TALKING SUSTAINABILITY – ITALY WATCH
The best practices of sustainable Italy selected for you
“Sustainable” Italians drive more than one point of GDP
The identikit of the new customer on the Italian market is drawn with a green pencil. The findings of a Eumetra/Lifegate survey leave no room for doubt. The green customer is aged between 18 and 34, is a high-school or university graduate, and, far from being alone,...
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Organic food. Why does it cost so much more?
Are we sure that the fact that an organic peach costs up to 7 times as much as a conventionally grown peach is simply a question of higher quality? According to the Bologna Chamber of Commerce’s weekly price list, updated on 24 August 2017, organic peaches are sold at...
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Milk, when will we have a sustainability standard?
The dairy sector is a sort of two-faced Janus for the Italian economy. While exports are flourishing, domestic consumption is sluggish, for a number of reasons. A study by Agrifood Monitor presented at the Cibus Connect tradeshow in Parma shows that establishing a...
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Mara Magni, carrying the sustainability torch for 4200 km
Someone once asked George Mallory why he wanted to climb Mount Everest. “Because it’s there”, was the laconic response. When I asked Mara Magni why she wanted to ride 4,200 kilometres on a bicycle to go to the North Cape, her answer was more articulate, but started...
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Rice, approval for mandatory provenance labelling
After the Piemunto project to promote the piedmontese milk supply chain jointly with mass merchandisers and the entry of Coop as one of the major distributors supporting the project, the regional councillor for agriculture announced a similar initiative to promote and...
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Gerbido incinerator, ashes could be used as building material
Like the phoenix rising from the ashes, so houses could rise from the ashes of the combusted waste of the Gerbido incinerator. As the result of a cooperation agreement between TRM, whose members include Iren, the city of Turin, and a number of municipalities in the...
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The importance of being sustainable
The world of beer is moving down the path of sustainability. And some surprisingly refreshing news comes from the Belpaese, proving once again that Italians’ attention to sustainability and the environment is growing every day. The beer house rules. Sasso Pirano, a...
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Favini writes “sustainable” on paper made from seaweed and leather
It was 1736 when the "Serenissima" Republic of Venice authorised the conversion of a windmill in Rossano Veneto into a factory for the production of paper. The Favini family came into the picture in 1906 when they bought the Rossano Veneto factory. In 1991, at the...
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MusKin, the wearable mushroom
Grado Zero Innovation, a start-up based in Montelupo Fiorentino, Tuscany, studies and develops new materials for use in the most disparate industrial sectors. One day it had the “crazy” idea of creating a material that would give the same tactile sensations as a...
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Beetroot is the new plastic
It was 1989 when the Fertec labs, the Montedison research centre, produced the first Mickey Mouse wristwatch for distribution with the famous comic. Not many people knew, however, that the watch had been made with materials derived from maize. Technological advances...
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Materials of the future, from waste oil to graphene
Graphene, a material consisting of a mono-atomic layer of carbon atoms (whose thickness, in other words, is equivalent to the dimensions of a single atom) and with the mechanical strength of a diamond and the flexibility of plastic, can be produced with waste oil. The...
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Corporate Cultural Responsibility, a proposal to measure the effectiveness of corporate cultural action
How do you calculate the effectiveness of corporate cultural activities? And what added value do they offer? Associazione Civita asked the question and also came up with some answers, experimenting with reporting model for corporate cultural activities. So far, the...
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