The Great Trade Challenge
A shock with worldwide repercussions: China’s ban on plastic waste imports, introduced at the beginning of 2018, has left the global recycling market reeling. The loss of the largest importer ...
How Green is Your Mine?
Western public opinion currently perceives China as a country whose prodigious economic growth has come at the price of unsustainable levels of environmental pollution. Although this idea does hold ...
Circular Japan
Kamikatsu, a rural municipality with 1,500 inhabitants located on the wooded island of Shikoku in the Japanese archipelago, performs a record household separate waste collection with 45 different ty...
France Turns Towards the Circular Economy
Following an intense consultation phase with stakeholders (businesses, councils and citizens), in April 2018 the French government licenced the roadmap that will guide the country’s transition...
The Construction Industry: Increasingly Green, Increasingly Circular
With estimated overall costs of about $135 billion for the insurance industry, 2017 represented the bleakest year in their history, mainly because of the compensation for damages caused by Hurricane...
Trash 2 Cash
Every year the European Union’s 28 member States discard over three million tonnes of textile fibres. A serious instance of waste that damages both the environment and the pockets of consumers...
The Dark Side of Digitalisation
According to a report issued by Global e-Sustainability Initiative, digital solutions can bring to a 16% reduction of climate-altering gases before 2020, a result that would go way beyond ...
C'mon People, Let's Repair!
Do you have a sweater you really like, but so do moth which left a clear trail on it? Did your children break the toy train they got as a Christmas present? Do you have to reposition your bicycle br...
The Double Life of Peach and Apricot Kernels
Apricot and peach kernels, salt used for salting meat: since February 2017, in Emilia Romagna, they have no longer been considered special waste to be disposed of, originating from the processing ph...
Regions and the Circular Economy
Emilia-Romagna is the first Italian region to have taken on, by law, the circular economy as the North Star of its waste policy with the aim of reducing mixed MSW production and recover as much matt...
Quo vadis sharing economy?
Bologna-based 35-year-old Valentina, with a degree in viola at the conservatory, is often travelling both for work as a musician and for passion. “To save money, but mainly to feel at home&rdq...
United by a Desk
In the beginning it was the loft, communicative yet impersonal. Then the digital revolution wave brought about home teleworking: working hours tailored to family needs, ecological elimination of the...
When Loans Go Social
Hands up those who are surprised to know that Italians’ confidence in the banking system has reached a historical low, which collapsed from 30% in 2005 to 10% at the end of 2015. A negative re...
A Kingdom Disunited by Waste
Every year, in the United Kingdom, secondary raw materials and energy for a total of about £15 million are recovered from waste, but sadly, most of it goes overseas. While the countr...
Houses like Trees, Cities like Forests
In 1987, Michael Braungart – a chemistry graduate – founded EPEA, the Environmental Protection Encouragement Agency based in Hamburg, of which he is currently CEO. For over twe...
2012 Earthquake: The Emilia-Romagna Model
While an increasingly vehement debate is still ongoing over the failure to remove debris and rubble in the Municipalities of Central Italy hit by the quake a little over a year ago, a Region –...