Prevention of Waste in the Circular Economy: Analysis of Strategies and Identification of Sustainable Targets - The food waste example

This report continues and further advances the work conducted by the JRC in the field of sustainable management of food waste, which resulted in the publication of the 2015 report “Improving Sustainability and Circularity of European Food Waste Management with a Life Cycle Approach”. It focuses on the broad European waste management context and, in particular, provides insight and analysis on the sustainability of food waste prevention strategies. Among other municipal waste streams, food waste gained prominence in the political debate in light of the recent Circular Economy (CE) package. In fact, the CE Action Plan included food waste within the so-called “priority areas”, i.e. areas that should be carefully considered to strengthen the circularity of the European economy. Against this background, this report analyses and evaluates the efficacy of some selected strategies for food waste prevention implemented at Member States’ and regional levels. A streamlined ‘stakeholder analysis’ is also developed in order to identify the most relevant stakeholders along the food supply chain and analyse their influence/relation with the mechanisms that lead to food wastage. Moreover, the report presents a novel and straightforward life cycle based methodology that helps identifying sustainable targets for food waste prevention in different contexts. The analysis of food waste prevention strategies being implemented by Member States and presented in this report seems to indicate that reducing food waste generation is a very complex to achieve in practice. The key reasons for this are the complexity of the food supply chain and the fact that a variety of integrated and well-coordinated measures that involve all stakeholders along the food supply chain need to be adopted to effectively tackle the problem. Moreover, sometimes the lack of reliable and coherent data is posing a threat to the successful identification of the most appropriate measures. It is also noted that food waste prevention measures are often set without considering how their implementation will influence the sustainability performance of food waste management. On the other hand, this report stresses that the definition of food waste prevention targets should follow the definition of the desired improvement of the overall sustainability performance. Towards this goal, the methodology presented in this report tries to identify environmentally sustainable targets for food waste prevention that allows achieving a given reduction of the environmental impacts along the food supply chain.JRC.D.3-Land Resource

Improving Sustainability and Circularity of European Food Waste Management with a Life Cycle Approach

In the past years, several research initiatives have been promoted in the area of food waste. Many of these were focused on the identification of key drivers of food wastage and on the quantification of food waste generation. While these initiatives provided fairly accurate information over European food waste generation and management routes, they did not always deliver comprehensive and comparable knowledge on the sustainability of food waste management and on ways to mitigate negative consequences at environmental, economic and social levels. Building on most recent methodological advancement and policy needs, the work presented in this report aims at providing policy/decision makers and waste managers with a life-cycle based framework methodology to quantify the environmental and economic sustainability performance of European food waste management. This methodology can help identify options for improvement of such performance, thus can offer relevant insight to the decision making process. A numerical case study is also developed. This is meant to give an example of simplified application of the proposed methodology to a fictitious European waste management context. The environmental dimension has been evaluated with the Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) software EASETECH, while the economic assessment is conducted based on a number of different indicators expressing the costs associated with food waste management. This methodology makes use of multi-objective optimization and Pareto optimality concepts in order to help identify most sustainable management options for food waste, intended as those that minimize environmental and economic impacts. In any case, the proposed methodology is meant to only provide relevant information that can support science-based decision making. The final choice will in fact depend on a number of additional aspects that are beyond the scope of this report and also depends on the preferences of the decision maker.JRC.H.8-Sustainability Assessmen

The problem of maternal toxicity in developmental toxicity studies

Guidelines for developmental toxicity studies require that the highest dose(s) should induce some signs of maternal toxicity. However, the interpretation of the results is often difficult when developmentally toxic effects are recorded only at maternotoxic doses, as it is impossible to ascertain whether the developmental effects are maternally mediated or not. In order to avoid this source of misinterpretation we suggest to use in developmental toxicity tests for environmental chemicals the maximum dose unable to produce maternal toxic effects extrapolated by previous short term toxicity studies

Georadar Techniques in the historical and architectonical field: the case study of the sanctuary of Madonna in Campagna in Guanzate (CO)

oai:journals.unibo.it:article/469The artistic and architectonic heritage on the Italian territory is huge. The uniqueness of the goods, their variety and the historical mean are often related to their age and to the environment in which their are located. From this point of view, both historical and architectonic and archeological studies, especially involving churches and religious buildings in general are often aimed at evaluating the architectonic development of the buildings during the centuries, looking for pieces or elements of the previous buildings or part of their structure (floor, graves, walls, etc.). To support historical considerations, could be indispensable to investigate the "dark side" of a building, i.e. to detect the occurrance of caves, underground archeological elements or structures like wall foundations. The Georadar or GPR (Ground Penetrating Radar) system is the most advanced non-invasive technique aimed at searching underground elements and structures, and it can be widely used in the historical and archeological field. This technique allows to get detailed plans including information about the location, depth and size of the objects, goods or rests of them, making it possible, crossing information coming from the existing plans and the historical, historiographic and archivistic data, to rebuild plans of already forgotten buried structures, helping experts to rearrange the oldest events of Madonna in Campagna in Guanzate is presented, and these techniques have allowed supporting very complex hypotheses about the modifications of the religious building during the centuries; theories which up to now didn't have enough support from the available historical documentation

Management practices for compostable plastic packaging waste: Impacts, challenges and recommendations

The EU Green Deal aims at solving the challenges related to plastic production, (mis-)use, and pollution. While the bioplastic industry is identified as one of the possible avenues to tackle the problem, bioplastic waste collection and management practices are still far from full-development and harmonisation. To inform policy makers on the best practices and their feasibility, this study quantifies environmental and economic impacts of compostable plastic packaging (CPP) waste management schemes by means of Life Cycle Assessment and Costing. Results show that, with respect to climate change and financial costs, the scheme leading to the highest benefits is collecting CPP with conventional plastic waste followed by mechanical sorting and recycling (saving ca. 306 kg CO2eq. t-1 at a net income of 3.7 EUR t-1). The second best option is collecting CPP with bio-waste followed by biological treatment (saving ca. 69 kg CO2eq. t-1 at a cost of 197 EUR t-1). Collecting CPP with conventional plastics followed by sorting and biological treatment is to be avoided. The trend on the other impact categories generally follows climate change. Ideally, closed loop is therefore preferred, but conditioned by (i) having high share of CPP in municipal waste (else sorting is economically unfeasible), (ii) good citizen's behaviour at source-segregation, and (iii) an established market for secondary material. Currently, overall benefits are limited by the low amounts, suggesting that the management choice could ultimately be based on rather simple technical and economic feasibility criteria while regulatory and management efforts should be focused on other waste streams with greater implications on environment

Microtubule alterations occur early in experimental Parkinsonism and the microtubule stabilizer epothilone D is neuroprotective

The role of microtubule (MT) dysfunction in Parkinson\u2019s disease is emerging. It is still unknown whether it is a cause or a consequence of neurodegeneration. Our objective was to assess whether alterations of MT stability precede or follow axonal transport impairment and neurite degeneration in experimental parkinsonism induced by 1-methyl-4-phenyl-1,2,3,6-tetrahydropyridine (MPTP) in C57Bl mice. MPTP induced a time- and dose-dependent increase in fibres with altered mitochondria distribution, and early changes in cytoskeletal proteins and MT stability. Indeed, we observed significant increases in neuron-specific betaIII tubulin and enrichment of deTyr tubulin in dopaminergic neurons. Finally, we showed that repeated daily administrations of the MT stabilizer Epothilone D rescued MT defects and attenuated nigrostriatal degeneration induced by MPTP. These data suggest that alteration of MTs is an early event specifically associated with dopaminergic neuron degeneration. Pharmacological stabilization of MTs may be a viable strategy for the management of parkinsonism

Lutero: santo ou demônio?

Do site Humanitas, da Unisinos, 10-08-2016. Publicado inicialmente por SettimanaNews, 07-08-2016. Tradução de Moisés Sbardelotto.</jats:p