Category Archives: Culture

The new European Community framework program, Horizon 2020, launched in January 2014, will regulate EU funding for the next seven years. There are many novelties, especially for small and medium enterprises. There are new complex and interesting guidelines on the basis of which loans will be dispensed.

This is a delicate and articulated subject which cannot be improvised. We interviewed Mr Paolo Neri from Warrant Group srl, the largest and most important Italian company, whose 140 employees deal with public financing to businesses.

Again there are many questions concerning the difficulties that domestic companies experience in order to access European funds and regarding the behaviour of politicians and lobby groups in this area.

Eco-design is the basis for sustainable industrial production and therefore is also the basis of bio-economy. 80% of the impact on the environment is generated during the design phase and generally these errors cannot be corrected downstream.

For this workshop we therefore interviewed one of the leading national experts on the subject: Professor Lucia Pietroni, associate professor in industrial design at the University of Camerino, where every year the oldest master of eco-design of Italy is held, and president of the EcodesignLab, the first Italian university spin-off which deals with eco-design topics.

As always happens in our seminars, the theme is thoroughly discussed and there are concrete industrial examples providing inspiration. The interview also touched on “thorny” topics regarding the typical difficulties experienced in collaborations between universities and companies.

The market has “dragged” many companies which weren’t entirely convinced into the world of environmental sustainability. This is why there are so many products which are falsely eco-friendly and there is still so much “green washing”.

The easiest thing to do is make a manufacturing process or a product’s feature “green”, hiding or creating negative environmental impacts during other processing or disposal stages or in the less visible aspects of the product.

For this reason, serious companies complete a LCA, which is a Life Cycle Assessment (analysis of the life cycle) of their products or sectors, whether it is to achieve an EPD or other certification, or whether they simply wish to know how improve. We asked Professor Giuseppe Vignali of the Department of Industrial Engineering, University of Parma, to explain to us how to complete a LCA, also by giving us practical examples.