Technologies

How 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...

“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...

OILY SPILLS IN RIVERS: THE BLIND CORNER OF WATER PROTECTION  There are few ecological disasters that arouse indignation and a desire for change like oil spills into the seas, indeed we easily remember the images of the oil tankers and the “oil spill” coming out of those gigantic ships. However, the spill of oil into rivers is constantly excluded. In fact, how many river ecological disasters can we remember? Not many. The reason is that the magnitude of such events is not resonant enough to be proposed in the news and it is a phenomenon of extended intensity and it is diluted over time. Does this mean that they have less relevance in the ecological context? Not at all. In fact, it is proven that river oil spills represent the major source of oily pollution in the seas. Moreover, – probably deriving from the same cause – there is a lack of an extensive and updated scientific literature on the peculiar characteristics that make river spills different from marine ones, leading to a deficit in the methodologies of action against such events. A study published this year offers an overview of the reference literature. According to the study results three are the characteristics that differ river oil spills from marine ones: 1) the water column of the watercourse that disperses or retains the oily mass; 2) the formation and action of oil-particle aggregates ( OPA); 3) the interaction of the oil with the shore. In addition to those, the peculiarities of the river concerned must be included: torrent or river with a large flow, the nature of the banks and the presence of differences in height on the river bed and thus the formation of rapids. Therefore, the central theme concerning the oily spill into water courses is the low...

During our event, Re-think Circular Economy Forum held in Milan in October 2020, Paolo Ganis starts his speech presenting Vitesy, a startup of young entrepreneurs working on sustainability and wellbeing. They have identified two main problems. The first issue is the lack of awareness about indoor pollution and its negative effects on the environment and our health. As a matter of fact, the World Health Organization argued that indoor pollution can be up to 5 times higher than outdoor pollution. This is due to the existence of several unknown contaminants generating pollution and VOC (volatile organic compounds), which are bad for our health considering we spend about 9% of our time indoors. The second problem is related to the use of products using old polluting technologies, which are made of plastic and cannot be recycled. These products work with HEPA and Carbon Filters that need to be replaced often, otherwise the pollution goes back to the indoor area. In the last 5 years, 102 million filters have been wasted and generated 20.000 tons of trash. In their solutions, Vitesy is working on a new concept of connected wellness, thanks to the combination of nature, nanomaterials, technology and design. They have started testing the power of nature in research labs. In 2017, they launched their first product, Clairy, a natural air purifier that should eliminate 93% of VOC in 30 hours. Clairy enhances the phytoremediation power of some plants to remove pollution agents from the air. Thanks to its sensors and its app it is also possible to monitor air quality. In 2019, they launched Natede, the evolution of the previous product, combining photocatalysis and phytoremediation together increasing its purification process. It features advanced sensors to analyze temperature, humidity, VOCs, fine-particulate and carbon monoxide. Their latest product is Eteria with new...

By Shyaam Ramkumar, Circular Innovation Expert at Tondo lab In the occasion of our Re-think Circular Economy Forum 2020 in Milan, Shyaam Ramkumar, Circular Innovation Expert at Tondo lab, explained us how digital technology can form a roadmap to enable Circular Economy.    Shyaam Ramkumar focused his speech on how digital technology can form a roadmap to enable Circular Economy.    Since the latter half of the 20th century we have seen an increasing digitalisation of the world. A proof of this huge exponential digitalisation is visible, for instance, by comparing the amount of world information stored in a digital format. Indeed, in 2014 this percentage overcame the 99%, while in the 80s less than 1%. We are currently experiencing the beginning of the fourth industrial revolution, with incredible advancements in different kinds of technologies that are changing our reality (AI, digital fabrication, IoT etc.). Especially this year due to Covid-19, we have seen an accelerating trend towards a more digital society, increasingly moving in the direction of online working, online learning and online socializing. This trend has huge implications for governments, companies and citizens, creating a new normality in a post-covid world. This increasing use of digital technology has actually a huge positive trend to enable the circular transition as well.  Technology allows for greater knowledge sharing and collaboration, insights and analytics to support a better use of assets and resources and improved wellbeing for all. As highlighted in Circular Economy’s “DISRUPT” framework, incorporating digital technology is a key element of the circular economy, especially with regard to how resources could be optimized and connections between actors among the supply chain could be strenthened by using digital online platforms. During his speech, Shyaam focuses on four kinds of technological solutions: digital platforms, blockchain, big data analytics and artificial intelligence. It is relevant not only to understand how these technologies are contributing to the Circular Economy, but also how they are connected to each other.   Many digital platforms have been recently developed, creating the foundation to enable greater connection and collaboration to advance Circular Economy. Through them companies, governments and citizens are able to exchange knowledge, share assets, reduce transaction costs and some of the inefficient market failures for second-hand resources, wastes and products. The constant use of digital platforms is also generating a great amount of data and insights in terms of: patterns of the use of resources and wastes, the demand and the supply of second hand goods. An example of this is Floow2, an online marketplace that enables companies to increase and valorise their existing assets, services, knowledge and skills by sharing them with other businesses under a given price. The platform really opens new opportunities for collaborations within companies and is gathering data on what are the biggest resources required, who has the biggest needs and who has the resources to provide them.   Thinking about the creation of these platforms, it is important to manage and store all of this information in a secure way, while providing them to the different stakeholders. The blockchain can provide a decentralized way to manage and store this information, allowing a greater transaprency in terms of the origin of product, resource use, authentication, tracing supply chain issues etc. In addition,...