Ercole Botto, CEO of Successori Reda, presented this reality and its approach to circularity during the presentation event of the Circular Threads report last June. Reda is a leading company in the textile sector, began Botto, that feels the responsibility to promote change through sustainable innovation, respect for the environment and social progress in order to ensure a future to next generations. When it comes to sustainability, Reda embraces several concepts, including transparency, which, as Botto said during his speech, is essential in order to be sustainable. The company is also located in a manufacturing sector that, for economic reasons, had already to apply the principles of circularity to its fibres. For example, during the processing of wool, the first by-product generated in the first step of combing is fat, which is then used as a base in the beauty creams of all the brands in the sector. Reda’s journey began, continued Botto, somehow in a reckless manner, as they approached this sector when they were already grown up, and it was only through the growing literature on sustainability that they became increasingly aware of the new possibilities and the fact that textiles are the second most polluting sector in the world because they are also the one that wastes the most. Even the company itself had to learn this: in 2004 it received its first certification for sustainability, and from then until 2018-2019 it was unable to sell its products because they were sustainable products. There were no brands buying from them because they were sustainable and therefore still difficult to justify on the market compared to other similar products. However, the world has finally started to change and move towards more sustainable and circular purchases. In recent years, the company has also started to certify its products with LCA...
Month: April 2022
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21 April 2022Isabella Pisano, Researcher at University of Bari, during her speech at the Re-think Circular Economy Forum in Taranto last September, presented some case studies and scenarios of what is defined as the “circular bioeconomy“, the good “biotech” practices that she follows in the laboratories and then, through a SWOT analysis, she saw the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities but also threats of that certain practice. She began by defining the circular bioeconomy as an emerging knowledge-based business model for the development of products and processes based on renewable biological resources. The challenge of the bio-economy is to increasingly replace fossil fuels, and therefore it addresses a bio-based market for the production of new bio-products, ranging from food, energy, plastics, textiles to the chemical industry. For several years, researcher Pisano has been carrying out the study and implementation of various organic waste close to our territory with a view to its valorisation. Are we really talking about waste and refuse, or are we still talking about resources? Starting with an overview of the organic waste agenda that she has been working on, there are for example, waste from the dairy chain such as whey, which is highly developed in our area and whose production in Europe is around 90 million tonnes per year, and of which 40% is considered special waste under current legislation; lignocellulosic biomass, such as pruning waste, which is very often burned by small farmers, albeit in small quantities, or perennial herbaceous species that are found in marginal areas but could be fully exploited, while they are still considered waste, and the olive oil sector, which is also very present in the Mediterranean territories and for which, in accordance with the law, olive oil vegetation water can be disposed of by spreading it on the land. However, there are still...
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14 April 2022“A Circular Economy entails gradually decoupling economic activity from the consumption of finite resources and designing waste out of the system. Underpinned by a transition to renewable energy sources, the circular model builds economic, natural and social capital”. Starting from this quote from the Ellen MacArthur Foundation, Simon Bushell, Founder and CEO at Sympower, during his speech at Re-think Circular Economy Forum Milan 2020, illustrated how flexibility, such as demand response, contributes to a circular economy. To do so, he started by explaining the functioning of electricity systems. In these systems, demand and supply of electricity always need to be balanced. In each country, the electricity grid operators are responsible for keeping this balance. In Italy, the grid operator at the national level is Terna, while at the local level we have other actors such as Unareti (Milan) and Areti (Rome). Maintaining the grid balance can be challenging. For example, the UK often experiences fast and high peaks of electricity demand at half time during football matches, when millions of people simultaneously turn on kettles to boil water to make tea. This sudden peak in electricity demand is equivalent to turning on two entire coal-fired power plants and, at the moment, this is exactly where this electricity comes from in the UK. This is an incredibly inefficient, expensive and polluting way to address demand peaks because these plants then always have to be on standby for such moments. As more renewable energy of intermittent nature (such as sun and wind) replace traditional sources of energy, this becomes a growing concern due to the increasing mismatch between demand and supply of electricity from renewable generation. This transition to renewable energy resources is also accompanied by a transition to electrical transport and mobility, making the demand for electricity even more variable. To achieve...
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7 April 2022Roberto Zoboli, Rector’s Delegate for Scientific Research and Sustainability at Università Cattolica, Milano, for his speech at the Re-think Circular Economy Forum held in 2020 talked about the general architecture of the European Green Deal identifying different areas of actions: the decarbonization and zero pollution area, the bio economy area – from Farm to Fork to preserve European natural capital and biodiversity, and the transition to a Circular Economy area. These areas, he started, can be considered separately but also in a NEXUS approach, which is used by international organizations and think-thanks to study the interactions between the different areas of reality and policies. All these interactions can be in synergy but also in conflict over the different processes and policies. For instance, the circular economy can save bio resources by using biowaste as input such as in green chemistry. In the case of decarbonisation, the biomass-based RES (energy/biofuels) can create possible pressures over virgin bioresources especially after the strong support on renewable energy sources in Europe. Finally, the circular economy can provide waste-based feedstocks for RES, reducing the demand for virgin bioresources. The acknowledgement of these interactions can be beneficial for policy integrations and for the achievement of the European Green Deal (EGD) objectives avoiding potential conflicts. At the European level, in the NEXUS the focus is on biomaterials. Knowing that there is a great amount of residues in production (442 mt/year), there is a large potential that is partly unexploited but, in some cases, there is a high demand pressure on some sectors like wood residues. Looking at the biomaterials flows in the European Union it is possible to notice that these resources are not used properly, a large part of materials are wasted or used in low-value processes: The energy use is about 72% of total uses and...