Did you know it takes 1,000 years for a plastic bag to degrade in a landfill? Even so, the bags don’t break down completely but instead photo-degrade becoming microplastics that absorb toxins and continue to pollute the environment. According to The World Counts, 5 trillion plastic bags are used per year, which is 160,000 plastic bags per second, which can cause major environmental challenges and active measures must be put in place to minimize its usage. International Plastic Bag-Free Day is a movement started by Rezero in 2006. The campaign against single-use plastic bags began in Catalonia by a group of people to fight for the elimination of plastic bags. It is celebrated on every 3rd July to promote environmental conservation and spread awareness on the consequences of the use of plastic bags. The birth of Plastic Bags Interestingly, Polythene, the world’s most popular plastic used as carrier bags was first discovered by accident. In 1933, a team of chemists at the ICI Wallerscote plant were working on polymers. During the process, the experiment went wrong yielding an unintended result: a white waxy residue which was polythene. This invention served a good purpose to the British military during the second World War. Polythene was used as an insulating material for radar cables during the war, and the substance was a closely guarded secret until after the war. In 1960, a Swedish company called Celloplast filed a U.S patent for tubing for packaging purposes using polythene. The initial design was better developed and in 1965, the team of three at Celloplast obtained a patent for what is now called “the T-Shirt Plastic bag”. Plastic bag quickly replaced grocery bags made from fabrics in Europe. Supermarket chains in the United States of America and all around Europe switched to single-use plastic bags...
Month: June 2022
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23 June 2022During the Re-think Circular Economy Forum held in Taranto last here, we had the honour to have as guest Walter Stahel, father of the Circular Economy and founder of The Life-Product Institute in Geneva, who began his speech giving a panoramic view of the opportunities of a low-waste, low-carbon circular industrial economy. Circular Industrial Economy (CIE) is about stocks, not flows, he started, and it’s about managing, maintaining the value and the utility of natural capital, human capital, cultural capital, manufactured capital. The origins of circularity are several: in nature, in infrastructure designed for long-term use, in good husbandry in societies of poverty and scarcity. The take-away from early sustainability and Circular Economy is that it comes from people caring for their belongings – what they have – and as there is no waste in nature, it simply means that all waste is man-made. Walter explained that, looking at the economy as a whole, it is like a bath-tub economy, where you have inflows and outflows, but the thing we are most interested in is quality and quantity of stock of water in the tub. This is largely unknown today. So, a bath-tub view of a mature circular economy is one loop, with a main era of “R”, reuse, refill, repair, remanufacture and an era of “D”, de-linking materials to recover molecules as-pure-as-new from used resources. The era of “R” is about essential services, production is about productive labour and that’s why economists usually ignore the era of “R” because it’s not productive labour. The era of “R” of the Circular Industrial Economy is about local SMEs and innovation to extend the service-life of objects. And who takes the decisions in the era of “R”? It’s the owner-user in control of his/her belongings. Then, according to Walter, a first watershed happened...
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16 June 2022How to use blockchain for supply chain traceability and circularity? Mesbah Sabur, founded Circularise in 2016, as a spinoff from the Delft University of Technology, where he studied industrial product design. Therefore, his background, as he underlined in his speech at Re-think Circular Economy Forum held in Milan last February, is in creating from scratch products that can be manufactured, industrially scaled and sold internationally. The economic system we are currently living in does not properly work, the way products are manufactured and resources extracted, where most of it ends up in a landfill or in incineration, cannot work in a longer run. Therefore, there is a clear need to develop a better system, which is the Circular Economy (CE) together with other trends. In order to realize a CE it is necessary to have the right digital infrastructures for supply chain, to coordinate with each other and to activate the CE activities by having the right information about materials resources, where they come from and where they end up. Therefore, Circularise mission is to bring traceability in global supply chains in order to enable the shift towards a more CE. The company firmly believes that if there is no transparency in data then there is no circularity. At the beginning of the company, they tried to understand which were the problems in order to figure out good solutions based on confidentiality and trust of the data. Some of the questions while working were: How do you store all that information from a supply chain? How do you connect that and how do you make sure the data is trustworthy? In order to develop the protocol, they specialized for a while on chemicals and plastics companies worldwide and they have been working with suppliers in the chemical space to prove...
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8 June 2022Comunicato Stampa RE-THINK CIRCULAR ECONOMY FORUM ARRIVA A NAPOLI Aziende, Organizzazioni, istituzioni, startup ed enti di ricerca presenteranno i loro percorsi circolari intrapresi per favorire la nascita di attività innovative e imprenditoriali nel territorio campano 30 giugno presso il Museo DaDoM della Stazione Zoologica Anton Dohrn dalle ore 9.30 alle ore 18.30 – Link per la registrazione Evento in presenza su invito ed online aperto a tutti Milano, 8 giugno 2022 – Con l’obiettivo di favorire la nascita di attività innovative ed imprenditoriali nel territorio campano, Tondo, organizzazione internazionale operante nel settore dell’economia circolare, annuncia la sesta edizione di Re-think – Circular Economy Forum. Si tratta di un grande evento in modalità mista sia in presenza fisica, solo su invito, e sia online per il grande pubblico. Tra i partner EPM Servizi, UniCredit, Ambasciata del Regno dei Paesi Bassi in Italia, Adnkronos nel ruolo di Media Partner e Smallfish nel ruolo di Graphic Partner. L’evento si terrà a Napoli il 30 giugno presso il Museo Darwin Dohrn (DaDoM) della Stazione Zoologica Anton Dohrn in modalità ibrida, con gli speaker, i principali stakeholder ed un pubblico ristretto che potrà entrare solo su invito, sul luogo fisico, mentre il grande pubblico potrà accedere da remoto – qui il link per la registrazione. “EPM– dichiara il consigliere delegato di EPM Carmine Esposito– è in prima linea nella circular economy e nella transizione ecologica. Lavorando nel facility management, aiutiamo anche i clienti ad implementare azioni concrete e processi per ridurre gli sprechi anche grazie all’utilizzo di nuove tecnologie e di tutte le innovazioni di processo e prodotto presenti sul mercato e in sperimentazione. Siamo coscienti poi che, affinchè avvenga la transizione ecologica, è fondamentale partire dalle nuove generazioni. In quest’ottica supportiamo organizzazioni come Marevivo e scuole paritarie dell’infanzia, primarie e secondarie di primo grado.” L’economia circolare...
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2 June 2022By Jacqline Kwakye, Social Media Marketing Intern in Tondo “In the middle of a pandemic, COVID-19, if there’s ever been a moment in human history where we’ve been thrown and thrust to the very front and shown that we as humans are very vulnerable, it’s now.” – Musonda Mumba, Chief of the Terrestrial Ecosystems Unit, UN Environment. Coming out of a global pandemic highlights the importance of protecting the environment as the theme of this year’s World Environment Day conveys “We have Only one Earth“. The World Environment Day is an international day dedicated to the environment and led by the United Nations Environment Program (UNEP). It has been held annually on every 5th of June since the 1973 and this year will be hosted by Sweden. The initiative calls for a collective, transformative action on a global scale to celebrate, protect and restore the planet. Current global crisis and challenges requires a retracing of human actions and the necessity to get proactive with gearing not just economic, but also environmental and social sectors towards sustainability. Sustainable development is the development that meets the needs of the present generation without compromising the ability of future generation to meet their own needs. Evidently speaking, humanity is living unsustainably, this is because we extract natural resources more frequently than it takes the Earth to replenish. In every given year, there is a day which marks the date when humanity’s demand for ecological resources exceeds what the earth can generate within that year. This day is called: Earth Overshoot Day. The Global Footprint Network evaluates it based on 3 million statistical data from 200 countries. It is calculated by dividing the planet’s biocapacity (in global hectares) by humanity’s ecological footprint (in global hectares) and then multiplying by the number of days in a year. Statistics from the Global...