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The Brazilian National Solid Waste Policy (BNSWP) determines that reverse logistics (RL) of waste batteries is mandatory and adopts the principle of shared responsibility among stakeholders. In this work, we sought to diagnose the current state of the RL chain for batteries in Vale do Aço, Brazil, and identify challenges and potentialities related to its improvement. Data were obtained by means of questionnaires sent to the main stakeholders involved in the batteries RL chain and by consultation of official Brazilian databases. The results showed that the main obstacles to the implementation of the RL of portable batteries in the region are: the lack of information by consumers and retailers regarding the BNSWP and management of waste batteries; the existence of few collection and consolidation points in the region; lack of municipal waste management plans; and lack of sustainability of waste picker organizations. The identified potentialities were: the good receptivity of environmental education actions by the population; the possibility of taking advantage of direct logistics of local retail chains to collect waste; the existence of a special waste management and transportation company in the region; and the existence of waste picker organizations interested in integrating the RL system. Finally, by a SWOT analysis, strategies for the implementation of a more effective RL system were drawn up. This work can serve as a basis for the structuring and implementation of the batteries RL system at the Metropolitan Region of Vale do Aço (MRVA) and can be a reference for other settings.

The most popular definition of sustainable development, which can be found in the Brundtland Report, sets an ideal goal but do not provide a clear direction for the implementation of sustainable solutions. Other related concepts and approaches have emerged as means to progress towards sustainability in a more pragmatic way, such as the circular economy. The circular economy has risen to prominence at a rate and on a scale to rival the idea of sustainable development itself. This is despite the fact that there is relatively little about the circular economy that is entirely original—it draws heavily on precursor concepts such as industrial ecology and industrial symbiosis. These ideas have received renewed impetus even whilst being eclipsed in both academic and policies debates. In order to address this paradox and help establish the identity and contribution of these fields, this article presents the concepts of circular economy, industrial symbiosis and sustainable development, summarizing their complex and often intertwined evolutionary paths, focusing on relevant developments and implementation challenges. In addition, the authors point out the divergences and interrelations of these concepts and link them to other adjacent concepts and research fields, such as ecological modernisation and the green economy. Additionally, the potential contribution of industrial symbiosis and the circular economy to sustainable development and to the Sustainable Development Goals set in the United Nations Agenda 2030 is briefly discussed.

The fleet of electric vehicles has increased worldwide, pushed by the necessity of building a low-carbon economy. In Brazil, the number of new electric cars registered per year is also increasing, especially after the promulgation of the Program Route 2030. Collection rates and management criteria for end-of-life lithium-ion batteries (EOL LIBs) in the country are still not defined. Therefore, in this paper, we aimed to assess how big the market of electric cars (EC) will be in Brazil in 2030 and to investigate how different management patterns can affect the flows of electrodes active materials in the country. Simulations were conducted using Matlab, considering three different scenarios of penetration of EC in the total fleet of cars in 2030: 1%, 4% and 10%, while three management strategies were analyzed for the year of 2030 using Material Flow Analysis. According to the model, the number of new electric cars entering the Brazilian market in 2030 can surpass 1,800,000 units, resulting in a demand of Li, Co, Ni, Mn and graphite of up to 8,700, 15,000, 46,000, 15,000 and 92,000 tonnes, respectively. The number of EOL LIBs in the same year may overcome 340 thousand. The amount of material available for recycling depends on the management strategy adopted. In any case, revenues from recycling LIBs electrode active materials result mainly from Co and Ni recovery (88–93%). In view of increasing circularity of materials and expected technological development, the adoption of repurposing and remanufacturing is recommended.

This chapter presents the case of a historic industrial district in the city of Bologna (Italy): Roveri District. Here a transition process towards a smart sustainable district has been started and a systemic, integrated and bottom-up approach put the basis for the conception of the sustainable model in order to transform the district into Roveri Smart Village. Roveri Industrial District was settled in the early ‘70s as an industrial area in the outskirts. In the last years, the whole district was incorporated into the southern urban area of Bologna. Currently, Roveri Industrial District represents one of the Italian Metropolitan areas with the highest concentration of small and medium-sized enterprises. Nevertheless, district management does not already exist. Recent economic contingencies have induced a general, not coordinated transformation of the past industrial structure. Therefore, the combination of regeneration and sustainability actions is the main challenge to which Roveri Smart Village Project aims. This chapter presents the development of a collaborative and integrated approach to support the Roveri industrial district transformation. Especially, methods and actions supporting the creation of new sustainable industrial practices for the Roveri Smart Village community are described in detail. In this process, governance models, collaborative processes and innovative solutions based on industrial symbiosis scenarios and energy efficiency have enforced the Roveri transformation. The results are connected to steer the innovation towards an industrial Smart Sustainable District (SSD) and to build the district community based on a strong network of enterprises and local stakeholders. In this process, circular economy and energy efficiency applications can act also as strategic tools favouring this collaborative and integrated approach establishment and put the basis for a transferable model that can inspire the transformation of other industrial districts.

Industrial Symbiosis (IS) is a business-focused collaborative approach oriented towards resource efficiency that has been theorised and studied mainly over the last 25 years. Recently, IS seems to have found a renewed impetus in the framework of the Circular Economy (CE), a novel approach to sustainability and Sustainable Development (SD) that has been rapidly gaining momentum worldwide. This opening chapter of the book provides an introduction to the concepts of IS, CE and SD, and summarises their complex evolutionary paths, recalling the relevant developments and implementation challenges. In addition, the authors point out the divergences and interrelations of these concepts, both among themselves and with other related concepts and research fields, such as industrial ecology, ecological modernisation and the green economy. Furthermore, the potential contribution of IS and the CE to SD is briefly discussed, also highlighting critical issues and trade-offs, as well as gaps in research and application, especially relating to the social component of sustainability. Particular attention is given to the potential role of IS in the achievement of targets connected to the Sustainable Development Goals set in the UN Agenda 2030. The recent advances in the IS and CE discussion in the context of the SD research community are further explored, with particular emphasis on the contribution of the International Sustainable Development Research Society (ISDRS) and its 24th annual conference organised in Messina, Italy, in 2018. The programme of that conference, indeed, included specific tracks on the above-mentioned themes, the contents of which are briefly commented on here, after an overview of the whole conference and the main cross-cutting concepts emerged. In the last part of the chapter, a brief description of the chapters collected in the book is presented. These contributions describe and discuss theoretical frameworks, methodological approaches and/or experiences and case studies where IS and the principles of CE are applied in different geographical contexts and at different scales to ultimately improve the sustainability of the current production patterns.

The optimisation and the resources saving can represent an economic lever and support companies’ competitiveness. In Italy, the national government has established a strong policy for energy saving, energy efficiency and for incentives to energy production from renewable sources, whereas polices and tools for improving resource efficiency have not been developed yet. The purpose of this work is to present an operational methodology, developed by ENEA, for the audit of resources at the company level, with the aim to boost resource efficiency, thus obtaining both economic and environmental advantages. This methodology operates both internally, by means of an efficiency increase and processes optimisation, and externally, by means of the cooperation with other companies and stakeholders at territorial level (industrial symbiosis). The proposed resources audit is based firstly on the analysis of input and output resources used and produced by a company and then on the investigation of possible options to reduce their consumption or under-utilization (waste disposal, etc.).

The aim of this paper, by focusing on the construction chain, is to provide a functional-cognitive framework for orienting the use of all the available resources including raw materials, products and by-products but also residues and wastes in order to support national resource efficiency policies, to identify potential actions and to achieve resources efficiency and sustainable waste management within the entire supply chain. A material flow analysis (MFA) has been developed, on a national basis in Italy, and extended to the whole chain of construction and quarrying activities as a tool to develop the cognitive approach using the most recent data on production, sale and import–export, and to establish the potential domestic demand for each product. Waste production, current management and the potential of reuse within the chain have been investigated for several categories of wastes. The potential substitution of raw materials by residues produced in other industrial sectors has been also investigated, identifying their current reuse rate, the potential not yet exploited as well as the operational constrains and the critical issues. From this analysis enormous potentialities emerge for waste valorization and raw material substitutions that nowadays are not adequately exploited. Significant efforts, in term of national policies and strategies are needed to effectively shift towards a full resources management efficiency and circular economy development.

The growth in the relevance of the circular economy is confirmed today by the presence of numerous concurrent initiatives at a global level in terms of both policy level and labelling initiatives. Despite the presence of these initiatives, there is still no international agreement on systems to measure this effort. The ISO/TC 323 initiative aims precisely to develop responses to this challenge over the next three years. This article presents the main features of this initiative, in particular WG3 at a global level and the parallel UNI/CT 057 initiative.

This paper reports the activity, promoted by the Italian agency for new technologies, energy and sustainable economic development (ENEA), in the framework of the project for the development and implementation of the first Italian Platform for Industrial Symbiosis implemented in Sicily (2011-2015). The goals of the project were: to provide a methodology and an instrument for industrial symbiosis implementation at regional scale, to implement a IS Platform as a support to SMEs to individuate symbiosis opportunities in the region. The whole approach includes: network activation, platform architecture design and implementation, analysis of the productive sector in Sicily, data collection and companies involvement. In particular the paper focuses on the activities developed for companies’ network creation trough a preliminary analysis of the predominant productive sectors followed by the organization of operative meetings in Sicily for companies’ involvement, analysis of potential synergies and resources sharing, and finally platform population. During the first two meetings more than 80 SME were linked giving rise to almost 400 output resources and almost 180 input resources. More than 690 potential matches were found between the participating enterprises showing interesting opportunities both for substituting resources with waste products in real and virtual cases and for sharing waste management services and infrastructures. The discussion occurred during the meeting has remarked the significance and the consequences of the regulatory and control system on IS application, underlining the necessary participation of local stakeholders and control authorities. It has also emerged the need to identify predominant productive activities in well-defined territorial contexts where to investigate the specific/local tangles taking into account legislative and technical-economic feasibility. Technical dossiers on three main resource streams (wastes from processing stone materials; plastics and agro-industrial wastes), which may generate the more interesting potential synergies, are being processed. These dossiers include European, Italian and regional regulations, guidelines, technical standards, logistic and economical aspects useful for supporting companies in synergies implementation. Results of this activity will also be used to improve the algorithm in the platform to find synergies.

Sharing economy business experiences are rapidly rising worldwide and deeply changing structures and models of customers purchasing attitudes and needs. Inspired by principles of sustainable consumption, its starting point is the idea that every underutilized resource is a wasted resource. Beyond the digital services implemented by sharing platform, there are also social and physical places where communities are experimenting the potential of collaborative and innovative solutions: purchasing groups, time banking, social street, co-working spaces. Goods and services access promoted by sharing business models are emerging in the place of older model based on private propriety and a consumerist view of society. This is strongly connected with circular economy strategies, particularly referred to waste prevention, reduction and resources valorisation European goals. This paper gives an overview of sharing economy including drivers and barriers which can affect its effective expansion. Moreover, collaborative models in the most strategic and critical sectors (such as mobility, agro-food, buildings and goods production and consumption) by a resources perspective, will be analysed to show how sharing economy can contribute to circular economy. At this end, this paper explores the circularity approach and in particular it identifies the role of sharing economy in products and services from a life cycle thinking (LCT) approach. The focus will be the benefits ofthe sharing economy models considering mainly two aspects; a) the length of the product’s use phase (lifetime) and b) the intensity of use. A review of available data considering the most strategic sectors in terms of environmental impacts, will also be presented from a sharing economy point of view. © 2017, Gh. Asachi Technical University of Iasi. All rights reserved.

Purpose: An improvement of the methodology used for the implementation of the first industrial symbiosis platform in Italy is proposed aimed at solving some critical issues encountered during its application at a regional scale in Sicily. Methods: The investigation mainly focused on the phases of companies’ involvement and operative meeting organization. The different sectors characterizing the companies participating in the meetings were analyzed and compared with the productive system features in the investigated area. Resources shared by the companies during the operative meeting and the individuated potential matches were analyzed, as well. Results: Several critical issues were identified: (a) the low grade of diversification of participating companies that was not fully representative of the actual productive system so limiting the information on the potential matches; (b) the disequilibrium between observed supply and demand due to the prevalent interest of participating companies in finding out alternative solutions for the disposal of their residues rather than to find alternative supplies for their processes; (c) the excessive offers of services and expertise; (d) companies concern about a potential increase in controls on their activities. Conclusions: Solutions were proposed to increase the “biodiversity” of the firms, the level of companies knowledge on the potential for substituting their input resources, the control of “alien” species and to promote greater confidence in the symbiosis approach between the companies, as well as a greater awareness between the same stockholders. Finally the encouragement of paths that are not so financially attractive but that can have a strong positive impact on the environment is proposed. © 2016, Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht.

Quarrying causes high damage to the ecosystems, consequently abandoned sites monitoring is a very important issue. This study describes a methodology to assess the sites’ state of restoration through the analysis of Landsat 5 TM images. The procedure does not require any radiometric corrections for atmospheric effects nor for irradiance effects related to the relief. Such corrections would require a model for the atmosphere at the time the images were taken and a detailed digital topographic model (DEM). In addition, the use of a GIS allowed a direct model calibration from satellite images without any previous field inventory and measurements. The results from the proposed procedure have been compared to in-situ surveyed data.

In Italy quarrying causes relevant environmental damages and alterations to the land and the ecosystems. Despite the present Italian legislation requiring the restoration of the sites after exploitation, most of the quarries, both the abandoned and the still operational ones, are not restored. The objective of this work is to indicate a monitoring methodology in order to survey the present state of the quarry sites and their evolution in time, which are the basic data needed to implement an adequate land reclamation project. Such methodology has been applied to several abandoned limestone quarries in the Latina province (close to Rome), characterised by a typical Mediterranean vegetation, but it can be applied to any other kind of litology and vegetation. The land monitoring has been realised both by using remote sensing techniques, supported by a Geographic Information System of the studied area, and by in situ surveying. The in situ surveying was able to assess the capability of the remote sensing model to describe the state of each site.

In May 2011, the Environmental Technologies Technical Unit of ENEA launched a project to build a platform of Industrial Symbiosis to be implemented in Sicilia Region. It is a 3 years project, in a framework of a larger asset to support productive development in southern Italy. This chapter summarizes the activities carried out during the 1st year of operation by the working group that participates in the initiative. The platform, whose main objective is to help in launching industrial symbiosis through a geo-referred information system support, acts as a tool in the service of business and territory and also offers a range of tools that may be of interest and use especially for SMEs. In addition to the technical aspects of the implementation of the information, tools, and website, the activities involved a first phase of consultation in Sicily with stakeholders, with particular reference to Confindustria Sicilia—with which ENEA has signed a specific Cooperation Agreement—and Sicilia Region, Regional Agency for Waste.

The increase in the number of lithium-ion batteries (LIBs) on the market in the last decades, boosted by the increasing popularity of electric vehicles, has led to high extraction and use rates of ...

This article introduces the special series “LCA in Market Research and Policy: Harmonization beyond standardization,” which was generated from the 19th SETAC Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) Case Study Symposium held November 2013, in Rome, Italy. This collection of invited articles reflects the purpose of symposium and focuses on how LCA can support the decision-making process at all levels (i.e., in industry and policy contexts) and how LCA results can be efficiently communicated and used to support market strategies. Integr Environ Assess Manag 2015;11:370–372. © 2015 SETAC

Il presente lavoro intende proseguire l’analisi preliminare che è stata svolta nel lavoro “Integration between the territory indicator of VIVA project and the social LCA analysis for the wine sector” di Acampora et al. (2018) il cui obiettivo era quello di identificare le sottocategorie d’impatto socio-economico per definire gli indicatori di inventario, partendo dalle categorie di stakeholders che vengono considerate durante il ciclo della produzione vitivinicola. In particolare, l’obiettivo di questo studio è quello di andare ad evidenziare gli indicatori in comune alla metodologia SLCA e della certificazione “VIVA”, relativa alla sostenibilità del settore vitivinicolo italiano. Da tale confronto è possibile comprendere quali sono gli aspetti sociali che vengono attualmente considerati fondamentali per un’analisi di questo tipo.

Nell’Unione europea è in atto un processo di transizione basato sui principi dell’economia circolare, volto dunque al raggiungimento di un modello economico che impieghi minori quantità di risorse nei processi produttivi e che minimizzi le emissioni inquinanti e la produzione dei rifiuti. In tale contesto, l’approvazione del Pacchetto sull’Economia Circolare da parte del Parlamento Europeo nel giugno 2018, pone ambiziosi obiettivi in tema di riciclaggio dei rifiuti urbani e degli imballaggi. È proprio sul tema degli imballaggi e del loro riciclaggio che si focalizza lo studio del presente lavoro. L’obiettivo di questa analisi LCA è duplice: (i) valutare l’impatto ambientale del ciclo di vita di una Cassetta del sistema “USA E RECUPERA” e (ii) confrontare tali impatti con quelli di un processo di produzione che utilizzi esclusivamente materiale vergine, per verificare l’effettivo risparmio di risorse e riduzione degli impatti ambientali. I risultati da noi ottenuti sembrano indicare come il progetto “USA E RECUPERA”, sia in grado di apportare vantaggi dal punto di vista ambientale ed energetico in tutte le fasi del ciclo di vita, dalla produzione del granulo di PP alla fase del Fine Vita.