Paola De Bernardi spoke about the paradox and limits of the agri-food system, then suggested possible operational solutions.
-
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17 March 2023During the last Re-think in Milan, Kirsi Terho, Key Account Director of Infinited Fiber, spoke. Infinited fiber is an innovative startup from the perspective of developing new infinitely recyclable materials so that the textile industry is more sustainable. She says that in the textile industry, the time for using virgin fibers is over. Infinited Fiber makes this possible with its technology. They are a technology company that is turning old clothes into a new textile fiber. They take trashed clothes and make them into a new textile fiber called Infinna, that can be turned into yarns. The technology uses cellulose in the waste as its raw material to create the new fiber. It’s a unique technology that they are using at their pilot factories in Finland. Infinited Fiber was founded in 2016. Technology has been around a lot longer. It has been studied at the Technical Research Centre of Finland, VTT, and Infinited Fiber Company was spun off to commercialize the technology. It’s a patented technology that allows textile fibers’ regeneration – or rebirth. The dream is to stop waste from being wasted and to make textile circularity a reality by capturing the resources in the waste and giving them new value as new fibers. Infinited Fiber collaborates with several of the world’s leading fashion and apparel companies, like H&M Group, Patagonia, and Adidas, which have also made big commitments through investing in the company or signing multi-year purchasing deals, or both. Climate change is real as we all know, and these brands know it too. They are paying attention to sustainable sourcing, and they have made public pledges to shift to products made from recycled materials. To make good on these promises, they need innovations that enable high-quality textile-to-textile recycling, and Infinited Fiber is offering one such solution. Of...
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10 March 2023Let’s take the opportunity to celebrate all women playing a pivotal role in the progress toward a circular economy. From entrepreneurs and politicians to scientists and designers, women are making huge contributions to sustainable development. Here are only 5 of the most prominent thousands of females devoting themselves to circularity. ELLEN MACARTHUR 71 days, 14 hours, 18 minutes, and 33 seconds: this is how long Ellen MacArthur took to circumnavigate the whole globe, becoming the fastest solo sailor to complete this journey. During her boat trips, Ellen witnessed firsthand the by far unsustainable levels of waste and pollution of our planet, and the resulting pressing environmental challenges facing the world today. Specifically, she could not remain indifferent to the vast amounts of plastic bottles, bags, and debris floating on the water’s surface: plastic pollution was hopelessly harming marine life and ecosystems. The “take-make-dispose” economic model was one of the primary causes of this problem and needed to be replaced. In 2010, she founded the Ellen MacArthur Foundation, becoming a leading voice in the circular economy movement. As a matter of fact, the Foundation inspired circular change in businesses, governments, and organizations all around the world, and contributed to research on circularity and policy implementation. Just think that the Foundation contributed to the development of the European Union’s Circular Economy Package, promoting a more circular approach to resource use and waste reduction in the EU. JENNIFER HYMAN AND JENNIFER FLEISS Double the Jennifer, double the power. Jennifer Hyman and Jennifer Fleiss are the founders of Rent The Runway: the leading clothing rental platform providing consumers simultaneously with a cost-effective and sustainable solution to show off the most iconic high-end looks. By allowing them to rent dresses for special occasions, RTR allows fashionistas to have high turnover fashion rates without harming the...
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3 March 2023During last February’s edition of Re-think Milano among other topics there was a discussion about sustainability communication of companies and brands engaged in this area. Nicola Camurri is a board member of Giglio Bagnara Spa, a company active in the same area since 1869. The relationship with the territory is fundamental if we want sustainable models that disintermediate competitive advantages. He is also Client Advisor at Altavia Italia a company specializing in retail commercial activation. At Altavia, Camurri is in charge of the advisory practice on fashion-related retail innovation and sustainability issues. The central objective of his speech is to focus attention on how to tell about the excellence present in our country: the Italians are actually championing both sustainability and the production of products used by luxury brands, think that among the same participants in the forum, there are some samples of wool and yarns that fashion companies around the world use. We are talking about an industry in which everyone can now recognize the importance of the issue of sustainability thanks to fairly effective but still largely negative communication. How many of us can tell whether or not fashion is harmful to the environment? By now it is well known how harmful fashion is, yet we have yet to build a counter-narrative that can show how much we have been able to do to change this trend. Sustainable production is the biggest business opportunity for brands, after digitization, but it is also seen as the second biggest challenge for 2022 after the raw material supply crisis. This tells us something very interesting: we are still looking in the wrong direction. Digitization is a fact, it’s a question of how the tools we are going to relate to, work with, and do more and more things with are changing....
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24 February 2023Let us consider a commonly used object: a plastic water bottle. Before ending up on the shelves of our trusted supermarket, the object in question will have to go through several stages. First among them is the extraction of the materials needed to produce the bottle. Then there is the actual manufacturing stage, where the product takes shape, which is followed by the transportation and distribution stages. However, the life of the bottle does not end there: the bottle will in fact be used by the final consumer, and then it will be thrown in the trash and disposed of, recycled, or transformed into a new product according to the principles of the circular economy. Each step in this process has its own impact on the environment. Life Cycle Assessment (generally known by its acronym LCA), is a detailed analysis used to estimate what effects a product or service causes on the environment, throughout its life cycle, from material extraction to disposal. LCA helps us understand that there is much more to it than what appears on the surface and helps us look at the big picture. Considering the life cycle of a product in its entirety can be critically important – both for consumers who want to make increasingly informed choices and for companies who want to make their products less and less impactful- in identifying areas for improvement and in making sustainability decisions. A product life cycle analysis generally consists of four steps. The first is to define the objectives (for example, that of reducing the environmental impact of a product) and the scope of the assessment, and then identify the methods to be used in the analysis. The next step is to create the so-called LCI, or Life Cycle Inventory: a list that includes all inputs and...
-
17 February 2023During the edition of Re-think Circular Economy forum held in Taranto last October, there was a lot of talk about how to make agriculture more sustainable and circular, about this subject spoke Raffaele Fasano, Project Manager of AgriSmartIOT, which offers a 100% made in Italy product developed by the company Neetra S.r.l. operating for more than 30 years in the field of design and production of BROADCAST, ISM (Industrial Scientific and Medical) and IoT (Internet of things) technologies. In recent years, Neetra S.r.l. has been offering its expertise with excellent results to private companies operating in the ICT, industry, agriculture, commerce, logistics, energy, and personal services sectors. Introducing his talk, Raffaele Fasano highlighted how once upon a time the concept of circular economy was a trivial one. In the past, no resource was wasted, as all resources, water, light, or energy were scarce, and “common sense” led farmers to widely use circular economy models. It is precisely this concept of “common sense” that must be, in his view, placed at the basis of what could be called the first source of the circular economy, namely, the reduction of waste. In fact, by wasting less, one has fewer products to recycle. The speaker later recounted his journey that led him from being an electrical engineer employed in the telecommunications world to using his knowledge and technology in the agricultural world. From this point of view, it was pointed out that the world of agriculture is one in which technologies are at hand and only need to be known and applied by actors in the sector. Applying technologies to agriculture, however, involves the use of a lot of energy and resources. The idea developed by AgriSmartIOT, then, is to technologically transfer information to users in the agricultural world so that they can...
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10 February 2023During the latest Re-think Milano, Simone Gaslini, owner of Astro Spinning Company, spoke. Simone Gaslini began his talk by introducing Filatura Astro, a family business based in Vigliano Biellese, founded in 1956. It produces 2 million kg/year of recycled yarn and has 30 employees, with a turnover of 7 million euros equally divided between Italy and abroad. Filatura Astro’s yarns are used in the apparel sector to create outerwear, pants, sweaters, and T-shirts, and in the furniture industry where using the yarn in both warp and weft, they create seating for sofas, curtains, and carpets. The core business is recycled yarns, in which the starting material is waste material: scraps from clothing and knitting cuts, spinning mill scraps, and post-consumer material are used. Anything that in the sight of many is non-usable material, in Astro Spinning we look to see if it can be reused by giving it new life and creating new fiber. All raw materials purchased are analyzed both at the level of composition, to guarantee a specific composition to the final consumer, and at the level of chemical substances; in fact, the products created by Filatura Astro are certified with both Oeko-Tex Standard 100 class 1 appendix 6, and GRS, a certification that attests to the real percentage of recycled raw material that makes up the yarn. Recovering fibers from garments or fabrics is only possible with mechanical steps, in which the fabrics are broken down until the fiber is obtained and then transformed into yarn. Simone Gaslini talks about “creating,” not “producing”; Filatura Astro creates fibers and colored yarns from colored knitting yarns. This means that they create colors from colors, they choose colored fibers to create new colors, all without using water and dyes. One has to think that in addition to the water that...
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3 February 2023They have been found on the bodies of worker bees, at the bottom of the Mariana Trench (the deepest of known ocean depressions), and even in our blood. Microplastics have been detected in thousands of places in recent years, and are now suspected to be everywhere. Certainly complicit is their size: plastic particles less than 5 millimeters in diameter are defined as such. The origin of microplastics can be diverse: some, so-called primary microplastics, are intentionally manufactured to that size for commercial use and account for about 15-31% of total microplastics. Due to their abrasive properties, they have been crucial to the cosmetics and oil industries for years. In contrast, the majority of microplastics are secondary microplastics: these are formed from larger plastic objects abandoned in the ocean (such as a water bottle or straw) and exposed to environmental factors (such as wind, waves, and sunlight) that cause them to degrade into smaller and smaller fragments. The main source of global microplastic pollution is found in our closets: 34.8% of it is caused by microfibers. The latter is a type of microplastic that is released during the washing of synthetic fabrics (such as polyester and stretch denim). The mechanical and chemical stress to which fabrics are subjected in the washing machine causes the microfibers to detach from the yarns that make up the fabric. It is estimated that up to 700,000 microfibers are released during an average wash. And these particles are so small that they are not intercepted by washing machine filters or sewage treatment plants. That figure is not sustainable: experts have calculated that continuing at the same rates, as many as 22 million tons of microfibers will populate the oceans between 2015 and 2050. Microplastics can be fatal to the entire marine ecosystem. Given their size, these...
-
27 January 2023At the last Re-think event held in Taranto, one of the topics covered during the three days was sustainable mobility, an important theme as rethinking infrastructure and the way of moving in a more sustainable way is central to innovating different forms of transportation for more efficient use, paying attention to resources such as biofuels, hydrogen, and biomethane; and to move toward reducing pollution risks, protecting the health and public spaces. Emanuele Memmola, T&TS – Sustainable Mobility in Eni, explained during his speech what Eni is doing in the world of sustainable mobility. Today we are in a time of unprecedented climate emergency, Memmola said, so either we take action by introducing mitigation actions, or the globe’s temperature will continue to rise. The figure presented by the United Nations Climate Change Report says that from the pre-industrial era to 2021, the temperature has increased by 1° Celsius, and if we combine this degree with global pollution, its value has risen to about 416 parts per million in atmospheric CO2; the forecast is not optimistic. If measures to lower temperatures are not promptly activated, by the end of 2100 the temperature of planet earth will rise by 2.7° Celsius, far from the 1.5° Celsius predicted in the Paris Agreement. Although the supply of increasingly renewable sources is evident, there is an ever-increasing demand for energy, especially in developing countries where the fuel mix is more skewed toward fossil sources than renewables. In addition, the world population is continuously growing. This has led to a 60 percent emission of CO2 into the atmosphere over the past three decades due to the effects of climate change. The main culprits, of course, are energy-intensive industries and the world of transportation, particularly in Europe. Italy has as many as 39 million vehicles for transporting goods...
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20 January 2023During the last Re-think held in Milan, the founder of the Recup association, a very interesting example of awareness and sustainability within the agrifood sector, spoke. As president of Recup, Alberto Piccardo explained that the association’s motto is “Food that loses economic value, gains social value” and that, this, has been an integral part of its project from the beginning, when in 2015 Recup debuted in the Viale Papiniano Market in Milan. The market featured mountains of boxes completely abandoned in the middle of the street, with a bad smell, and lots of people dumpster diving. What Recup did, was to analyze these two problems and look for a solution: since 2015 to date Recup has been trying to intervene in as many markets as possible, especially in Milan, where there are about 90 district markets every week, for an average waste of 200-300 kg in each of them, thousands of tons every week in one city alone. The intervention, Piccardo continued, was aimed at recovering from the merchants all the surplus food, collecting it with a cart, a cargo bike, and taking it to the Recup stall; it is a free parallel stall, where they do not sell a product but try to make social inclusion. So, the two main pillars of Recup were initially combating food waste and combating social exclusion; then using food waste as a tool to approach all the people who have economic problems and try to connect with them, thus creating an intergenerational and international project. Recup, specifies Alberto Piccardo, is not intended to be a charitable action like those of large entities in Italy-Banco Alimentare, Caritas, Pane Quotidiano-but aims to raise people’s awareness by letting them experience food waste firsthand. Piccardo continued his speech by going on to explain the evolution of Recup,...
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13 January 2023During the course of the latest Re-think Taranto, Dario De Lisi, Sales Manager of the company Fruttirossi, spoke and presented the case study of the company that, through the adoption of different techniques manages to be sustainable and circular. Masseria Fruttirossi, explained Dario De Lisi, is an agritech company, located in the countryside of Castellaneta, in the province of Taranto, which was established in 2016 and whose plant was inaugurated on October 2, 2018. The company’s core business is pomegranate cultivation. In this field, it has managed to reach significant cultivation areas in a short time, with about 300 hectares of land and 200,000 trees planted in a few years. These numbers make the Society a leader in pomegranate cultivation in Italy. De Lisi highlighted how the company treats pomegranate as the main product of its business, around which to build a real supply chain project. In fact, the company deals not only with cultivation in the field but also with the processing of the fruit through innovative technologies designed to preserve its organoleptic properties, which, as now proven by numerous scientific evidence, make the pomegranate one of the most antioxidant fruits ever. Sustainability has always been a foundational theme in the company’s development. As explained, since its design, Fruttirossi has in fact chosen to place the concept of sustainability as the basis of its operations. As an example, suffice it to say that on the roofs of the company’s warehouse, there is a photovoltaic system, with an installed capacity of about 750 KW, which makes the company, especially during daylight hours, self-sufficient from an energy point of view. This aspect is relevant, especially in light of the current soaring prices of the energy resource, as it allows the Company to remain competitive in the market. In addition to energy...
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24 March 2023Paola De Bernardi spoke about the paradox and limits of the agri-food system, then suggested possible operational solutions.
-
17 March 2023During the last Re-think in Milan, Kirsi Terho, Key Account Director of Infinited Fiber, spoke. Infinited fiber is an innovative startup from the perspective of developing new infinitely recyclable materials so that the textile industry is more sustainable. She says that in the textile industry, the time for using virgin fibers is over. Infinited Fiber makes this possible with its technology. They are a technology company that is turning old clothes into a new textile fiber. They take trashed clothes and make them into a new textile fiber called Infinna, that can be turned into yarns. The technology uses cellulose in the waste as its raw material to create the new fiber. It’s a unique technology that they are using at their pilot factories in Finland. Infinited Fiber was founded in 2016. Technology has been around a lot longer. It has been studied at the Technical Research Centre of Finland, VTT, and Infinited Fiber Company was spun off to commercialize the technology. It’s a patented technology that allows textile fibers’ regeneration – or rebirth. The dream is to stop waste from being wasted and to make textile circularity a reality by capturing the resources in the waste and giving them new value as new fibers. Infinited Fiber collaborates with several of the world’s leading fashion and apparel companies, like H&M Group, Patagonia, and Adidas, which have also made big commitments through investing in the company or signing multi-year purchasing deals, or both. Climate change is real as we all know, and these brands know it too. They are paying attention to sustainable sourcing, and they have made public pledges to shift to products made from recycled materials. To make good on these promises, they need innovations that enable high-quality textile-to-textile recycling, and Infinited Fiber is offering one such solution. Of...
-
10 March 2023Let’s take the opportunity to celebrate all women playing a pivotal role in the progress toward a circular economy. From entrepreneurs and politicians to scientists and designers, women are making huge contributions to sustainable development. Here are only 5 of the most prominent thousands of females devoting themselves to circularity. ELLEN MACARTHUR 71 days, 14 hours, 18 minutes, and 33 seconds: this is how long Ellen MacArthur took to circumnavigate the whole globe, becoming the fastest solo sailor to complete this journey. During her boat trips, Ellen witnessed firsthand the by far unsustainable levels of waste and pollution of our planet, and the resulting pressing environmental challenges facing the world today. Specifically, she could not remain indifferent to the vast amounts of plastic bottles, bags, and debris floating on the water’s surface: plastic pollution was hopelessly harming marine life and ecosystems. The “take-make-dispose” economic model was one of the primary causes of this problem and needed to be replaced. In 2010, she founded the Ellen MacArthur Foundation, becoming a leading voice in the circular economy movement. As a matter of fact, the Foundation inspired circular change in businesses, governments, and organizations all around the world, and contributed to research on circularity and policy implementation. Just think that the Foundation contributed to the development of the European Union’s Circular Economy Package, promoting a more circular approach to resource use and waste reduction in the EU. JENNIFER HYMAN AND JENNIFER FLEISS Double the Jennifer, double the power. Jennifer Hyman and Jennifer Fleiss are the founders of Rent The Runway: the leading clothing rental platform providing consumers simultaneously with a cost-effective and sustainable solution to show off the most iconic high-end looks. By allowing them to rent dresses for special occasions, RTR allows fashionistas to have high turnover fashion rates without harming the...
-
3 March 2023During last February’s edition of Re-think Milano among other topics there was a discussion about sustainability communication of companies and brands engaged in this area. Nicola Camurri is a board member of Giglio Bagnara Spa, a company active in the same area since 1869. The relationship with the territory is fundamental if we want sustainable models that disintermediate competitive advantages. He is also Client Advisor at Altavia Italia a company specializing in retail commercial activation. At Altavia, Camurri is in charge of the advisory practice on fashion-related retail innovation and sustainability issues. The central objective of his speech is to focus attention on how to tell about the excellence present in our country: the Italians are actually championing both sustainability and the production of products used by luxury brands, think that among the same participants in the forum, there are some samples of wool and yarns that fashion companies around the world use. We are talking about an industry in which everyone can now recognize the importance of the issue of sustainability thanks to fairly effective but still largely negative communication. How many of us can tell whether or not fashion is harmful to the environment? By now it is well known how harmful fashion is, yet we have yet to build a counter-narrative that can show how much we have been able to do to change this trend. Sustainable production is the biggest business opportunity for brands, after digitization, but it is also seen as the second biggest challenge for 2022 after the raw material supply crisis. This tells us something very interesting: we are still looking in the wrong direction. Digitization is a fact, it’s a question of how the tools we are going to relate to, work with, and do more and more things with are changing....
-
24 February 2023Let us consider a commonly used object: a plastic water bottle. Before ending up on the shelves of our trusted supermarket, the object in question will have to go through several stages. First among them is the extraction of the materials needed to produce the bottle. Then there is the actual manufacturing stage, where the product takes shape, which is followed by the transportation and distribution stages. However, the life of the bottle does not end there: the bottle will in fact be used by the final consumer, and then it will be thrown in the trash and disposed of, recycled, or transformed into a new product according to the principles of the circular economy. Each step in this process has its own impact on the environment. Life Cycle Assessment (generally known by its acronym LCA), is a detailed analysis used to estimate what effects a product or service causes on the environment, throughout its life cycle, from material extraction to disposal. LCA helps us understand that there is much more to it than what appears on the surface and helps us look at the big picture. Considering the life cycle of a product in its entirety can be critically important – both for consumers who want to make increasingly informed choices and for companies who want to make their products less and less impactful- in identifying areas for improvement and in making sustainability decisions. A product life cycle analysis generally consists of four steps. The first is to define the objectives (for example, that of reducing the environmental impact of a product) and the scope of the assessment, and then identify the methods to be used in the analysis. The next step is to create the so-called LCI, or Life Cycle Inventory: a list that includes all inputs and...
-
17 February 2023During the edition of Re-think Circular Economy forum held in Taranto last October, there was a lot of talk about how to make agriculture more sustainable and circular, about this subject spoke Raffaele Fasano, Project Manager of AgriSmartIOT, which offers a 100% made in Italy product developed by the company Neetra S.r.l. operating for more than 30 years in the field of design and production of BROADCAST, ISM (Industrial Scientific and Medical) and IoT (Internet of things) technologies. In recent years, Neetra S.r.l. has been offering its expertise with excellent results to private companies operating in the ICT, industry, agriculture, commerce, logistics, energy, and personal services sectors. Introducing his talk, Raffaele Fasano highlighted how once upon a time the concept of circular economy was a trivial one. In the past, no resource was wasted, as all resources, water, light, or energy were scarce, and “common sense” led farmers to widely use circular economy models. It is precisely this concept of “common sense” that must be, in his view, placed at the basis of what could be called the first source of the circular economy, namely, the reduction of waste. In fact, by wasting less, one has fewer products to recycle. The speaker later recounted his journey that led him from being an electrical engineer employed in the telecommunications world to using his knowledge and technology in the agricultural world. From this point of view, it was pointed out that the world of agriculture is one in which technologies are at hand and only need to be known and applied by actors in the sector. Applying technologies to agriculture, however, involves the use of a lot of energy and resources. The idea developed by AgriSmartIOT, then, is to technologically transfer information to users in the agricultural world so that they can...
-
10 February 2023During the latest Re-think Milano, Simone Gaslini, owner of Astro Spinning Company, spoke. Simone Gaslini began his talk by introducing Filatura Astro, a family business based in Vigliano Biellese, founded in 1956. It produces 2 million kg/year of recycled yarn and has 30 employees, with a turnover of 7 million euros equally divided between Italy and abroad. Filatura Astro’s yarns are used in the apparel sector to create outerwear, pants, sweaters, and T-shirts, and in the furniture industry where using the yarn in both warp and weft, they create seating for sofas, curtains, and carpets. The core business is recycled yarns, in which the starting material is waste material: scraps from clothing and knitting cuts, spinning mill scraps, and post-consumer material are used. Anything that in the sight of many is non-usable material, in Astro Spinning we look to see if it can be reused by giving it new life and creating new fiber. All raw materials purchased are analyzed both at the level of composition, to guarantee a specific composition to the final consumer, and at the level of chemical substances; in fact, the products created by Filatura Astro are certified with both Oeko-Tex Standard 100 class 1 appendix 6, and GRS, a certification that attests to the real percentage of recycled raw material that makes up the yarn. Recovering fibers from garments or fabrics is only possible with mechanical steps, in which the fabrics are broken down until the fiber is obtained and then transformed into yarn. Simone Gaslini talks about “creating,” not “producing”; Filatura Astro creates fibers and colored yarns from colored knitting yarns. This means that they create colors from colors, they choose colored fibers to create new colors, all without using water and dyes. One has to think that in addition to the water that...
-
3 February 2023They have been found on the bodies of worker bees, at the bottom of the Mariana Trench (the deepest of known ocean depressions), and even in our blood. Microplastics have been detected in thousands of places in recent years, and are now suspected to be everywhere. Certainly complicit is their size: plastic particles less than 5 millimeters in diameter are defined as such. The origin of microplastics can be diverse: some, so-called primary microplastics, are intentionally manufactured to that size for commercial use and account for about 15-31% of total microplastics. Due to their abrasive properties, they have been crucial to the cosmetics and oil industries for years. In contrast, the majority of microplastics are secondary microplastics: these are formed from larger plastic objects abandoned in the ocean (such as a water bottle or straw) and exposed to environmental factors (such as wind, waves, and sunlight) that cause them to degrade into smaller and smaller fragments. The main source of global microplastic pollution is found in our closets: 34.8% of it is caused by microfibers. The latter is a type of microplastic that is released during the washing of synthetic fabrics (such as polyester and stretch denim). The mechanical and chemical stress to which fabrics are subjected in the washing machine causes the microfibers to detach from the yarns that make up the fabric. It is estimated that up to 700,000 microfibers are released during an average wash. And these particles are so small that they are not intercepted by washing machine filters or sewage treatment plants. That figure is not sustainable: experts have calculated that continuing at the same rates, as many as 22 million tons of microfibers will populate the oceans between 2015 and 2050. Microplastics can be fatal to the entire marine ecosystem. Given their size, these...
-
27 January 2023At the last Re-think event held in Taranto, one of the topics covered during the three days was sustainable mobility, an important theme as rethinking infrastructure and the way of moving in a more sustainable way is central to innovating different forms of transportation for more efficient use, paying attention to resources such as biofuels, hydrogen, and biomethane; and to move toward reducing pollution risks, protecting the health and public spaces. Emanuele Memmola, T&TS – Sustainable Mobility in Eni, explained during his speech what Eni is doing in the world of sustainable mobility. Today we are in a time of unprecedented climate emergency, Memmola said, so either we take action by introducing mitigation actions, or the globe’s temperature will continue to rise. The figure presented by the United Nations Climate Change Report says that from the pre-industrial era to 2021, the temperature has increased by 1° Celsius, and if we combine this degree with global pollution, its value has risen to about 416 parts per million in atmospheric CO2; the forecast is not optimistic. If measures to lower temperatures are not promptly activated, by the end of 2100 the temperature of planet earth will rise by 2.7° Celsius, far from the 1.5° Celsius predicted in the Paris Agreement. Although the supply of increasingly renewable sources is evident, there is an ever-increasing demand for energy, especially in developing countries where the fuel mix is more skewed toward fossil sources than renewables. In addition, the world population is continuously growing. This has led to a 60 percent emission of CO2 into the atmosphere over the past three decades due to the effects of climate change. The main culprits, of course, are energy-intensive industries and the world of transportation, particularly in Europe. Italy has as many as 39 million vehicles for transporting goods...
-
During the last Re-think held in Milan, the founder of the Recup association, a very interesting example of awareness and sustainability within the agrifood sector, spoke. As president of Recup, Alberto Piccardo explained that the association’s motto is “Food that loses economic value, gains social value” and that, this, has been an integral part of its project from the beginning, when in 2015 Recup debuted in the Viale Papiniano Market in Milan. The market featured mountains of boxes completely abandoned in the middle of the street, with a bad smell, and lots of people dumpster diving. What Recup did, was to analyze these two problems and look for a solution: since 2015 to date Recup has been trying to intervene in as many markets as possible, especially in Milan, where there are about 90 district markets every week, for an average waste of 200-300 kg in each of them, thousands of tons every week in one city alone. The intervention, Piccardo continued, was aimed at recovering from the merchants all the surplus food, collecting it with a cart, a cargo bike, and taking it to the Recup stall; it is a free parallel stall, where they do not sell a product but try to make social inclusion. So, the two main pillars of Recup were initially combating food waste and combating social exclusion; then using food waste as a tool to approach all the people who have economic problems and try to connect with them, thus creating an intergenerational and international project. Recup, specifies Alberto Piccardo, is not intended to be a charitable action like those of large entities in Italy-Banco Alimentare, Caritas, Pane Quotidiano-but aims to raise people’s awareness by letting them experience food waste firsthand. Piccardo continued his speech by going on to explain the evolution of Recup,...