Extension of the policy support for biofuel and bioenergy to biobased chemicals would ensure that the latter was not disadvantaged.”

In your opinion, how does the strong development of the tertiary sector affect the bioeconomy in UK? “The bioeconomy needs a service sector – legals, project management, marketing, finance – in a manner comparable to the petrochemical economy. Many of the skill sets will be transferable so strength in the tertiary sector can be applied to the bioeconomy both in the UK but also across the globe.”

BioVale is the first UK cluster dedicated to bio-economy. What is your role in supporting the bioeconomy?

“Building on its world-class strengths in the bioeconomy BioVale aims to establish Yorkshire and the Humber as an internationally recognised centre for bio-based innovation, focusing on renewable raw materials and agricultural technology. Working with collaborators such as UKTI and the Foreign Office’s Science and Innovation Network as well as our European Cluster partners in the 3Bi consortium, we promote the region’s bioeconomy assets to export markets, investors, policy makers, and funders.”

Can your case be replicated in other parts of the country?

“Yorkshire and the Humber has an outstanding combination of bio-based research, industry and agriculture, giving it a distinctive advantage, however, there are definitely opportunities for other regions to develop their bioeconomies using similar approaches. Our cluster has chosen to focus on four priority areas where our cluster stakeholders have world leading strengths: adding value to biowastes, next generation fuel and chemicals, high value chemicals from plants and microbes and agricultural technology.

Other regions will have different priorities that reflect their local industry and agriculture.

The basic principles of strengthening connections between elements in the new biobased supply and innovation chains can be applied anywhere.”

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renewablematter 10. 2016

UNITED by a DESK From lofts to coworking: 10 years on since the first space was fitted out in San Francisco, today there are about 50,000 workstations in 608 cities scattered in 89 countries.

by Silvia Zamboni

Silvia Zamboni is a professional journalist and an expert in environmental and energy issues. She authored books on the green economy’s good practices, mobility and sustainable development.

She collaborates with Radio 3 Rai, magazines and dailies. She is a member of Ecoistituto’s scientific committee in Bolzano.

In the beginning it was the loft, communicative yet impersonal.

Then the digital revolution wave brought about home teleworking: working hours tailored to family needs, ecological elimination of the home-office commuting but also isolation and expansion of the work-space into private life.

A decade ago, in California, a new choice peeped out: a new office format combining the socializing aspect of lofts with that of self-employment, embracing – and this is the aspect that makes all the difference – the collaborative philosophy of sharing.

Welcome to the world of coworking, collective offices where fledgling freelance flexible workers, start-ups and microenterprises can rent,

even for just a few months, single equipped workstations and use Wi-Fi, secretarial services and common spaces such as meeting rooms, kitchens and bars. And where, as a specific added value, one can exchange skills creating synergies – networking as it is known in these milieus – with other professionals working in the same location, creating a collaborative peer-to-peer network, helping self-employed workers developing their projects.

An ideal solution for those who do not have the capital needed to start an office and aim at strengthening their creativity by exploiting the expertise of their desk neighbours. Another aspect of the sharing economy, united also by a strong link with digital technologies

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Teddy Bear Advertisement. Sears Roebuck & Co. Catalogue. Winter 1916

Policy

Global Coworking Map, coworkingmap.org/

Impact Hub, www.impacthub.net

and the many platforms hosted in these spaces.

Coworking is already a worldwide phenomenon: coworkingmap.org has registered over 1,000 (1,036 to be precise) locations in 608 cities scattered in 89 countries, totalling nearly 50,000 equipped workstations (49,463 at the moment). Too few? Too many?

The real interesting point is the speed with which this formula has caught on. “Since 2005, when the first experiment was started in San Francisco according to an open source approach to working, from the USA to Europe, coworking has kept on expanding in all Western countries as a typically urban phenomenon.

Today it shows outstanding growth rates also in Asia, for instance in Bangkok, Hong Kong and Singapore,” Alessandro Gandini, a sociologist and an expert of this phenomenon, notes.

Some true colossuses of the digital economy have also entered the scene. Starting with Google Campus based in the Tech City in London, a technological hub opened in 2012 in an area universally known as Silicon Roundabout. Some giants of the Internet economy gather here, but also dozens upon

dozens of start-ups looking for sponsors.

At Google Campus one can choose between the Campus Resident option offering a permanent workstation 24/7 and Work from the Café guaranteeing a permanent workstation but allowing people to work from the café of the Campus with wireless coverage and access to all the activities on offer.

Similarly to other technological hubs, every day Google Campus offers workshops run by experts and big names of the tech industry, networking meetings with entrepreneurs and web developers. Google’s partners include SeedCamp, an investment programme for start-ups financing about 20 of them a year, and Springboard, a technological platform accelerator.

From Moscow to Johannesburg, from Singapore to San Francisco, from Dubai to Sao Paulo, including London, Amsterdam, Madrid, Zurich, Stockholm, Impact Hub is an international franchising coworking network present in over 80 locations (plus 17 more ready to be launched). It is mainly aimed at social entrepreneurs, and boasts a community of over 11,000 members to whom it offers technological tools, professional resources,

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renewablematter 10. 2016

InteriorBE, a platform that in just ten days churns out low cost projects by Italian architects for interior refurbishing and furnishing, with the additional option of buying online furnishing items at a highly discounted price.

“Beeyouconcert.

La musica è di casa” a web platform devoted both to people wishing to buy a concert for private or public events, and musicians who want to play live in houses and special locations.

opportunities of mutual inspiration and contamination, training events to increase the positive impact of their activities on local communities.

Impact Hub Milano (but there are also branches in Trieste, Rovereto-Trent, Turin, Reggio Emilia, Florence, Rome, Bari and Syracuse) “started in 2009 in a place used for fashion photo shooting,” says Montserrat Fernandez, the young account manager of the company, originally from Barcelona and with a degree in arts. This certified incubator of start-ups and social innovation “occupies 600 square metres set up using Controprogetto, a group utilizing second-hand materials and components,” Fernandez continues.

“Our 300 member-strong community, with variable composition, includes creative people, photographers, graphic designers and language schools. As well as platforms such as Ugo, specialized in car sharing, Jobmetoo, an employment agency for people with disabilities and XMetrics” that invented an innovative electronic device to measure swimming performance launched by champion Max Rosolino.

Milan is the Italian capital of Made in Italy Coworking: the municipality has registered 25 projects that have gained a sort of guarantee imprimatur in order to tell them apart from normal rented offices passed off as coworking.

Other coworking initiatives based in Milan include CoWo (led by Massimo Carraro, defined by Gandini as “a communication expert carrying out an outstanding networking job between freelancers operating in the communication sector in Milan”); Talentgarden (Tag), with branches in many other Italian and European cities; Avanzi including in its expertise urban regeneration, impact evaluation and social cohesion.

A few months ago, the estate management agency Halldis, part of the Windows on Europe, opened its premises in Copernico. StartMiUp is in charge of managing more than 100 open space coworking stations sharing an 8-floor building with Copernico’s business centre traditional offices hosting enterprises and investment funds. In the coworking area, at a cost varying between € 250 and €290 per month, people can rent mobile or permanent workstations accessible 24/7: while a dedicated card grants access only to social areas, lounge, library, refreshment room and park.

The co-worker community includes freelancers, web designers and digital platform administrators. Federica, 26, and Sabrina, 40, are the founders of InteriorBE, a platform that in just ten days churns out low cost projects

by Italian architects for interior refurbishing and furnishing, with the additional option of buying online furnishing items at a highly discounted price. The main reason that led them to coworking? “The opportunity to know

other kinds of experience, learning both from their successes and their failures,” Francesca answers.

Federico, 31, – founder of the portal Curioseety putting curious travellers, mainly non Italians, in touch with professional guides, chefs and vine-dressers for tailored tours in any Italian regions – from Copernico also values “the opportunity of networking with other start-ups and companies, exploiting synergies and starting fruitful partnerships in an informal environment.” The only negative aspect?

“The lack of sufficient privacy typical of an open space environment.”

Beyond the Po River, in Florence, Multiverso, created in 2011, has expanded to regional level. In Rome, Millepiani coworking space, just round the corner from Garbatella underground station, has the distinctive feature of “being managed by the eponymous non-profit social promotion association based on an urban regeneration project.

It was created in collaboration with Municipio VII in a disused building belonging to the Municipality,” explains President Enrico Parisio. It hosts architects, environmental engineers, web designers, social media marketing experts, start-uppers such us the creator of “Beeyouconcert. La musica è di casa” a web platform devoted both to people wishing to buy a concert for private or public events, and musicians who want to play live in houses and special locations.

These are only some of the professionals with whom Millepiani aims to create an actual community of expertise, engaged in studying shared projects based on the notion of common good open to the local community.

Other coworking projects are also emerging catering for the needs of parents with very young babies. In Rome, Città delle mamme, an association created in 2009 with the aim of making the city more children-friendly.

After Mammacaffé, the baby-friendly hairdresser, and Cinemamme (cinema matinées for mothers) in the suburban area of Centocelle, the association opened Alveare: 200 square metres with equipped workstations, 2 offices, a meeting room and a baby area. The location is open to anyone interested in this sharing experience. The first generation of coworking digital “babies” will crawl here...

Policy Interview

edited by Silvia Zamboni

Millennials Style Alessandro Gandini, a sociologist and lecturer at Middlesex University in London

Freelancers, VAT-registered workers, self-employed professionals and start-ups populate the coworking world. A variation of the more classical and prosaic “to make a virtue of necessity” and an expression of the uncertainty characterizing our working environment, above all of the so-called Millennials? Or, on the contrary, a positive representation of our times seen from a creativity and innovation point of view?

Freelance, free download of Alessandro Gandini’s ebook: www.doppiozero.com/ libro/freelance

“Both,” answers Alessandro Gandini, a sociologist and now lecturer at Middlesex University in London and author of the e-book Freelance.

“In the perspective of a special framework including phenomena of creativity, innovation and communication following the development of the digital economy, these projects have a positive value. On the other hand, they are also the result of the often uncertain working conditions of the self-employed. But those in coworking do not necessarily see themselves as having an uncertain working life: some do it because they could not do anything else, but some choose coworking because they see it as an opportunity for their professional and entrepreneurial growth. People choose coworking because it puts them in contact with other skills and expertise, for the social capital that these spaces attract making productive the fact of being together while somehow being alone.”

There is no shortage of criticism towards the giants of coworking such as Google Campuses.

“For those criticizing the relationship with the digital monopolist Google, being in that space means working partly ‘for’ Google” and not only ‘in’ Google’s spaces, even though from a technical point of view this is not the case because we are always talking about self-employed people committed to developing their own projects.

For these critics there is a difference between the space owned by the monopolist host and a co-managed one, where the peer-to-peer philosophy is prevalent. On the contrary, for others Google Campus is an ideal incubation space to facilitate business development, thus an environment with which smaller coworking projects with limited resources cannot compete.”

Can you foresee any novelties as a response to these reservations?

“Judging by the criticism towards this model of ownership and management of mega-platforms

and algorithms of the sharing economy of the size, for instance of, Uber, Trebor Scholz – professor of Digital Media at New York University – suggests a cooperative approach to ownership, that he calls Platform Cooperativism.

By extension, we can think of coworking spaces self-managed by workers’ cooperatives replacing the renter. It is a very interesting evolution, even if it is still work in progress, that outlines two visions: an entrepreneurial approach on the on hand and on the other, a cooperative one.”

Is there something linking synergistically the coworking phenomenon to the circular economy, which is by the way the focus of our Renewable Matter magazine?

“There are some analogies, both from an intangible and immaterial point of view, even if they have not been either analysed or structured yet: I am thinking about the sharing of knowledge that takes place within coworking and circular approaches, obviously not in the physicalenvironmental sense of the circular economy.”

We could define it as a sort of immaterial circularity “The coworking logic is based on the search and the opportunity to come into contact with other professionals. The implicit availability to share expertise characterizing being part of a coworking community is based on the idea that if today I cooperate with Tom, tomorrow Tom will help me. From this point of view it creates circular dynamics of immaterial resources which are both ethical and instrumental because they are inspired by the aim of finding possible opportunities for our own professional growth.”

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How to Preserve Value in WASTE

MANAGEMENT

by Simonetta Tunesi

Planning waste management is a complex problem requiring appropriate approaches able to go beyond partial visions.

The first step in preserving waste value is identifying and quantifying all household and assimilated waste flows that go through a given area.

This article was published in Ecoscienza 5/2015; www.arpa.emr. it/ecoscienza/rivista. asp?id=49

Can we comprehend that waste management is a “wicked” problem: a really complex problem, not just a “little complicated”? When we are dealing with a wicked problem, it is never clear whether it has been solved and in any case it presents some specific characteristics that require attention and creativity.

There is nothing worse that tackling a wicked problem as if it were a “classical” or simplifiable problem adopting methods not suitable for its complexity leading to partial solutions (namely non solutions) that do not understand and deal with the fundamental features of the problem.

Despite recognizing that the first priority is to put under investigation the link between consumption and the ensuing waste, waste production and management will be an ongoing problem for high-income and emerging countries and increasingly

Case Studies

Simonetta Tunesi, Strategic Environmental Consultancy.

impacting in low- and middle-income countries.

Retracing and Quantifying Waste Flows Building on this awareness, we put forward a method to plan and publically discuss a new integrated waste management system.

A method able to: •• support the definition of the necessary plants needed for the running of an integrated waste management system in a given area: number, type, plant size and equipment; •• allow us to compare the environmental performance of alternative solutions to optimize the planed system with the recovery of materials and energy contained in waste.

The proposed method is based on the identification and quantification of all domestic waste or assimilable flows running through an area; flows are crucial to define waste treatment needs, to reduce health and environmental impacts and to improve material and energy recovery. Its implementation requires the following steps: 1. Description of the reference scenario quantifying all the waste flows of the management system in use; 2. Advancing of alternative management scenarios to plan an improvement of the system or to evaluate the effectiveness of proposed modifications such as: ways to increase separate collection or energy recovery of organic

fractions; to improve energy recovery from mixed waste; 3. Comparing through Life Cycle Analysis (LCA) the reference scenario with alternative scenarios based on selected environmental impacts; this can lead to the identification of features that improve the system and whose implementation increases the integrated recovery of matter and energy.

The Solution Is in the Description Since there are no ready-made solutions that can be adapted to each area and social situation, when planning, the first action is to describe the situation of a given area; the description helps us understand the system, define its boundaries but above all it forces us to identify all its features. As a matter of fact, in order to describe waste flows it is necessary to know the plants and equipment – variable both in number and type – present in a system and connected with each other to guarantee that all the steps of the waste hierarchy are followed.

The described and planned system must be complete and integrated. The proposed method does not allow for partial or superficial solutions because it requires plants for a specific management system to be able to take care of all the waste generated in the area in question. Figure 1 shows the benefit of “visualizing” the bigger picture to understand the connections between elements of the waste

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renewablematter 10. 2016 Figure 1 | Urban solid waste management Simplified chart of waste flows in an integrated waste management system

Door-to-door unsorted waste

Transport to heat treatment

To non-ferrous recovery

Non-ferrous recovery

To ferrous recovery

Ferrous recovery

Slag recovery

Heat treatment of unsorted waste

Urban waste

Assimilated special waste

Curbside unsorted waste

Transport to heat treatment

To slag recovery

Door-to-door collection

Sorted waste to first rinsing

Ash to landfill

Hazardous waste landfill

Curbside collection

Sorted waste to first rinsing

Residue

Hazardous waste landfill

Private and public Collection transportation centres

First rinsing plants

To sorting plants

Sorting plants

To first rinsing

To glass recovery

Glass

Food waste

To composting

Composting plants

Compost

To paper recovery

Paper

Vegetable waste

To anaerobic digestion

Anaerobic digestion

Compost use

To ferrous and non-ferrous recovery

Ferrous and non-ferrous

To energy recovery

Energy from vegetable waste

Ash

To plastic recovery

International transport

1. The study carried out by Gruppo Hera required a huge amount of data offering a detailed description of the system never seen before in literature. We would like to thank them for allowing us to use their results and charts.

hierarchy and illustrate with a single image the complexity of an integrated management system. Waste flows are divided, highlighting the role of collection, into three main sections: 1. the central circle includes different urban and assimilable waste fractions deriving from separate collection and destined to matter recovery in reprocessing plants producing secondary raw materials; 2. circled flows at the bottom highlight organic waste from separate collection, from food and vegetable, that can be sent to matter recovery through composting, to matter and energy recovery through anaerobic digestion of food waste, and/or energy recovery through thermal treatment of vegetable waste;

Residue to landfill

Plastic

3. the upper section of the chart shows the remaining mixed waste flows that can be sent to landfills or energy recovery through thermal treatment.

This description and quantification of flows are the basis for analysing an integrated waste management system and choose amongst alternative solutions to improve environmental performance. Thanks to this graphic representation, advanced hypothesis and LCA results can be better illustrated to managers and citizens and the method becomes an instrument to support and facilitate communication with the public when showing the environmental efficiency of different strategies.

Bologna City Council integrated management

Case Studies system, derived from a study carried out by Gruppo Hera1 to evaluate efficiency changes from the 2013 scenario to an alternative 2017 scenario, entails the following modifications: 1. Increase of separate collection with the introduction of door-to-door collection in the city centre and in the outskirts cap-device bins; 2. Rationalization of the matter recovery supply chain; 3. Avoiding pre-treated mixed residual waste (MRW) to end up in landfills; 4. Increase of energy recovery form MRW. Figure 2 concisely compares two scenarios taking into account resource consumption, climate-changing gas emissions and emissions of acidifying pollutants.

Note that negative values indicate a reduction of environmental impacts (avoided impacts).

For all environmental impacts, for 2017 the system shows significantly lower figures, proving that ongoing and planned interventions will lead to an improvement of the management’s environmental performance.

All steps of the management are interconnected: negative impacts and/or environmental benefits of the management systems assessed as a whole derives from the combination of positive or negative values associated with any piece of equipment and plant actually used.

To illustrate this aspect, figure 3 shows the contribution of each steps of the management to climate-changing gas emissions for the scenarios drawn up for Bologna City Council. In these scenarios, collection, transport, running of intermediate transfer plants and landfills all produce emissions; matter and energy recovery help to reduce emissions by substituting raw materials and fossil fuels (negative values in the chart).

The improvement of the system in 2017 is due to: •• increase of matter recovery; •• increase of energy recovery through thermal treatment of mixed waste and anaerobic digestion of food waste; •• reduction of landfill methane emissions thanks to the reduction of biodegradable waste disposal.

We would like to highlight that the environmental performance of a waste management system can only be correctly quantified by simultaneously taking into consideration all the steps of the waste hierarchy and all the infrastructure involved, plants and activities of the systems: only an LCA applied to integrated waste management systems and in a bigger enough area can correctly assess the environmental impacts of a management system without “dumping” them beyond the boundaries of a “partial system”, in another area or citizen.

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Figure 2 | Municipality of Bologna: Comparison between 2013 and 2017 scenarios for selected categories Resources consumption/saving (t Antimony eq/year)

Carbon Dioxide Emissions CO2eq (t CO2eq/year)

Emissions of acidifying pollutants (t SOxeq/ year)

21,949

SC-13 SC-17A

-402

-249

-365

-525

-11,416

Figure 3 | Comparison between scenarios: direct and avoided emissions of CO2eq SC 2013 kg CO2eq x 1,000

Municipality of Bologna: Contribution of single phases of waste management to direct/ avoided emissions of climate changing gases (kg CO2eq) for the 2013 and the 2017 scenarios (negative values indicate avoided impacts)

SC 2017-A kg CO2eq x 1,000

36,976,727

Collection Transport Intermediate plants Recycling Pre-treatment, Major-accident Hazards and energy recovery Landfill

10,544,104

2,732,823 764,636

2,789,377 1,063,193

848,397

-2,338,382

1,013,672

-2,841,081

-17,035,278

-23,984,957

ALUMINIUM LETTERS Circularity’s ways are infinite.

In Milan, an event showing how aluminium is taking up a new life, in the hands of master calligraphers.

by Marco Moro

Cans and calligraphy: this sounds really like an odd combination. But if you search online for cola pen everything becomes clear and you discover a collection of tools which buffs and experts of this ancient art, currently being rediscovered, use for their works.

Butterfly Wing or large nibs, cola pens are often created by artists themselves, unique pieces made “to measure” for the results that they intend to achieve. On the web, there are plenty of step-by-step tutorials on how to build yourself writing tools from easily found raw material: an empty drink aluminium can.

Malleability and flexibility of cans’ aluminium, coke cans and others, made this material popular with the international community of calligraphers, experts of an art that during our fully digitalized era is re-launching artistic creation with ink and paper.

The road that led to the current rediscovery of calligraphy has been developed also thanks to phenomena that in recent decades have characterized mass trends, such graffiti, murals and tattoo art, helped by the nearly daily relationship that those using computers can have with fonts.

A factor that must not be underestimated that started at least “a mass typographical alphabetization.”

The choice of fonts that any operating system gives to the user and the easiness of experimenting made available to a large public a practice that in the past was the domain of typography experts and professionals.

While one of the most fascinating events of Design Week 2016 – held in April in Milan – focussed on the very manual art of artistic writing on paper. And this is where aluminium comes on the scene. “The Design of Words” organized by Le Balene (a Milan-based communication agency) and Trees Home (a video production company) in partnership with CIAL (Italian Consortium for the Recovery and Recycling of Aluminium).

This offered a stage for the works of some internationally known artists, members of the Calligraphy Masters’ community.

In Milan, notebooks sent by artists scattered all over the world were exhibited, they were then “processed” and sent back to enrich the exhibition area of the event. Thanks to the direct participation of five masters of the community, “The Design of Words” offered workshops open to the public and devoted to different aspects of calligraphy: techniques and rules of composition, logo design, gothic styles, tribal lettering, calligraphy for large-scale projects, 3D and anamorphic designs.

These artists introduced the second elements of the exhibition, that is cola pens, made using renewable material, recycled aluminium from cans, and made available by CIAL and designed to satisfy the style and expressive needs of any “hand.”

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Info balene.it/ treeshomefilm.squarespace.com/ www.cial.it/english-posts/

Artists taking part in Milan Calligraphy Masters Online platform created in 2013 to offer an information hub on the contemporary art of calligraphy, it has now become an actual community involving the best world’s experts on this subject. calligraphymasters.com/ www.instagram.com/calligraphymasters/ www.facebook.com/ CalligraphyMasters/?fref=ts Theosone www.instagram.com/theosone/ Zepha www.abadiafez.com/ www.instagram.com/zepha1/ FrakOne www.instagram.com/frak_one/ www.facebook.com/frakonehxcalligraphy/ Pokras Lampas www.instagram.com/pokraslampas/ www.facebook.com/calligrafuturism/ Tolga Girgin www.be.net/tolgagirgin99 www.instagram.com/tolgagirgin99

Water

BOUNDARIES Over the next 15 years, global demand for water could exceed supply by 40%. In order to guarantee the availability of such resource, fragmentation and lack of coordination amongst players in the sector will have to be overcome in favour of a multi-scale, multidisciplinary and circular approach.

by Emanuele Bompan

Water is the best example of circularity in nature. Everybody remembers clearly the charts showing the water cycle on biology textbooks in high schools.

Snow, rain, tributaries, lakes, seas, evaporation, plant nutrition, source of life for animals, basic resource for man’s social and economic development.

In a continuous cycle of changes of state and ontological mutations.

A perfect cycle with a complex geography, crossing a global scale (water is a supranational resource circulating incessantly) and a regional and non-territorial scale (water basins do not stop at administrative or national borders).

Nowadays, water as an essential resource for mankind, is faced with a geographical issue.

Political geography often clashes with physical geography, without dovetailing. Does a river end at any state border? Can a municipality manage autonomously water upstream disregarding the needs of downstream municipalities? Whose responsibility

are aquifers polluted in a country but consumed in another? Who pays for that? And more importantly, whose water is it?

Currently, the availability of such good is endangered and requires an effort to replenish and restore its once perfect cycle, that human activities, agriculture, overbuilding and population growth have dramatically altered, impacting on ecosystems, aquifers and water quality, limiting right of access to animals and people. The challenge of climate change and the rising trend of over three billion people along the social and food chains (more meat, more consumption) make this juncture very critical for future water supplies. If innovative solutions of circular economy for such precious resource are not found, global demand for water by 2030 could exceed supply by 40% with easily imagined consequences: wars to gain control over it, food crises and worsening of hygienic conditions.

In several European countries, where water has always been abundant, the situation looming ahead is worrying. Climate change will be the first cause affecting water availability.

Indeed, according to a study carried out

Case Studies Euro-Mediterranean Centre on Climate Change, www.cmcc.it/it/

by the Euro-Mediterranean Centre on Climate Change (CMCC), such alteration will determine a decrease in the average snow cover and a dramatic increase in rain precipitation.

“Climate-derived impacts – explains Alessandro Russo, Gruppo CAP’s Chairman, one of Italy’s main state-owned companies – increasingly imply strong stress on treatment plants and considerable extraction from aquifers and the water supply network, with a discontinuous trend of water basin replenishment.”

Due to the agricultural sector demand, water consumption will stay high. Italy managed to bag a booby prize: according to the book Eating Planet (Edizioni Ambiente), by Barilla Center for Food and Nutrition, Italy with over 5,000 litres pro capita is ranking second in Europe for water consumption.

Barilla Center for Food & Nutrition, Eating Planet.

Food and Sustainability: Building our Future, Edizioni Ambiente 2016; www.edizioniambiente.it/ libri/1108/eating-planet/

Italian Committee for World Water Contract, contrattoacqua.it/

An attentive observer would notice that this issue is totally off the radar from the sector players such as administrative actors, public technicians, water management private and state-owned companies and those involved in land security.

“Actors are too fragmented and uncoordinated – explains Rosario Lembo, Chairman of Italian Committee for World Water Contract – they do not communicate with each other and do not collaborate. More importantly, they do not understand that water is a fundamental right.” Very few understood the value of blue gold, except for some private companies that have sensed the strategic value of its reserves for a long time. Only very few countries have a national security strategy in place for water. One of them is Israel, a historical cutting-edge country in the management of water resources.

Italy, the Imperfect Water System In Italy, after the referendum to make water a public resource, everything went back to normal.

No reforms of the water management system, no water resilience plan. Even committees just looked after their own backyard and nothing more.

As a result, water cycle management in Italy is still in chaos, with its overlapping, interference, poor integration of a system and lack of longterm plans linked to climate change adaptation.

Too many players: Provinces (who will shortly pass the dossiers to Regions), Civil Protection and Civil Engineering Department (whose task is to oversee river banks and manage emergencies in case of flooding or large-scale contamination) and the Interregional Agency for the Po River (AIPO), dealing with first, second and third class hydraulic works in the Po basin.

Then there is the intricate maze of Land Reclamation Authorities, public institutions supervising the operations and maintenance of public works of reclamation checking on the activities of the private sector on their designated territory, the so called reclamation district. They deal with water security and management of waters for irrigation and the protection of the environmental and agricultural assets. It effectively overlaps Regions and partly AIPO. Then we have Drinking Water Service Boards, which are public bodies for the integrated water service, including collection, aquifer management, purification, distribution, storage and final treatment.

A huge knot to unravel to optimize management in order to make water flow in a circular manner, with no leaks, contamination, energy or environmental waste.

Suffice it to go to Germany to understand that solutions are available and cheap.

“In the Ruhr area, a special legislation created water management associations, with municipalities and companies being members as well. In this way, decisions are already made on a large scale and in a strategic fashion,” explains Simone Raskob, deputy mayor of the city of Essen, boasting

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renewablematter 10. 2016 a 145 year-old public utility for water, the Stadtwerke Essen. “Being responsible for an entire region makes investments more efficient from an economic point of view.

Moreover, a series of benchmarking projects can be carried out so that decision makers can choose the best ones.” In Essen, a holistic and integrated approach is used. For years, sewage and rainwater as well as sink wastewater have been managed separately. Thanks to an investment of €4.5 billion in the region (€490 million in the Essen municipal area alone) Emscher Conversion for the region’s water management has become one of Europe’s bigger infrastructural projects, bound to become an example for all European cities in terms of water integrated management.

Actually, by 2027, according to the EU Water Framework Directive, Emscher will reach the highest ecological standard of water environmental management. High quality water with minimum costs.

to analyse the dynamics of subterranean water flows, showed how during the years of the great industrialization – 50s and 60s – important companies such as Falk pumped out great quantities of water. In the late 80s, the aquifer began to rise again. From 6 metres, now it is only four metres below the surface. This has important consequences for the infrastructure: the underground, cellars, garages, often forced to get rid of water with draining pumps to avoid flooding.

Lombardy, a Changing Italy

Solutions: Towards a Multi-Scale, Multidisciplinary and Circular Approach

Lombardy represents the Italian ground zero to understand the water issue and the need for a water cycle management through governance geared towards the water basin.

On the one hand more water is needed for agriculture and the growing population.

Simultaneously, important weather phenomena are occurring, as shown by cloudbursts and ensuing river overflows, while snowfall is less with lower water linked to snow melting.

This is a worry for drinking-water management, since the so-called cloudbursts end up more and more in the sewage system, thus causing an overload in water treatment plants.

And there are more risks involved.

Then, there is a peculiar issue. “In Milan, groundwater – explains Alessandro Russo – has reached unprecedented levels. Actually, there is a lake underneath the city.”

Monthly piezometrical measurements, allowing

Then there is the problem of effluent from heat exchangers. In other words, distilled water, completely devoid of impurities, coming out from air conditioners and heat exchangers. Such water also ends up in sewers “while it could safely be reintroduced into the environment, being pure water – explains Michele Falcone, CEO at Gruppo CAP – instead of affecting water treatment plants, already stressed to the limit.”

A first integrated response to the problem of fragmentation of authority and lack of holistic vision of the water system will occur on 4th July in Milan with an international conference, organized by Gruppo CAP, where experts from Italian and European utilities will discuss the best solutions for metropolitan areas and water basins.

The aim is to understand how to manage the relation between weather phenomena, effluent from heat exchangers and mandatory use of groundwater and collection to reduce waste, water treatment overload, preserving high water quality and avoiding competition and overlapping in water management.

Gruppo Cap will initially present two proposals.

The first is a research project, carried out by the Faculty of Agriculture of Università Statale

In Milan, groundwater – explains Alessandro Russo – has reached unprecedented levels.

Actually, there is a lake underneath the city.

Case Studies

Info www.gruppocap.it/en

Recreating river and wet areas can contribute to restoring habitat for many animals.

in Milan to map the secondary network of the Lombardy basin. Lombardy has a less developed hydrographic network compared to that of the 15th century. In the 12th century, the Chiaravalle and Morimondo, in the low Lombardy plain, Cistercian monks reinvented tilled land, water meadows, animal farming and wool processing and the ensuing intricate network. Then the Visconti and Sforza families came along and completed the work started by the Cistercian monks with the Naviglio Pavese and its many small canals, Naviglio Grande (used to transport marble for the Milan Cathedral), and last but not least Martesana Naviglio, made by Francesco Sforza to enrich the area and to control the flow of the Brianza watershed (rainwater coming from the hilly surroundings), with a more rational collection system of small canals fed by a controlled water flow.

In this way, over 25,000 hectares of land, often flooded, and hundreds or resurgences were recovered and exploited.

An intricate and smart network that could be revamped in order to manage local waters in a sensible way. “We are working with Villoresi consortium to recover the fabric of the secondary network in the south and in the north west, including grids, small canals, Cistercian canals, ancient resurgences and locks,” explains Falcone. “We want to see and study the feasibility of spreading the water load so that it can be best absorbed by the network. This should be localised, starting from geographical and hydrological data of the Milan plain.”

In this way, restoring hundreds – perhaps thousands – of kilometres of network, great quantities of water could be saved, both from the rise in the aquifer and downpours,

which could be used for irrigation – in crisis caused by climate change and prolonged droughts – thus improving water treatment quality (and ensuing consumption).

Thousands of gallons of water put back into the cycle for the benefit of the environment.

“Recreating river and wet areas can contribute to restoring habit for many animals including herons and egrets as well as plants such as typha (Typha latifolia) and phragmites (Phragmites).

The other aspect being studied – which can be a source of inspiration for all Europe – is integration amongst the various levels of management. “The city’s water system must be rethought at metropolitan level by adopting a holistic vision” says Alessandro Russo. “Therefore we have to understand what the virtuous systems are. Abroad, water reclamation is the domain of institutions dealing with water services as well, i.e. they deal with drinking water then ending up in sewers and then treated. When the sewerage system interacts with the network, and therefore with water protection and hydrogeological instability, it is clear that we cannot split responsibilities amongst thousands of institutions. We asked legislators to include in our bill hydraulic works on the territory.

We would be prepared to act now. But for now everything is fragmented”. So much for the circular economy.

How to start? First of all amalgamating subsidiaries with reclamation consortia.

As the mayors of Barcelona, Rotterdam and Essen at the conference organized by CAP will tell us, we need to study the best foreign practices to maximize results, paying attention to contextual solutions. After all, Italy and Europe already offer good examples... For once, it is a matter of copying and adapting them to the context.

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PULSES

are Circular

by Sergio Ferraris

Those who think the circular economy is a hindrance to companies are proved wrong by Gruppo Pedon’s results.

Here is how to marry value production with environmental and social sustainability. Save the Waste: an all-around project involving agricultural communities, reusing vegetable waste and supporting ethical and social projects.

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

It is a fact that the circular economy is in search of a clear definition.

This process will hardly stop at the aspect, albeit crucial, of matter recovery, by restoring a role and function to materials that up until today have been considered waste. Companies are much more complex phenomena than the mere engineering aspect linked to production with incoming flows of raw materials and outgoing end products and waste. Indeed, industrial production has notorious environmental repercussions, considering emergencies linked to climate and pollution, while when it comes to purely “sociological” issues we are still stuck at Adriano Olivetti’s experience.

Save the Waste, www.pedon.it/en/ethics-environment/Save-TheWaste

But, more evolved companies, able to reconcile their main activity of producing value with the respect for the environment, do exist.

Gruppo Pedon is a good case in point.

Based in Molvena, near Vicenza, is specialized in the distribution of cereals, pulses and seeds and controls 50% of the Italian market in this sector.

The group is committed to buying pulses and cereals on the world market, then it selects and distributes them to mature markets such as Europe and the United States. Such activity could be regarded as normal, except for the fact that the company built supply chains particularly sensitive to sustainability.

Starting with the social chain, such as the production of pulses in Ethiopia. “First, I would

like to point out that we do not obtain supplies from abroad to save money or for cheap labour: we do that in order to control quality of the supply sources,” Luca Zocca says, Pedon’s marketing manager.

“We had to resort to getting our supplies from abroad because over time we required an increasingly higher quantity of pulses that were not available in Italy, while cereals we could find in abundance, although we still deal with top-end types of cereals such as chickpeas from Murgia and lentils from Castelluccio.”

Pedon has been present in Ethiopia since 2005 with an interesting story. At the time, in that nation, pulses were not culturally destined for people, they were only grown for animal consumption; Pedon’s arrival has changed things. Within a few years the purchase price for farmers’ pulses soared by 800%, thanks also to ethical supply chains set up on their crops. On top of the market price established by Ethiopia Food Exchange, Pedon awards a prize supporting local populations, which is not managed by the company but by the collaborating non-profit organizations, including Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Save the Children and CESVI. The company deals with processing, exporting and marketing of pulses produced by five local small farmers’ co-operatives consisting of about 30,000 families who receive seeds and the know-how on agricultural techniques and sometimes

Henderson Peas, 1898 – OldDesignShop

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2016: The Year of Pulses The UN declared 2016 as the International Year of Pulses. For a simple reason.

From a nutritional point of view, they are more efficient. They are an alternative to costly animal proteins and this makes them perfect for improving diets in the poorest areas of the world; besides, pricewise their yields are 2/3 times greater than those of grains.

Therefore, they are a tool to fight rural poverty.

“Pulses are important crops for the food security of a great percentage of the world population, particularly in Latin America, Africa and Asia where they are part and parcel of traditional diets and are often grown by small farmers,” states José Graziano da Silva, Director-General of FAO. Residues from pulses’ crops can be used to feed animals, while their cultivation fix nitrogen in the soil improving soil fertility reducing the need for synthetic fertilizers.

They need little water and their great variety will enable farmers to select those most resilient to climate change.

machinery. Non-profit organizations get involved in this process by organizing specific projects supporting the population with initiatives such as wells and schools, roads and hospitals, agreed with local communities.

“The involvement of non-profit organizations is important,” adds Zocca. “In this way the prize for the production we award falls within a larger financing context, made of private bodies and governments, which in turn triggers virtuous and larger economic cycles, because the amount of money available is higher.

The idea is not to be too intrusive, by offering local communities tools that help them evolve socially which would be difficult to obtain otherwise, education for instance.”

Over the years, the company build a school for 250 children aged between three and thirteen, employing a dozen teachers; such initiative boasts an ethic aspect as well; it guarantees pulses are not grown with child labour, which is fairly common in these countries. “We are very open towards local communities, because, in the case of Ethiopia, it is necessary to relate to village chiefs that are very important in order to keep a balance in the relations, especially with foreign partners,” continues Zocca.

“Setting up from the beginning relations between equals, offering practical models

and a series of services and activities requested by the community, while offering social support, is the best course of action.

Confirming the effectiveness of our approach Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, once in Ethiopia to fund the projects of economic development of small families, after meeting many non-profit organizations, local communities and institutions, visited the Pedon’s facility to find out what model had been used in the relations with local populations.”

History In order to understand the company’s sensitivity to social issues we need to offer a historical perspective. Soon after WW2, Guerino Pedon, the father of the founding members, when the second son was born, came back from abroad where he was a miner.

In the Veneto region, after the war everything had to be rebuilt, the community spirit was strong, and the Pedon family received support to overcome their difficulties, which left an indelible mark in the family DNA. So, Guerrino got on his bike and came up with the idea of door-to-door sales, as a peddler of food items including oil and pulses. Those were the early years of the economic boom, things went well and his passion for selling was handed down from the father to the second son, Sergio,

Info www.pedon.it/en

Case Studies who became a sales agent, turning the activity into a wholesale business. The turning point came in the 80s, when the large-scale retail trade started to spread like wildfire all over Italy.

Large shopping centres and hypermarkets for food mushroomed. The Pedons understood that was the way to go and that it was profitable to offer products suitable for that type of sales.

A small warehouse and a second-hand packaging machine allowed the Pedons to market their own brand of pulses; but the true success was the fact they owned a van and the bar codes on the packaging. In other words, efficient logistics and a cutting-edge solution for tills.

Besides the fact that pulses were commonly used in their area, the two novelties allowed the company to take off in 1984. At a later stage they started to distribute cereals, dried mushrooms and products for bakery items.

That kind of food does not require any cold chain for its preservation, but rather simple and cheap management and logistics, which at the same time create good economies of scale and low selling prices. Such experience led the Pedons to create, thirteen years ago, Lenticchia Pedina (lentils), an ethical and fair-trade product: for every package sold, fifteen cents are donated to Save the Children and CESVI for humanitarian projects against malnutrition and child mortality. “It is not a surcharge for consumers, they would pay the same amount even though there were no donations, but a lower income for the company,” continues Zocca, with the advantage that we are trying to get people

accustomed to using healthy food, such as lentils, throughout the year and not just over the Christmas.

Sustainable Pulses With regard to sustainability it created an all-round mix, thus circular, made of process innovations and direct communication to consumers.

Pedon’s “Save the Waste” project combines all the pieces of the socio-environmental sustainability puzzle created over the years.

Pulses are obtained from selected seeds, no GMOs within programmes for the economic development of populations, such as those in Ethiopia, and carried as far as possible – in the case of Italy just to a few kilometres from the Molvena Plant – by train to reduce CO2 deriving from transport. Subsequently, residues from pulses processing – that can be as high as 20% – are used to make, in collaboration with Favini Paper Mill – the first paper in the world – Crush Fagiolo (paper from beans) – to have been granted the certification for food use both in Europe and the USA despite being made with production “waste.”

This helps reduce the use of virgin cellulose fibres by 15% while cutting CO2 emissions by 20% in packaging production. Packaging created

by Lucaprint using plant-based ecological inks and inserting a see-through window made with plastic also derived from vegetable waste.

This helps eliminate the inner bag – one less wasted item – since Crush Fagiolo is certified for food use: the whole packaging is recyclable.

In the area, thanks to this circular system – the companies are about fifteen kilometres from each other – we are trying to create a sort of district of circularity of industrial processes that is becoming the norm. It is no surprise that three companies – Pedon, Favini and Lucaprint – with different processing, products and characteristics, are “intertwining” their supply chains and using 100% renewable energy for their energy needs. The new packaging will also close the solidarity circle since it will soon be used for Lenticchia Pedina.

In real terms, Pedon’s story also debunks the cliché supported by some economists that the circular economy is a burden, if not a real hindrance for companies.

The figures of the Molvena-based company speak clearly. In 2015 its turnover amounted to €100 million – in 1999 it was 8 million – the company controls 50% of the Italian market, it has developed 3,000 items with 600 employees working in its production plants in Italy and 200 scattered in Ethiopia, Argentina, Egypt and China. It exports to 45 countries with over 100 private logo lines besides its own. Organic products make up 20% of its turnover.

These are not exactly the results of a company held up by the circular economy.

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EARTHWORMS vs.

ECOMAFIA

by Antonio Pergolizzi

Antonio Pergolizzi is a journalist and researcher. Since 2006 he has been the Coordinator of Legambiente’s Observatory for the Environment and Legality.

In a province where less than 10% of waste is separated at source, some little red worms will snatch waste from criminal modus operandi, thus turning what is a cost into a resource and starting a little organized and sustainable legal network.

In Rosarno, situated in the previously lush Gioia Tauro Plain, in the Reggio Calabria province, earthworms are about to start their titanic clash against ecomafia.

David vs. Goliath. In this context, the former is made of an army of little red worms and the latter is the super powerful ‘ndrangheta.

Here, after Terre del Sole consortium was allocated the area seized from the Iamonte clan (almost 7,000 m2 of agricultural land), the Mestieri Legali (“Legal Trades”) was created, sponsored by Fondazione per il Sud (“Foundation for the South”), Elisabetta Tripodi’s pride and joy in her fight for legality as an anti-mafia mayor. She has spent her life escorted by the police for naming and shaming the mafia arrogance. In this initiative, a number

of associations joined the consortium including Legambiente, ARCI, Omnia, Alba Servizi Cooperative and the municipalities of Rosarno and Laureana di Borrello.

This is excellent teamwork. One of the trades is a worm farm that will turn the two municipalities’ waste into new lifeblood, from a cost to a resource, to the advantage of the whole area. A circular economy prototype grafted onto the kingdom of Pesce and Bellocco – ‘ndrangheta’s cocky and bloodthirsty aristocracies – where, according to many justice collaborators, many poisonous substances are buried, especially inland, only a few metres deep, including radioactive waste.

Earthworms are actually just one piece of a far larger puzzle: a tangible and ambitious project that represents a window into the future,

Case Studies

a bet to be won. The target is the creation of a Biodiversity Comunitas, i.e. a process of restoration of the local natural environment – a tiny plot of land where two rivers, the Mesima and its tributary Metramo, meet – involving the study of the ecosystem’s biological indicators and the area’s use by the community as well as setting up educational/naturalist workshops for schools, fully aware that the new generations will inherit the destiny of such territory, once they will be able to appreciate and recognize it in a new light.

The initiative aims at creating a network, grafting onto a space where healthy examples of circular economy are already thriving such as Fattoria della Piana, a well-established farmers’ cooperative that opted for an organic short production chain to manufacture cheese and cold cuts, relying on energy self-sufficiency thanks to a biogas plant allowing to close the loop of the production cycle. Such farm

is now a virtuous example, officially recognized in Calabria and beyond.

And the tiny worms will have to carry out the thankless task of lock picking in order to snatch waste from criminal and parasitic logic – in a province with less than 10% of separate waste collection and in a Region that has already been under receivership for sixteen years for this – in order to shift it towards forms of circular economy. Worms are employed to reintegrate the soil with the necessary organic matter, the right oxygen, to produce quality compost from simple organic waste from the land and from the two participating municipalities’ organic waste (FORSU). All this has enormous environmental benefits for the municipalities’ cash flows. In this way, according to some estimates, on a 50 m2 surface, up to 75,000 kilos of organic waste a year will be disposed of.

That’s a good start! Moreover the bins for worms will be provided by another giant of Calabria’s circular economy, particularly

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renewablematter 10. 2016

unpopular with Locride’s bosses – Polistenabased Ecoplan company, producing materials obtained from recycling plastic and olive pomace. A small organized, legal and sustainable network in the Reggio province.

1. See Guidelines of “National Programme for the fight against drought and desertification (Pan)”

by CIPE (Interministerial Committee for Economic Planning), by deliberation n. 229 of 21st December 1999.

In this peculiar ecosystem delicate balance the compost produced will have more than one benefit. First of all, it will allow obtaining a natural soil conditioner from a waste type that up until now has been environmentally problematic in Calabria, creating senseless management. Now it is possible to use it on the soil itself to improve its fertility or sell it on the market. It thus contributes to the improvement of the structural soil quality, helping against desertification, which ARPACal defines a real emergency1 for Calabria and reducing emissions, improving the soil capacity to fixate CO2. But, above all,

Info Fondazione per il Sud, www.fondazioneconilsud.it Consorzio Terre del Sole, www.consorzioterredelsole.it Ecoplan, www.ecoplan.it/home.html

worm farming will help to direct waste towards a sustainable and transparent process which, besides solving the age-old power and money-grabbing problems of the clans, will contribute considerably to the rehabilitation of urban and rural areas, by embracing a more modern management, with a lower impact than waste, and above all less reliant on old landfills.

The initiative boasts ethical as well as social connotations, since it is aimed directly at communities of migrants, mainly Africans, many of whom have been caught in the nets of local corporals (very busy throughout the Plain) and subjected to regular attacks. Culminated in the act of violence of 9th January 2010, when in Rosarno coloured people were chased around and shot, with many people injured resulting in a mass

Case Studies

exodus of the African population. According to the investigators, those events were orchestrated by the clans, which sent a clear message to all seasonal workers (all immigrants), paid only a few euros for picking oranges in the bosses’ lands, guilty of having asked for better life conditions.2 The fact that Mestieri Legali starts by involving immigrants, the weakest link of a long production chain made of exploitation and mafia, embodies more than a symbolic meaning. Indeed, two of them, after a training period, will have to look after the composting plant. This is a very strong message that certainly did not go unnoticed in town.

This journey is doubly circular in that it helps produce the social antibodies necessary to oppose the mafia way of thinking and as a hotbed for a social economy model, which is both sustainable and inclusive.

The two aspects reinforce each other.

As Lidia Liotta reminds us (Legambiente in Reggio Calabria), one of the staunchest supporters of the project, “the boys are already on the case, having enthusiastically taken part in the first work camp and, with their bare hands, have already removed tons

of waste (Eternit included) from the Mesima banks.”

Local policies, though, have been trying to stifle the enthusiasm, with the bizarre en masse resignation of opposition councillors (plus a governing one), which has meant the early dissolution of the Town Council in Rosarno, resulting in the fall of the anti-mafia mayor, a staunch supporter of the project. Luckily the project seems to be enjoying a life of its own, having spread like a virus to other towns in the Cosenza and Crotone provinces, willing to follow Rosarno’s3 example with new worm farms cropping up instead of landfills. This idea was so revolutionary for mafia pax that it pushed some “unknown people”, the day after the first public event to launch the initiative occurred last September, to hurl several stolen cars’ wrecks across the entrance gate to the seized area.

Unequivocal proof in a land ruled by ‘ndrangheta and unwritten rules. Mafia prefers landfills (illegal or otherwise) to harmless red worms, seen as – and rightly so – unbearable seeds of freedom as well as of sustainability. So, their resistance (and existence) is instrumental in redeeming this land and in affirming a fairer society, in every sense.

2. “Arance Insanguinate (Bloody Oranges) – Dossier Rosarno” edited by Stopndrangheta and daSud non-profit organization, February 2010; tinyurl.com/njsq75d.

3. The first municipality in Calabria to concentrate on worm farming was Marzi (Cosenza).

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CIRCULAB, the Circular

by Brieuc Saffré

Economy Business Game

Here is a game, with its own board, that can help a company plan its own virtuous business model. It stimulates creativity and innovation, relying on cooperation instead of competition.

Brieuc Saffré, is an advisor and author of a book on useful marketing (Le marketing peut sauver le monde...

Quelle est votre brand utility?, 2012), he deals with facilitating the intergeneration of the circular economy into organizations and their business model.

Circular economy is not just about rethinking waste management, it is a whole new economical and philosophical approach to business. It is complex, diversified and therefore hard to grasp for the uninitiated. This is why Circulab has been designed. This tool has one purpose: helping people to imagine concrete ways of setting up the circular economy.

What is Wiithaa?

Founded in 2012 by two French circular economy aficionados, Wiithaa is a design agency entirely devoted to the circular economy.

Wiithaa is the aboriginal name of the bowbird, an Australian bird that uses every resource he finds to build a beautiful nest to lure the opposite sex. In nature its structure is made of twigs, flowers, shells, but now it is common to find straw, plastic caps and other human-made objects in its nest. This funny

little bird is an example of how waste can become a resource, and therefore of how an environmental issue can become an economic opportunity.

Wiithaa’s raison d’être is to put an end to the very notion of waste by helping companies to manage their flow of resources and energy in order to be both environmentally virtuous and economically performing.

Wiithaa works on two fronts: first, the agency trains the employees to the circular economy paradigm, helping them to seize its concepts, and then Wiithaa acts at the design stage, conceiving new products or services hand in hand with companies.

Considering that it is not easy for people to integrate this approach in their daily working life, Wiithaa created a tool: Circulab. Inspired by the board games played at home, Circulab creates an atmosphere of innovation and cooperation that enables players to trigger the circular economy logics around them.

Case Studies What is Circulab?

Circulab is a set of tools that aims to consider and analyze a business model as a whole in order to co-generate more virtuous solutions for a better ecosystem integration.

A new way of designing business models Two business philosophies are at the genesis of Circulab: design thinking and biomimicry.

Tim Brown, CEO and President at IDEO, a design and innovation agency, is one of the main “Design Thinking” evangelist. This new approach helps companies stimulate creativity and innovation. It calls for going back to users, understand their motivations and analyze contemporary issues that need to be adressed.

In order to do so there are 5 steps to focus on: 1. Emphasize: It consists in observing and interacting with users in order to better understand their experience.

2. Define: In this step, “ thinkers ” shape users’ main need.

3. Conceive: Aims at coming up with possible ideas and solutions that can solve the problem.

4. Prototype: Ideas take a physical form so that “ designers ” test and improve them.

5. Test: In this last step in-situ information and feedback are used to refine the original vision.

The second guideline of the Circulab approach is biomimicry; organizations should mimic the model through which nature has evolved over the past 3.8 billion years.

A natural ecosystem differs from human economy because it does not generate waste.

The very concept of waste makes no sense in it.

Someone’s waste is someone else’s resource.

Nature is by far better than us. Each species and each cell has its own function, its raison d’être.

And if each component of the ecosystem is so well designed, it is also because it cooperates.

Let’s take a sequoia as an example: slugs living at its foot feed on invasive plants that consume the water and the nutrients that are essential for the tree. In return, the tree gives them cool and moist. Therefore, the sequoia multiplies positive interactions in order to increase its resilience. Indeed, the more it maintains symbiotic relationships with other species, the less it depends on one resource or species, and the more it is resistant to external disruptions. By playing Circulab, you will find yourself in a context where eco-friendly and useful innovation goes through a win-win cooperation with the other stakeholders: this is the bio-inspired mindset of Circulab.

The Circulab board game The main component of Circulab is the board, divided into squares where the flows and interactions within the business are situated.

The 10 main squares help synthesize the current business model.

1. Function. It requires to define the “raison d’être,” the need that the activity aims to satisfy.

2. Key activities represent the organization’s know-how and activities.

3. Partnerships require to identify all the partners that take part in the activity.

4. Natural resources are all the materials used for manufacturing, distribution and final use.

5. Technological resources include the machines needed both to create the consumption process and to obtain products or services.

6. Energetic resources integrate all kinds of energy consumed in the process, including end user’s consumption.

7. The “value proposition” refers to the experience the organization offers the user: what product or service, its key characteristics and its added value.

8. “Clients and context” answers the questions: to whom are we going to sell?

Which situation is more suitable to the offer?

9. Distribution tends to define how we communicate and how we sell.

10. Upcycling deals with “zero waste”.

It involves the knowledge of all the leftovers components and materials after the final use, and which of those are repairable, reusable or recyclable.

The complementary squares highlight the flows and their impact on the company and its ecosystem.

The first flows are the economical fallouts.

They include the incoming and outgoing streams created by the central squares. By specifying and analyzing needs and possible revenues, it helps understanding better where and why money is spent, and to consider the new revenue opportunities. Players can take into account costs and investments to achieve their goals and optimize the flows within their business.

The second flows are the positive and negative impacts of the business on its economy, environment and society. By positioning each square in its ecosystem and taking into accounts all its components, from production to actual end-of-life, it becomes easier to discern all the negative impacts caused by producing, consuming or throwing away.

Three main objectives Circulab can serve organizations in three different ways.

First, it provides players with tools that are useful to understand the key concepts of circular economy. When they play they see right away how an organization is not only a matter of stocks, but also of flows that concern more than business models themselves. As a matter of fact, a company is part of a much larger ecosystem: considering it from this perspective is the very essence of the circular economy.

The game fosters cooperation between employees, departments, companies and territories. Each participant plays

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Case Studies in the same team with the same goal: creating new ideas to solve a given issue. They do not compete with anybody as they are in the same boat, like us on this planet.

People from various backgrounds and professions share their skills to create something more than a simple sum of their talents.

Cooperation between actors is an essential component of circular economy: when people understand the meaning of global thinking, they apply this thought pattern more easily on a daily basis.

This is the third aspect of Circulab: getting players involved. While creating new ideas, they take hold of them and, as a consequence, they feel responsible for their implementation.

Three main principles Designing regenerative business models with adapted products and services requires setting up 3 main principles, which corresponds to different degrees of Circulab use.

Exploring: Starting from a detected problem, one should strive to understand the actual business flow and know-how and its context.

The problem can be related to the supply, the resilience or the design of your products or services.

This observation work allows to fill each square of the board, enhancing products and services more suitable to consumers’ needs, the organization resources and its ecosystem.

Info wiithaa.com/en/ circulab.eu/en/

Creating by cooperation: It is time to involve all the relevant stakeholders and brainstorm on how to make the observed business model more virtuous while answering the initial issues.

Players bring together their ideas to get the best options.

Taking action: Once the ideas have been conceived, the company will make the difference and be able to transform its business model by prototyping a strategy leading to new economic, social and environmental opportunities. Defining the prototype is of particular importance, since up to 70% of the social and environmental impact of a product is determined during its design.

Taking action implies testing and ensuring the feasibility of an idea with the right components and design, while making sure the product or service will have the least possible negative impact for the duration of its life cycle.

What is the Circulab network?

To be used efficiently, Circulab needs to be facilitated by an external consultant.

To do so, Wiithaa has started the Circulab network.

The Circulab network gathers independent consultants with various backgrounds and complementary skills, who share the same will to help companies in their journey towards circular business models.

Game facilitators Circulab’s goal is to co-generate business models with multiple positive impacts.

Multiple skills, one approach These consultants are from different domains; design, engineering, biomimicry, Corporate Social Responsibility, upcycling, change management or marketing, green IT or renewable energy. Such a variety of concepts and expertise plays an important role in developing the game and its application. Today, the 22 members of the Circulab network come from France, Belgium, Norway, Spain, Turkey and Canada.

Networkers support organizations so that they can come to a diagnosis and to a set of strategies and actions aimed at mitigating their impact on the ecosystem. Nevertheless, their tools and services are not all the same. In a cooperation effort, the ideal is to reach a common objective sharing the same approach that each person feeds through its expertise.

If a particular territory thinks that the creation of a virtuous circle amongst local players (citizens, public or private institutions) can lead to new economic possibilities, it can be best helped by someone from that very territory. The richness of the network lies in the fact that the business game of the circular economy can be use efficiently with an adapted local application.

Accelerating the Circular Economy The Circulab approach shows how to reconcile business and nature. By promoting cooperation, it encourages players to consider themselves as a part of a larger ecosystem. All actors, whether it be companies, states, regions, citizens, NGOs, must see the economy through a new prism, where environmental concerns are no more a threat or a burden for business but a source of opportunities. Circulab helps people accelerating the development of this virtuous paradigm.

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Who Said

FLIES

are Useless?

by Ilaria N. Brambilla

How to produce fish feeds using flies farmed with fruit and vegetable waste. A piece of research carried out by the University of Insubria on the possibility to use insects to recycle everything that up until now has been considered waste.

Ilaria N. Brambilla is a geographer and environmental communicator.

She collaborates with research institutes, communication agencies, Italian and foreign newspapers on sustainability themes.

Disposing of waste thanks to a fly and producing feeds out of it. This is the objective of the “Insect Bioconversion” project, a study on the use of a fly – Hermetia illucens – for disposing of fruit and vegetable waste. Such insect, once grown with this special diet, is used to obtain flour with a high protein content used to supplement feeds used for farmed fish.

“Insect Bioconversion” Project, tinyurl.com/jda34cx

The “Insect Bioconversion” project presented at the University of Insubria in collaboration with the University of Milan and Crea – Council for research in agriculture and analysis of agricultural economy – in Padua was granted €300,000 by Fondazione Cariplo within the competitions activated for the “Integrated research on industrial biotechnologies and the bioeconomy”. It was also endorsed

by Sogemi Spa, a company for the creation and operation of the wholesale food markets

in Milan, by the Association of Italian fish farmers and Paul Vantomme, in charge of FAO’s “Edible Insects” project.

The research is organized in five stages.

First of all, the growth performance of Hermetia is taken into consideration with different kinds of diets: from a standard one made of bran, corn and alfalfa, to a chicken feed, typically used to feed other types of insects and a vegetable diet still being studied.

The second stage is about the biological characterization of Hermetia, that is the detection of some markers to assess the growth performance, its efficiency in the transformation of the substrate and the conditions in which this insect grows (optimal or potentially pathogenic). During this phase, a selection of the best subjects takes place so as to create an egg stock of Hermetia, necessary to start a certified supply chain in the post-research stage.

Case Studies

“Edible Insects” Project, www.edibleinsects.it

During the third stage, the fly is isolated from what remains of the substrate, then the transformation of the insect in flour and its microbiological evaluation. Then tests on rainbow trout are carried out, phasing in insect flours into traditional feeds, analysing the growth performance and the wellbeing of the fish fed in this way.

The last step is the evaluation, the study and management for alternative uses – as compost or development of soil conditioners to be used in nursery gardening – of non consumed waste, together with insects’ faeces and chitins derived from ecdysis.

From an Idea to the Project The project manager in Varese is Gianluca Tettamanti, an entomologist. We met him in his laboratory.

“There is still a lot to discover about Hermetia Illucens: at the moment, we are assessing

on a small scale the growing phase and we saw how, by changing, even slightly, lighting, temperature and humidity, the impact on the life cycle is dramatic”, explains the professor. “This insect has excellent characteristics for our project.

It is saprophagous, meaning that it grows on decomposing material. Its yield is really high for the amount of waste it is able to dispose of. And, more importantly, an adult lives up to a few days only and after laying eggs it dies. Therefore, unlike other more studied insects, it does not carry any diseases. Undoubtedly, this is an advantage for the research.”

Tettamanti then tells how the project was born. “The interest of the work group towards edible insects dates back to 2013, when in Europe such interest started.

Simultaneously, the aquaculture colleagues stressed the need, in a rapidly expanding economic sector, to find efficient systems

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renewablematter 10. 2016 to provide protein for farmed fish. In the same period, through contacts with Sogemi Spa

by Roberto Valvassori, a zoologist and back then full professor at Insubria, we got to know about the need of society to dispose of 1,300 tonnes of fruit and vegetable waste every year.”

So, we developed the idea to transform such waste into a resource, enhancing the potential of an extremely topical subject, edible insects, reacting at the same time to the needs of a very promising sector for Europe, aquaculture.

Not only that. As a matter of fact, other companies as well need to dispose of substrates, perhaps different ones, beer waste for instance. At the moment, such waste is used to produce biogas or is composted: using it to feed insects could instead represent a valid alternative. Actually, the insect is not just a source of protein, although the percentages of such component vary between 30-60%.

For example, the oil fraction, besides for animal feed industries, it could prove useful for the cosmetic sector. Chitins and chitosans – that is the part constituting the exoskeleton left over the substrate during ecdysis – are used for packaging in the food industry, since they seem to stimulate the immune system. Last but not least, Hermetia can provide us with antibacterial molecules.

Locusts, crickets and larvae on the table? Let’s hear it from EFSA EFSA is the European authority for food security: not only does if provide scientific consultancy but also efficient communication about risks – existing and emerging – associated with the food chain. In October 2015, it released a report entitled Risk profile of insects as food and feed where it is stated that insects represent a niche food sector in the European Union, although many member states reported occasional human consumption.

However, the use of insects as source of food and feed has, potentially, important benefits for the environment, the economy and the security of food availability.

In its report, EFSA highlighted that the possible presence of biological and chemical hazards in insect-derived food and feed products depends on many factors: on production methods, on what the insects are fed (the so called substrate), from the phase of the life cycle in which insects are collected, on the species used as well as the methods used for their ensuing transformation.

By way of conclusion, when the non-processed insects are fed on feeds that are not currently authorized, the potential onset of microbiological hazards is understandably similar to that associated with other non-processed protein sources. The risk factor, is linked to the use as substrate of human or ruminant faeces, which is what led in 2001 to the ban of mammal meat and bone flours in all feeds for farmed animals in the EU, because of a link between such flours and the spread of BSE (Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy) in livestock due to an association between the BSE-infected meat and the variant of Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease in human beings.

EFSA’s scientific opinion takes also into consideration other hazards associated with other kinds of substrate, such as kitchen waste and manure. What we need to do, though, as stated in the report, is to carry on with the research in such fields, in order to avoid chemical risks too (for instance the build-up of heavy metals and toxins) or biological risks (bacteria, viruses).

Efsa Report Risk profile of insects as food and feed, www.efsa.europa.eu/sites/default/files/scientific_ output/files/main_documents/4257.pdf

Case Studies

Info www.fondazionecariplo.it/ it/index.html dipbsf.uninsubria.it/ invertebrati/

However, in order to achieve all this, large-scale protocols are needed as well as standards to develop a certified production chain. The question of standards is key in the research: in Europe the limits in insects’ farms for animal feeding not only have repercussions on efficiency but also on health risks. Just a few months ago, EFSA – European Food Safety Authority – published a report where this theme is debated, raising doubts on the potential biological and chemical dangers, but also allergenic issue and environmental risks linked to the use of insects farmed for food and feed.

Aquaculture: The Choice that Makes all the Difference Today, according to the available data, aquaculture provides about 50% of fish products for human consumption worldwide; while in Europe it represents 24% of fish production, with 85,000 jobs. Indeed, the European Union has been promoting this sector for over 15 years, with ad hoc funds, highlighting the sustainability of farmed fish products and stressing the fact that aquaculture is one of the most rapidly expanding sectors at global level. For this reason, faced with the choice of the end use of the insect flour obtained with the project, we thought of fish farming. Moreover, such farmers need standard feeds to keep the fish growth performance high, while warding off possible diseases and the reduction of the end fish production.

Genciana Terova will carry out the test on fish with the flour from flies. She is in charge of the aquaculture sector of the Department of Biotechnologies and Science of Life at the University of Insubria. Even though the research phase involving her has not started yet, we would like to have a closer look at the project with her.

We immediately discover that the choice to test the flour on the rainbow trout depends on the fact that in Lombardy there is a huge fish production, of trout in particular: the region hosts over 70 fish farms and over 5,000 tonnes of fish are produced each year.

We also found out that the insect flour could be compatible – after all due experimental evaluations – with other carnivorous species, such as bass, carp or tilapia.

Genciana Terova explains to us that, actually, the best source of protein for farmed carnivorous fish is fish flour. However, in order to keep economic and environmental sustainability, this is usually and largely replaced by plant-based flours, which are not always digestible and are often associated with anti nutritional factors. The possible advantages for fish represented by the use of Hermetia flour should be linked to the fact that such flour is a digestible protein source.

If such hypothesis is confirmed, fish will be able to benefit from an animal protein source, which can be easily digested and does not cause inflammation to the digestive system.

From Waste to Resource In the near future, the real challenge will be to be able to feed an ever-growing world population with increasingly dwindling resources.

Insect farming could well close the gap in two differing ways: by introducing in human food insect consumption which today already represents a protein supplement for over two billion people, but that should overcome many people’s resistance, at least in Europe.

The second possibility is about the use of insects to supplement animal feeds with a very low environmental impact compared to that linked to their production with fish flours.

The “Insect Bioconversion” project, therefore, is not only a bioeconomy project. What makes it so alluring are the enormous applicability and environmental sustainability of such continuous transformation, of re-cycling renewable raw materials (vegetable substrate and insects), contributing at every level to change the very idea of development.

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by Sergio Ferraris

DIVISIONE ENERGIA SRL Via Brianza 19, Oriago di Mira 30034 - Oriago di Mira (VE) +39 041 5630647 www.divisionenergia.it

FOLLOW THAT WASTE! In order to enter the manufacturing circle, secondary raw materials must simply match – qualitatively and quantitatively – raw materials.

Certification is the main way to reach this goal.

It’s easy to talk about the circular economy.

The moment waste is recycled, we start talking about the circular economy.

Such statement, to be fair, can be defined as superficial. The apparent simplicity of the production of goods, together with massive availability of raw materials that has characterized the whole industry up until now, has led us to regard recycling as an equally simple activity. But this approach is wrong.

Instead, production chains, considering just the manufacturing aspect, are very complex, stratified and rational, and their complexity soars when they attempt to close the cycle using secondary raw materials as resources.

Indeed, the cycle loses its rationality when the complexity contained in the product meets the sociological one of the use and its turning into waste.

This is chaos. Materials combined on the bases of random classifications, energy used irrationally and “moody” lifestyles are the ingredients making up such chaos, for decades hidden underground.

Namely landfills. Today the unsustainability of such logic is being perceived in the actions and the mission impossible

of waste rationalization through separate waste collection and recycling is being attempted.

A first experience does not come from a manufacturer but rather from Gruppo Veritas, Veneto’s major multiutility dealing with waste and water resource management: for the first time, in Europe and perhaps in the world, it certified waste cycle, from separate waste collection to the supply of secondary raw materials to companies, monitoring all stages in detail taking into account energy and environmental aspects.

“Certification by a third party (Bureau Veritas: a certifying body that only by chance share part of its name with the Veneto multiutility, editor’s note) – notes Andrea Razzini, general director for Gruppo Veritas – serves two purposes.

First, because it addresses one of the doubts citizens have with regard to waste, namely that their effort for the separate waste collection is pointless, in the conviction, (profoundly wrong), that at a later stage multiutilities mix everything again. The second, is that through the mechanism of certification and monitoring we can improve the quality of the secondary raw material we produce.”

Case Studies

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Certification. We need to understand, though, that we are not talking about stamps and red tape, or of a piece of paper obtained for whatever purpose, but about documents containing substantial information with scientific methodologies that cannot be “interpreted”, because when we talk about industrial processes and about supplies of raw materials to companies, the truth will always come out. Always. But this is not the case for Veritas that certified most of its supply chains/ platforms – glass, steel, aluminium, paper, plastic, SDF (Solid-derived fuel) – and it is also considering wet waste certification.

Here we are faced with the complexity and chaos of what we call waste.

Plastic is a good case in point. “Plastic, in the singular – carries on Razzini – is just a word. The correct lexical item is plastics because there are thousands of them, which complicates things. The chains for the transformation of waste into secondary raw materials are not at all simple or easily accessed. So, people not used not separate waste at source not only had to learn to separate waste, but also take it upon themselves to ascertain the quality of secondary raw materials because companies having to process them demand excellent quality material according to certain needs.”

Indeed, secondary raw materials, must simply match, both qualitatively and economically, raw materials, if they aim to enter the current manufacturing circle.

Most probably, certification is the main way to achieve this.

A Transparent Idea

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TRACCIABILITÀ DELLA PLASTICA PROVENIENTE DA RACCOLTA DIFFERENZIATA E CERTIFICAZIONE DEI FLUSSI DI FILIERA

Giuliana Da Villa

TRACCIABILITÀ E CERTIFICAZIONE DEL RECUPERO DEI MATERIALI PROVENIENTI DALLA RACCOLTA DIFFERENZIATA DEL GRUPPO VERITAS.

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Finally, once the data were in, Veritas thought how to communicate them to citizens, in order also to deny the cliché about the transformation of separated waste into mixed waste by multiutilities. And it literally launched the message in bottles distributed to citizens stressing the fact that just a few weeks earlier

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a secondary raw material which is an excellent carrier of information towards citizens.

“We chose glass as first experimentation of supply chain traceability/platform (essential action and introductory to certification, editor’s note), taking separate waste collection from some municipalities of the mainland (Venice, editor’s note) and analysing glass collected in banks, kilo by kilo,” tells us Giuliana Da Villa, Veritas quality and environment manager. “Also, the glass-making company’s factual collaboration was necessary. We asked them to melt our glass in only one furnace; for a week that furnace only melted our glass, turning it into bottles.”

It could seem a small thing, to be taken for granted but it is not. Every industrial entity belonging to any production chain has its own industrial dynamic and willingness to “stop” part of the production to check on the whole production chain, involving third parties too.

So, it is not at all to be taken for granted, especially when we are talking about a multinational.

After all, without such step, the supply chain data, especially from an energy viewpoint, would have had obvious gaps, which is why collaboration of end companies is crucial.

It is essential to get to know such data for the recycling chain, but companies’ secrecy is understandable. Their disclosure of greater efficiency of a company’s process, for instance, can eliminate its own competitive advantage, but at the same time such data would be needed in order to make the recycling chain more efficient. In search of such balance, certification carried out by Veritas is extremely useful. While data are available, details are not disclosed, because it is the recycling process as a whole that is being certified.

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Within Veritas, the idea of chain/platform certification originated on glass in order to understand, in the first place, what happens along a specific recycling chain with regard to collection and selection, up to the furnace. The choice of such supply chain for experimentation was carried out not only because it is Veritas’ most complete one – thus allowing close analysis – but also because the company identified in glass

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renewablematter 10. 2016 The NIMBY Decline

Info www.gruppoveritas.it

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Very soon, in Venice parents will be able to tell their children that their preferred playground piece of equipment was made using the crate of the fruit for their afternoon snack and their beverage can.

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those very bottles were glass waste disposed of into glass banks. A clear signal: waste has been turned into a useful object.

The glass experiment paved the road to the certification of five more supply chains. They include solid-derived fuel (SDF) that is undoubtedly one of the most controversial secondary raw materials because the public opinion associates it with incineration while it is an actual fuel that when meeting certain parameters is no longer waste. The analysis carried out for SDF certification revealed some important questions about supply chains/platforms such as types and quantities of wrong disposal and about the company itself.

It highlighted for examples some problems regarding the monitoring of energy used by vehicles in the collection phase due to the fact that data are not gathered in the same way in the different areas where they operate, a classical example of “stratification” over time of business practices. On the quality front, the process has passed with flying colours the planning skills of the Ecoprogetto Venezia plant, the subsidiary of the group dealing with SDF, which can guarantee, thanks to the technology and operating practices adopted, the production of SDF meeting the limits provided for by DM 22/2013 regarding the end of waste even with materials not suitable for recycling. So if the complexity of urban waste and its management is in the actions, for industrial waste, often mono-materials, it is rather simple to find the connection between products and secondary raw materials even for quality products.

For instance, cadmium telluride solar panels, that can achieve a record efficiency of 22.1%, are made using materials from industrial waste derived from zinc and copper refining.

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Waste management has always been exposed to the risk of NIMBY, even the most virtuous ones.

While Gruppo Veritas operates in densely populated areas, there has been no citizens’ hostility against its recycling platform: this is because plants were located in suburban areas and often in sites previously used for industrial activities. And most probably this is the right strategy to build problematic plants, even virtuous ones such as recycling platforms. We must bear in mind that citizens often look at issues in the short period and do not see the advantages that such plants can bring on a larger scale. But in this case, the choice of Veritas proved successful, because besides preferring a suburban area, for some plants they chose Porto Marghera. “This option,” Giuliana Da Villa explains, “was seen by citizens as a reclamation and a redevelopment of the area due to the activities that took place there in the past. Eco-Ricicli plant, a sorting and recycling centre for glass, plastic and cans, is located on a reclaimed area. In this way we reclaim areas that could not otherwise be reclaimed.”

The acceptance of the plants is also promoted by the fact that recycling is a labour-intensive activity and thus closing a cycle. New plants are built in areas were previous activities closed down thus creating new ones with lower impact and restoring jobs.

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DIVISIONE ENERGIA SRL Via Brianza 19, Oriago di Mira 30034 - Oriago di Mira (VE) +39 041 5630647 www.divisionenergia.it

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TRACCIABILITÀ DEL COMBUSTIBILE SOLIDO SECONDARIO DA RIFIUTI E CERTIFICAZIONE DEI FLUSSI DI FILIERA

TRACCIABILITÀ DELLA PLASTICA PROVENIENTE DA RACCOLTA DIFFERENZIATA E CERTIFICAZIONE DEI FLUSSI DI FILIERA

TRACCIABILITÀ E CERTIFICAZIONE DEL RECUPERO DEI MATERIALI PROVENIENTI DALLA RACCOLTA DIFFERENZIATA DEL GRUPPO VERITAS.

QUADRO DI RIFERIMENTO DIVISIONE ENERGIA SRL Via Brianza 19, Oriago di Mira 30034 - Oriago di Mira (VE) +39 041 5630647 www.divisionenergia.it

DIVISIONE ENERGIA SRL Via Brianza 19 - 30034 Oriago di Mira (VE) +39 041 5630647 www.divisionenergia.it

To get a real picture that includes also all round environmental issues, during the certification process all water, energy and other resources consumptions were taken into account, going beyond purely business aspects, such the quantity of material produced. For each supply chain/platform the lifecycle balance was accurately measured thus determining the ecological footprint of the recycling cycle starting from the citizen’s disposal to the re/finished product, such is the case with glass. Gathered indicators will be very valuable in the future since they can be used as a base for the development of the circular economy.

“During the certification process,” Da Villa explains, “we realized that the data collected were very interesting beyond communication issues and we wondered whether there were rules to do just that. So we found out that there are no international standards for traceability of recycling and so we approached an independent certification body, identified through a bid for tender, Bureau Veritas, to define data and methodologies available today.”

The Relationship with Businesses The limit that emerged from this experience, glass aside, is in the relationship with manufacturers. This relationship stops at intermediate business level because these companies thanks to their specific knowledge of business practices are able to provide manufactures with the right secondary raw material for specific productions.

It is a gap in the knowledge chain that complicates the optimization of the recycling process because upstream there could be a lack of important pieces of process information needed to obtain useful materials downstream.

In order to overcome this very limitation,

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TRACCIABILITÀ DELL’ACCIAIO E DELL’ALLUMINIO PROVENIENTI DA RACCOLTA DIFFERENZIATA E CERTIFICAZIONE DEI FLUSSI DI FILIERA

TRACCIABILITÀ E CERTIFICAZIONE DEL RECUPERO DEI MATERIALI PROVENIENTI DALLA RACCOLTA DIFFERENZIATA DEL GRUPPO VERITAS

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QUADRO DI RIFERIMENTO

DIVISIONE ENERGIA SRL Via Brianza 19, Oriago di Mira 30034 - Oriago di Mira (VE) +39 041 5630647 www.divisionenergia.it

TRACCIABILITÀ DEL VETRO RICICLATO E CERTIFICAZIONE DEI FLUSSI DI FILIERA

PROGETTO SPERIMENTALE PER LA TRACCIABILITÀ E LA CERTIFICAZIONE DEL RECUPERO DEL RIFIUTO SECCO NON RICICLABILE PROVENIENTE DALLA RACCOLTA DIFFERENZIATA DELL’AREA DEL VENEZIANO

TRACCIABILITÀ E CERTIFICAZIONE DEL RECUPERO DEI MATERIALI PROVENIENTI DALLA RACCOLTA DIFFERENZIATA DEL GRUPPO VERITAS

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Case Studies

DIVISIONE ENERGIA SRL Via Brianza, 19 30034 - Oriago di Mira (VE) +39 041 5630647 www.divisionenergia.it

Veritas is starting an experiment: detailed traceability of plastics and aluminium deriving from waste, the company aims to provide directly manufacturers with secondary raw materials to produce playground equipment for public parks. It is an experiment that could be funded by a European call for tenders in partnership with the Municipality of Venice that will chose, through a competition, a manufacturer that will have to make this equipment solely with secondary raw materials derived from the recycling of solid urban waste through Veritas supply chain. Having chosen this use is no small feat because outdoor playground equipment is exposed to the elements, to systematic abuse by small users as well as been subjected to very strict rules and regulations. Many manufacturers are interested in the project, to test both these methods and “new” materials.

Covering for the equipment will be made with granulated material derived from fruit crates, while the bearing structure in recycled aluminium. Very soon, in Venice parents will be able to tell their children that their preferred playground piece of equipment was made using the crate of the fruit for their afternoon snack and their beverage can.

Some years ago, the refrain was that “the medium is the message” (McLuhan, 1967); in the future we will be able to say “the object is the message.” To define and communicate the circular economy in the best possible way.

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Columns The Blue Yonder

Missing the Blue Ilaria Nardello is the Executive Director of the European Marine Biological Resource Centre (EMBRC), the European infrastructure for scientific and applied research on marine biology and ecosystems.

Statement by Karmenu Vella, Commissioner for Environment, Maritime Affairs and Fisheries, on the Ministerial Conference on Mediterranean Fisheries, 27 April 2016,eu/rapid/ press-release_ STATEMENT-16-1564_ fr.htm

In April this year, The Economist hosted the FishHackathon event in London. The small meeting was one of a series aiming to sensitize the public on fisheries issues. In her keynote, their Environment correspondent pronounced like pearls in a rosary all the issues impinging on our oceans today. While each of them would deserve a prolonged narrative of its own, and the health of the Oceans has evidently taken the global stage, some countries appear to be particularly insensitive to such arguments and to actively dismiss the opportunities to even take the smallest steps in the right direction.

Italy’s regions launched a public consultation, a referendum, concerning the drilling rights of companies mining for oil and gas off-shore, within 12 miles of the beautiful Italian Coast.

The referendum was called upon the initiative of some of Italy’s coastal regions, namely those more closely interested by the drilling sites. Their campaign aimed at abolishing some principles recently introduced in the Italian law, which now allows those companies and their platforms to forego the safe and healthy dismantling of the drilling platforms, to drill new wells in the same concession area, to exploit those wells until the complete exhaustion of the mine rather than until the expiration of the concession rights.

With the whole Mediterranean fish stock dramatically shrinking, and 93% in the state of being over-exploited (source European Commission), and some on the verge of being depleted; with the obvious impact of those activities on marine life; the great risk of environmental pollution disasters, which the recent facts of Genoa have prospected as a close ominous threat; and especially with a thriving green economy, we are incredulous by how the government first and then the broad majority of people have simply dismissed the appointment with this referendum, which failed to reach the quorum of voters.

On the other hand, a week later, Italy would proudly ratify the COP21 Agreements on Climate.

And the country’s message was strong during the intervention of the Italian Prime Minister in front of the UN Assembly, where words like Sustainability, Future and Environment appeared as the pillars of the Italian government’s at

one time environmental and innovation-driven agenda.

And it is true: Italy’s green economy is productive, innovative and leading some segments of the market. Among those, the bioplastic sector, with the strength of an industrial giant like Novamont; or the efficient energy sector, which according to recent statistics currently counts over 300,000 firms and 3 million workers. While some signals of alignment with the EU policies in this area, such as a green economy law passed by the Italian Parliament at the end of 2015, showed a modest intention to correct the bearing, strong signals of implementation still fail to be transmitted. Instead, the visible, recent efforts of revitalizing the Italian economy have pointed more often and more intensely to an ancient model of development based on fossil fuels and steel; i.e.: renewing the offshore gas and oil exploitation concessions, even within twelve miles of the coast, unfreezing the lock-down measures imposed on oil mining companies in the area of Basilicata and planning the grand re-opening of a long-time inactive steel factory based on the coast of Tuscany.

According to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, Italy’s diverse natural environment and exquisite cultural heritage are among its most important assets.

With the important threats that the oceans are facing, such as the depletion of its biological resources, the insurmountable amount of plastic soon to be present in larger volumes than fish, the ocean warming and acidifying, the opportunity of this referendum to provide the right signal was simply too good to be missed: to lead our people in the right direction, and embrace, at least symbolically, the liberation from ancient technologies and ancient socio-economic ties.

A process of dis-armament in favour of a more sustainable relationship with the Blue planet could have begun.

Columns

Innovation Pills

Cunning and Lateral Federico Pedrocchi, is a science journalist.

He directs and presents the weekly programme Moebius broadcast

by Radio 24 – Il Sole 24 ore.

In my opinion, there is a vast scenario that opens up when dealing with the circular economy, bearing in mind a basic rule: when faced with a huge problem wreaking havoc, a certain competence is needed to be able to get to the bottom of things, but one also needs to be cunning and lateral. Cunning is self-explanatory. Lateral can be ambiguous, so an explanation is in order. When we observe a phenomenon, we should bear in mind that alongside a so called “central” vision, which is important to have, there can be a lateral one able to produce interesting results.

The reason is quite simple: in the central vision we tend to use the know-how at our disposal, the experience and the basic concept that can be applied in many similar situations.

But this is an attitude that can lead to conservative practices.

When I occasionally meet the general public I happen to use the following problem, which is totally fictitious, there is no scientific activity of this kind. I say: a recent research shows that in China the number of heart attacks on a lift is almost double that of those recorded in Europe and the United States. How come?

The answers are many and varied, some linked to power and vertical movement of fast lifts.

Then I carry on adding: the reason is simple, in China, the average-sized lift carries at least 30 people.

Giuseppe Galatà – a Veneto-born engineer currently living in Sicily – in collaboration with the University of Messina is taking off with a start-up operating with a lateral vision on the issue of food waste. A much-debated issue, describing the various shapes waste takes up starting from when it leaves supermarkets.

But what happens before? Galatà started a supply chain able to work on fruit and vegetable markets, local markets, companies, even inventing machines able to unpack expired packaged food. Not only that: he derives feeds for farmed animals from greens. And then?

Greens contain a lot of water, don’t they?

He even recovers that, thus showing how lateral and ingenious he is.

Swedish Fredrika Gulfot, instead, pushes laterality in a direction of perverse intelligence.

We all know that we are extracting an enormous

amount of fish from the sea. According to some data, from 1970 to date, marine life has dropped by half. We are approaching a time where we will have to put wind-up toy fish, like those we use in the bath, into the sea (not just for children, but for adults as well).

It will be inevitable to avoid the anger of many professional fishermen, those using those huge nets to catch not only fish but also rocks, WW2 submarines and, periodically, Neptune, which they promptly throw back into the sea, though. Fredrika reasoned this out: 600 sardines are needed to obtain half a kilo of omega 3. It has now been ascertained that eating omega 3 is as good for your health as watching for three minutes a fire hydrant. So it is a totally useless production. But in order to stop all this it may take a long time. So she grows algae producing omega 3. The message is clear: planning the recovery of the useless.

This is how we can be cunning.

So, a suggestion: since coat hangers are horn-shaped, could we not spread the message that they can replace rhino horns?

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