Circular Economy – Politecnico di Milano

YouRban: co-creating innovative solutions for recycling and reuse of composite materials

Posted on 05/02/202409/02/2024 by admin

The YouRban project, funded by the European Union as part of Horizon Europe, coordinated by Professor Marcello Colledani of the Department of Mechanical Engineering at Politecnico di Milano and also involving the Department of Design, has kicked off.

Europe is expected to generate almost 700,000 tonnes of reinforced polymer waste in 2025 and YouRban aims to address this challenge in an innovative and participatory manner. The project aims to create an active and aware urban community to find creative solutions for recycling and upcycling, in particular for reinforced polymers. By promoting the values of sustainability and inclusiveness and the knowledge of circular economy processes, the project will activate an urban ecosystem involving citizens, artists, designers, architects and small-scale producers (e.g., FabLabs and artisans’ workshops or Urban Factories).

YouRban is based on an innovative research strategy which draws on the European Union’s Green Deal and New European Bauhaus initiatives, promoting workshop and training activities for artists and designers.

The beating heart of the project is its truck, a mobile laboratory conceived as a true travelling workshop. This plant houses recycling and reprocessing technologies for end-of-life composite materials. The truck is not just a production tool, as it is also a powerful dissemination medium designed to promote the new values of the circular economy through exhibitions, artistic events and participatory activities related to the circular economy. Citizens, artists and FabLabs will be involved in co-creation activities and will also be able to explore demanufacturing and reprocessing technologies, gaining awareness of the economic, social and environmental benefits of the circular economy for their community.

The project is developed around two pillars: a pilot project in Milan and a pilot project in Barcelona. The approach of the pilot project in Milan is based on ‘problems in search of solutions’. Citizens point out concrete problems and artists design solutions through an innovative co-creation process. The involvement of YouRban’s technical experts ensures specialised expertise and training. The approach of the pilot project in Barcelona is reversed, as it adopts a ‘solutions in search of a problem’ perspective. Artists and creative networks design solutions for change, then look for stakeholders willing to adopt them to solve specific problems and meet community needs.

Finally, YouRban exploits the Open Call mechanism to involve micro-, small- and medium-sized enterprises, laboratories and associations interested in understanding material recycling technologies and opportunities, helping to raise awareness, train and create new jobs and business opportunities within the involved cities after the end of the project.

Recovery of high value-added proteins from poultry industry waste

Posted on 17/07/202308/09/2023 by admin

Today, the animal-based food industry is one of the most critical and environmentally impactful: in the European Union alone, poultry farms produce more than 3 million tonnes of feather waste annually which is incinerated, thus releasing polluting by-products into the atmosphere.

In this context, the KARATE (Keratin smARt mATerials from feather wastE) project, coordinated by Politecnico di Milano and funded by Fondazione Cariplo within the framework of the call Circular Economy – Promoting research for a sustainable future, aims at reducing the environmental impact of the poultry production chain, contributing significantly to the revaluation and reuse of its waste, in order to transform it into high added value products. In particular, KARATE envisages the valorisation of waste feathers as a raw material for obtaining organic molecules of broad interest such as peptides and proteins, to be used as a basis for developing intelligent, high-performance biomaterials for the textile and biomedical sectors.

The project is coordinated by Pierangelo Metrangolo, full professor in Fundamentals of Chemistry for Technologies at the Department of Chemistry, Materials and Chemical Engineering “Giulio Natta” of Politecnico di Milano. It involves three other research partners (Fondazione Istituto Insubrico Ricerca per la Vita, Consorzio Italbiotec and Centro de Investigacións Científicas Avanzadas of the Universidade da Coruña) and 11 industrial entities (BiCT Bioindustry Innovation, Kialab, Klopman, Linari Engineering S.r.l., Lombardy Green Chemistry Association, Revita Technology, ROELMI HPC, Società Agricola Bruzzese S.S., Solvay Specialty Polymers, VEGEA).

Is circular always synonymous with sustainable?

Posted on 13/06/202314/07/2023 by admin

According to a scientific article published in the Journal of Waste Management by Lucia Rigamonti from the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the Politecnico di Milano, together with researchers from Brunel University in London, the University of Southern Denmark and Wageningen University & Research, the concept of “circularity” is not necessarily synonymous with “sustainability”. Efforts to achieve circularity do not always guarantee a sustainable result, therefore it is important to define more clearly the concept of circularity and what we hope to achieve by fostering it.

Currently, the circularity of packaging materials, components and products is one way to reduce the negative environmental impact of the life cycle of packaging. However, the meaning of the term is still broad and most of the indicators used to measure it fail to capture the complexity of the system or the wider effects, including potential ripple effects that may nullify or even reverse the environmental benefits.

To solve this problem adopting a practical approach, researchers have proposed a circularity scoreboard based on 7 simple questions that cover the life cycle of a product: production, use and end-of-life.

Current actions aimed at circularity can focus too much on superficial effects and lose sight of the real goals of the circular economy. Our goal is to kick-start a scientific discussion on how best to combine scientific knowledge and research on material, component and product flows across society to achieve the broader goal of sustainability while keeping pace with the time frames imposed by corporate decisions and policies. This is why we call for meaningful circularity targets, to prevent corporate decisions or policies from inadvertently helping to consolidate policies and infrastructure that do not contribute to real sustainability,

the four researchers argue.

In a context where the European Commission intends to transform the Packaging Waste Directive into a regulation directly applicable in all EU Member States, it is of paramount importance not to lose sight of the real goals of the circular economy.

The article available online

Ritessere: silk by-product reborn into new materials

Posted on 01/05/202313/06/2023 by admin

The RETESSERE (Silk Sericin materials from textile industry by-products) project has kicked off, funded by the Fondazione Cariplo. It aims to use the by-product from the treatment of raw silk, sericin, for the production of new materials and devices in the field of life sciences.

RITESSERE will evaluate new technologies which, starting from the sericin obtained from raw material of Italian origin with traceability certification (cocoon or raw silk), will lead to the obtainment of both two-dimensional electrospun matrices composed only of sericin, and new materials based on specifically modified sericin. These products will be characterized from a chemical-physical and morphological point of view, and the impact of their introduction on the textile industry market and on other high-tech sectors will be analysed.

In particular, the advantages of the circular approach will be demonstrated through three actions:

• sericin-based facial masks for the cosmetic industry

• three-dimensional scaffolds of sericin for cell culture

• modified sericin-based film for the packaging industry.

RITESSERE aims to demonstrate how sericin can be systematically recovered and used to produce high-tech materials. Starting from silk of Italian origin, RITESSERE will define and optimize a technological process aimed at giving nobility to this waste product, proposing a new sustainable and circular method for the silk production cycle.

The results of the project will also be conveyed and made available through continuous interaction with the Advisory Board, made up of players with a driving role in the silk industry, in the definition of new circular economy practices and in the involvement of civil society (Associazione Costruttori Italiani di Macchinario per l’Industria Tessile, Donne in Campo, Ufficio Italiano Seta, MADE-Competence Center Industria 4.0, Rigano Laboratories, Associazione per il Museo della Seta di Como).

The three-year project RITESSERE is a project funded by Fondazione Cariplo with the Economia Circolare – Promuovere ricerca per un futuro sostenibile program, and is led by Professor Simone Vesentini of the Department of Electronics, Information and Bioengineering and by professors Paolo Rosa and Sergio Terzi of the Department of Management, Economics and Industrial Engineering of the Politecnico di Milano.

Partners in the project, coordinated by our university, are Università degli Studi Milano Bicocca and Consiglio per la ricerca in agricoltura e l’analisi dell’economia agraria (Council for Agricultural Research and Agricultural Economics Analysis).

The RITESSERE project has received funding from Fondazione Cariplo, grant n° 2022-0529

Creating trustworthy digital twins thanks to AUTO-TWIN

Posted on 06/03/202306/04/2023 by admin

The AUTO-TWIN project (“Data-driven method based on a process mining approach for Automated Digital Twin generation, operations, and maintenance in circular value chains”) has officially kicked off. It won the recent Horizon Europe call “Digital tools to support the engineering of a Circular Economy”.

The AUTO-TWIN project aims to revolutionize the current system engineering model by introducing a new automated process-aware discovery method to create trustworthy digital twins. The project is aimed at supporting circular economies and will showcase its solutions in three distinct value chains: battery refabrication, plastic recycling, and medical device sterilization.

AUTO-TWIN represents a new and innovative method for creating digital twins, digital replicas of physical systems, by adopting an International Data Space (IDS) based common data space to automate the digital twin creation process, making it more cost-effective and efficient. The project also integrates advanced hardware technologies into the digital thread to create smart Green Gateways, enabling companies to make data and digital twin-based green decisions.

The Team of researchers from the Department of Mechanical Engineering will utilize their expertise in process mining for manufacturing systems to create algorithms for enhancing the digital twin’s component models and to create functional modules for converting graph models into discrete event simulation models and for validating results in real-time. A significant contribution will also be related to the improvement of the knowledge graph model using conformance checking results and to develop multi-criteria optimization methods.

Professor Andrea Matta will take the lead in managing the project, making sure it is completed on time and within budget. A strong consortium of 11 beneficiaries from Italy, Lithuania, Greece, Spain, Israel, and Turkey and 2 associated partners from Switzerland will work together for this three-year project and the 7.3 million€ total funding will provide our researchers the instruments to tackle some of the most critical challenges the world is facing in the upcoming years.

Circular economy: the CIRC-UITS project

Posted on 22/02/202305/04/2023 by admin

The three-year project CIRC-UITS (Circular Integration of independent Reverse supply Chains for the smart reUse of IndusTrially relevant Semiconductors), co-financed by the European Commission under its Horizon Europe programme, and coordinated by professors Paolo Rosa and Sergio Terzi from the Politecnico di Milano’s Department of Management, Economics and Industrial Engineering, has kicked off.

CIRC-UITS intends to develop new technologies for designing, producing, disassembling and efficiently and sustainably reusing disused electronic components inside new products, but it also intends to define new business models to improve data sharing and standardisation among the industrial leaders involved in the supply chains.

In particular, the advantages of the digital circular economy will be demonstrated through 4 pilot projects:

Development of environmentally friendly electronic panels to be incorporated into inverters and battery management systems in electric cars
Development of new-generation tyre sensors
Development of environmentally friendly flexible processing boards
Classification and storage of obsolete printed circuits of various pieces of electrical and electronic equipment

In this way, CIRC-UITS will provide material support to businesses in the automotive and mass-produced electronics sector, demonstrating the benefits that can be obtained from the application of the circular economy paradigm both from the perspective of both the business and supply chain and from the technological and sustainability perspective, through the adoption of Industry 4.0 technologies in the processes through which disused electronic components are managed and in the design of new products.

The role of digitalization in supporting the industrial circular transition

Posted on 23/05/202226/05/2022 by admin

The project “The role of digitalization in supporting the industrial circular transition” has won a grant of 10,000 euros as a T.I.M.E. project.

The project aims at investigating the relationship between the adoption of digital technologies and the implementation of circular economy practices within the industrial sector. Its aim is to understand the supporting role offered by the digital technologies, passing from the enhancement and generation of dynamic capabilities. This would be done by conducting an international survey, providing empirical-based insights.

The coordinator of the project is the Politecnico di Milano, Department of Management Economic and Industrial Engineering, with Dr. Alessandra Neri as principal investigator. KTH Royal Institute of Technology (Sweden) and Universidad Politecnica de Madrid (Spain) are partners of the project and members of the T.I.M.E. Association. The University of the West of England (UK) and Aston University (UK) take part in the project as external members.

The T.I.M.E. Association (Top International Managers in Engineering), founded in 1989, is a network of leading technical universities and engineering schools in Europe and all over the world, with a strong international dimension in teaching, research and industrial relations. The association currently consists of 57 members in 25 countries, and the Politecnico di Milano is a member of the Advisory Committee.

Besides double degree activities, T.I.M.E. promotes a series of other initiatives, including the T.I.M.E. projects, through which the association co-finances new or existing initiatives between member universities, in which T.I.M.E. can represent an added value.

Food Waste prevention: the circular economy paradigm

Posted on 14/06/202111/10/2021 by admin

Tag: Circular Economy, Food Waste Hierarchy (FWH), agri-food supply chain
Researchers: Federica Ciccullo, Raffaella Cagliano, Giulia Bartezzaghi, Alessandro Perego
Department: DIG

In the context of the global food supply chain one of the key challenges is preventing or limiting food waste, a phenomenon that has an ecological, economical and social impact.

The Food Waste Hierarchy (FWH) framework offers a more sustainable and holistic approach to the production and the consumption of food at all levels of the supply chain. The FWH works well within the circular economy paradigm, an economic model of production that aims at greater sustainability, limiting the use of resources and minimizing production waste.

A paper by Federica Ciccullo, Raffaella Cagliano, Giulia Bartezzaghi, Alessandro Perego of the Department of Management, Economics and Industrial Engineering (DIG) of Politecnico di Milano has recently published the paper “Implementing the circular economy paradigm in the agri-food supply chain: The role of food waste prevention technologies” on the Journal “Resources, Conservation and Recycling”.

The paper investigates how technology can play a key factor in implementing the principles of the Food Waste Hierarchy. Within the investigation, researchers carried out interviews on the role of technology in the food supply chain, both with technology providers and with companies involved in the production of food. The results identify strategies such as the adoption of various options of technologies as well as a strengthened cooperation at all levels of the supply chain, proving they can reduce food waste (i.e through the use of data science and big data to monitor and forecast the production) and can improve synergies with different level of the supply chain for waste prevention.

Read paper