Giorgia Marino – Chief editor of Materia Rinnovabile | Renewable Matter. Freelance journalist and web editor, her writing is focused around the environment and innovation. She has been the editor-in-chief of Greenews.info and now writes for various magazines, including the Italian edition of The Huffington Post and the national newspaper La Stampa. In recent years she realized some multimedia reportage projects financed by European journalistic grants, in particular in Haiti (sustainable reconstruction) and Nepal (climate change).
“The global economy is now only 7.2 percent circular; and it’s getting worse year on year, driven by rising material extraction and use”. This is how the Circularity Gap Report 202...
The greenwashing road is paved with good intentions, while that of circular washing – its latest and more treacherous evolution – is full of superficiality and inexperience. Yet, l...
From technical model for connoisseurs to (almost) mainstream idea: in a little over a decade, the narrative of the circular economy has experienced massive evolution. But what are ...
“The COPs are mainly used as an opportunity for leaders and people in power to get attention, using many different kinds of greenwashing.” Despite being almost 20 years old now, Gr...
According to Ellen MacArthur Foundation estimates, the equivalent of one lorry full of clothes is thrown in a landfill or incinerated every second. The global fashion industry keep...
Since its very onset, over a century ago, the supermarket model has had only one purpose: to make us buy as much as possible. But nowadays, a more responsible approach to consumpti...
Using fungi and their extraordinary characteristics to “grow” construction materials and degrade pollutants: this is the vision underpinning many studies that soon may lead to real...
Swedish fast fashion giant H&M has come under indictment for greenwashing. The plaintiff was American marketing student Chelsea Commodore, who took the case to federal court in Ne...
Growing cement instead of manufacturing it. The idea comes from a team of U.S. researchers at the University of Colorado Boulder, who, inspired by coral reef algae, have come up wi...
The end of 2024: meaning, two and a half years from now. This is the deadline that the states of the European Union have set for organizing and implementing mandatory separate coll...
Recycling wood waste, including wood chips and sawdust, to turn it into a building material even more durable than steel. Phrased that way, it almost sounds as incredible as the di...
The gastronomic preferences of a beetle larvae open new avenues for the circular economy of plastics. From Australia has come news that the larvae of the Zophobas morio beetle, als...
World Environment Day is turning 50 years old. It was established by the United Nations on June 5th, 1972, at the first Conference on the Human Environment, which opened at that ti...
Optimizing the use of resources by recovering, enhancing, reusing and recycling them. This has been the mission of Tomra, the Norwegian giant of the circular economy with offices a...
The rental of clothes is one of the circular business models that could make the fashion industry more sustainable. However, a Finnish study aimed at calculating the carbon footpri...
At the intersection of the energy transition and the sustainable products revolution, the battery supply chain is one of the strategic hubs of the green revolution in the economy. ...
"We don't have time to waste." With this imperative tagline, American retail giant Walmart launched its Circular Connector last April 11th. The goal: to accelerate innovation in t...
It’s not too late. Reaching the goals of the Paris Agreement and limiting global warming to 1.5°C by the end of the century is still possible. Provided, however, that we act now, m...
Ecodesign, circular textiles, regulations for construction products, greenwashing, and consumer power. These are the main points addressed in the new set of proposals presented on ...
Climate is back in the news. Under the motto “People Not Profit”, the folks at Fridays For Future have called on March 25th the first real global strike (almost) post-pandemic. Thi...
It's time to take responsibility for the climate. This line may sound ominous, but it is actually good news. If in fact, as individuals, it's easy to feel powerless and surrender t...
Talking about circular economy has never been more pressing. If the conflict in Ukraine and the international crisis seem to have put the climate and environmental emergencies of t...
The Italian bioeconomy restarts from the South. The new Terra Next accelerator for start-ups has been launched in Napoli and will become an innovation hub for the entire sector. Pr...
How short is the life of a toy? From The Steadfast Tin Soldier to Toy Story, many storytellers have sung the tale of the ephemeral, however shiny, existence of dolls, puppets and s...
Five hundred billion tons. That's the amount of resources consumed globally over the past six years, between COP21 in Paris in 2015 and COP26 in Glasgow. The sum was calculated by ...
“Our waste is our responsibility. Letting waste pollute the environment, end up in illegal dumpsites or in our oceans is a real loss of resources, which are precious for the EU’s t...
“If plastic were a country, it would be the world’s fifth largest greenhouse gas emitter." Thus begins Judith Enck, president of the American NGO Beyond Plastics, in presenting a r...
The fight against single-use plastic consumption has never been harder than in the past two years. With the spread of the Covid-19 pandemic, the (human) world's hunger for plastic ...
The Loop system is a great idea, and it was clear from the start. Large retailers are finally starting to understand it now. The platform for reusable packaging invented by Tom Sz...
According to the United Nations, today, over a billion and a half people live in informal settlements and by 2030 that figure could soar to 3 billion. So, the issue of future circu...
The future may be two-dimensional. At least, the future of materials. Since 2004, when the two Russian physicists Gejm and Novosëlov succeeded in isolating the first monoatomic la...
The optimization of the waste management system worldwide could cut down 2.76 billion tons of CO2 per year, or 5% of total global emissions. It’d basically be as effective as groun...
The spread of circular economy practices and principles in developing countries often runs up against the obstacle of a lack of data. The problem grows even bigger when working in ...
The year 2021 started with some news that mostly went unnoticed, as, after all, did many other things in a pandemic-dominated year-long news cycle. A study published in Nature esti...
Countries in the European Union collect and recover more end-of-life electrical and electronic devices than the rest of the world. This work, however, is still not sufficient to ac...
It’s Turkey’s turn to be tired of accepting plastic waste from Europe. With an amendment published on May 18th in the Official Gazette, the Turkish Ministry of Commerce has banned ...
There are over 41 billion plastic and glass bottles and beverage cans that every year, in Europe, escape the recycling circuit and end up in landfills, incinerators or, worse, in r...
Embracing complexity implies widening one's field of vision and learning to understand and consider the interconnections between phenomena, even those that seem too distant to matt...
Textile and fashion industry have a huge circular potential that has yet to be developed. One of the main issues currently holding back the application of the circular economy in t...
We’re back on the topic of nuclear power. 2021 may mark the tenth anniversary of the Fukushima disaster, which on March 11th, 2011 rekindled the fear of the risks of atomic energy ...
Spring brings a lot of news for the household appliance sector in Europe. Starting from March 1st, new energy labels have been introduced and, above all, the long-awaited and much-...
From Italy’s point of view – a country that stopped the production of nuclear energy in its territory after the 1987 referendum – nuclear decommissioning is an old story that is st...
New frontiers for circular architecture: in Australia oyster shells become building materials.The new Sydney Harbor Pavilion, designed by architects Jessica Spresser and Peter Besl...
From Novara to Norway, and then to the whole world. Novamont, the Italian bioplastics giant, has taken an important new step in its international expansion with the acquisition of ...
In Europe alone, the demand for plastic is close to 50 million tonnes a year, 40% of which is packaging. And almost entirely single-use. This is too much. Examples of overpackaging...
Coca-Cola has conquered, for the third year in a row, the unenviable podium of the top plastic polluter in the world. This was stated in the latest report by the Break Free From Pl...
Food security, water, monitoring the greenhouse gas cycle, maintaining biodiversity: all these ecosystem services depend on the health of the soil. And yet, there is no land on the...
The war is not yet won, but there has been another successful battle. With a vote in the European Parliament on 25th November, the campaign for the right to repair scored an import...
“It’s all about you”. With these words, on 3rd November, Executive Vice-President for the European Green Deal Frans Timmermans inaugurated the 2020 Circular Economy Stakeholder Con...
Europe is far from the plastic packaging recycling targets it set for itself. Take this step forward, and it will not reach those of 2025 nor those of 2030. This is the conclusion,...
The purpose of travel is not just leisure and exploration. People also move around for business and work, and the business travel sector took a heavy hit due to the Covid-19 pandem...
Plastic, or rather microplastic is added to plastic. And the Atlantic Ocean is even more contaminated than we feared. This is demonstrated by a new study by Katsiaryna Pabortsava a...
Packaging, cigarette butts, plastic cups and all sorts of throwaway items carelessly abandoned on the street or in parks. How much does it cost to collect and dispose of them corre...
Desertification, spurred by soil exploitation and climate change, is today an increasing threat also in Europe. Measures to prevent it are not enough. A coordinated strategy is lac...
Over half a billion euros for the next five years. Gruppo Cap, the 100% publicly-funded company managing the integrated water service in the Metropolitan City of Milan and currentl...
Some define it as the Sistine Chapel of the poor, a humble Louvre, a Divine Comedy of work tools, of waste and worn out shoes. Famous critics regard it as an extraordinary and uniq...
The post-Covid recovery will have to start from the territories, from the communities and from sustainability. The initiative launched by Sienambiente for a green recovery of the P...
The first law in the world banning the destruction of returned or unsold products has been passed in France. This happened following the wave of indignation unleashed after the rel...
When was the circular economy idea first introduced in China? “As far as I know the idea of circular economy (CE) was first introduced in China in the late 1990s, by research...
In Shanghai, the city’s administration excels in its commitment to electronic waste recycling, an ongoing ordeal that emerged from China’s digital boom. Urban mining potential is b...
The area of Turin known as “Innovation Mile”, between the Po and Dora Riparia rivers, is home to a large number of innovative companies and technological institutes. The newes...
A washing machine is not forever, there’s little doubt about this. But, if buying an appliance used to be a long-term investment, nowadays this is no longer true. Whether obsolesce...
Music is born out of silence. And silence can stem from a discarded tyre, after years spent squealing on tarmac. The project for the acoustic improvement of Parma’s Toscanini Audit...
Radical, visionary, eccentric, ironic, and firmly outside the box. Shamelessly, boldly and irreverently utopian. You can love it or hate it, but you can surely not remain indi...
We need a paradigm shift, even in the construction sector. Deep, fast and pervasive. In one word, ground-breaking: or better “disruptive,” as the innovator’s jargon calls it. Innov...
Making a virtue of necessity. This has always been the mantra in the Italian paper industry. A Country of “poor” forests that are not particularly productive in terms of biomass, t...
A little girl plays among heaps of packaging and plastic waste coming from every corner of the world. She “fishes” for dead fish in a polluted stream, whilst sheep graze on bubblew...
