The Hydrothermal Carbonization Process for Waste Valorisation: a Study on the Effect of Process Conditions on the Yield and Properties of Hydrochars from Municipal Solid Waste

Hydrothermal carbonization (HTC) has received considerable attention in recent years for its potential to process heterogeneous organic wastes with high moisture contents. Unlike other thermochemical processes, HTC does not require drying of the feedstock as a pre-treatment. Performed in aqueous conditions at moderate temperatures under autogenous pressure, HTC produces a carbon rich solid phase, referred to as hydrochar, which can be directly used as a solid fuel, or it can be better exploited for new applications. In the present work the potential valorization by HTC of a waste stream from mechanical biological treatment of mixed municipal solid waste, namely the under-sieve fraction from the mechanical treatment stage, was explored. This stream does not have any potential for material recovery, and it is usually landfilled after aerobic biostabilization. HTC tests were carried out in a laboratory-scale reactor. The joint effect of different process parameters on the yield and physicochemical properties of the hydrochar produced was investigated. The design of experiments (DoE) / response surface methodology (RSM) approach was used for the analysis of the influence of temperature, time and solid load on the mass yield and properties of hydrochar. Quantitative relationships between responses and process parameters were determined. The results obtained demonstrated the feasibility of HTC for mixed municipal solid waste, suggesting HTC as a promising alternative treatment path to current waste management

Superare la “Valle della Morte” – Framework, Approcci e Strumenti per prevenire i fallimenti delle startup

-ITALIANO- Le difficoltà generate dalla crisi economica hanno aumentato l'interesse di policy maker e studiosi riguardo il contributo che l'imprenditorialità può fornire in termini di crescita economica e creazione di posti di lavoro. A tale riguardo, sono state intraprese numerose iniziative per fornire agli aspiranti imprenditori le competenze e le conoscenze necessarie per gestire la creazione di nuove imprese e consentire loro di affermarsi sul mercato. Tuttavia, la maggior parte delle nuove aziende fallisce nei primi anni di attività e spreca la possibilità di creare valore per l'intera società. Da un lato, l'educazione all'imprenditorialità sembra fallire nel crescere nuovi imprenditori, dall'altro gli strumenti più utilizzati per sviluppare nuove idee imprenditoriali hanno difficoltà a passare da una fase di progettazione aziendale a quella di implementazione. Il presente lavoro si propone di affrontare i fallimenti delle startup e di identificare framework, approcci e strumenti innovativi che aiutino le nuove aziende ad avere successo sul mercato. Per raggiungere tale obiettivo è stato adottato un duplice approccio, da un lato l'ambiente aziendale è stato studiato per comprendere come l'intero ecosistema imprenditoriale possa supportare le nuove imprese a sviluppare modelli di business coerenti e ad affrontare il dinamismo del mercato. D'altra parte sono state analizzate le fasi di sviluppo delle nuove imprese al fine di identificare le carenze nei programmi di formazione imprenditoriale e sviluppare approcci e strumenti innovativi e complementari volti a prevenire i fallimenti e a consentire alle nuove imprese di superare la "Valle della morte". -INGLESE- The difficulties generated by the economic crisis have increased the interest of policy makers and research community on the contribution that entrepreneurship can provide in terms of economic growth and job creation. To this regard, a huge number of initiatives have been undertaken to provide aspiring entrepreneurs with the skills and knowledge that are necessary to deal with the creation of new companies and to allow them to succeed on the market. However, most new companies fail in the first years of activities and waste the possibility to create value for the whole society. On one side entrepreneurship education seems to fail in nurturing new entrepreneurs, on the other hand the most used tools for developing new business ideas struggle in passing from a business design phase to the implementation one. The present work aims at addressing the startup failures and at identifying innovative frameworks, approaches and tools that help new companies to succeed on the market. To achieve such an objective a twofold approach has been adopted, on one hand the business environment has been investigated to understand how the whole entrepreneurship ecosystem can support new businesses to develop consistent business models and to deal with the market dynamism. On the other hand the development stages of new business were analyzed to identify the shortcomings of entrepreneurship education frameworks and to develop innovative and complementary approaches and tools aiming to prevent startup failure and to allow new businesses to overcome the “Valley of Death”

La certificazione ISO 14001 e il miglioramento continuo delle performance ambientali - Il caso Continental Automotive Italy S.p.A.

L’elaborato, partendo dalla crescita della sensibilità verso l’ambiente dei primi anni sessanta del Novecento, si sviluppa analizzando l’introduzione dei primi strumenti command & control e degli strumenti economico-fiscali volti a mitigare gli effetti dell’inquinamento. L’analisi si completa sviscerando le caratteristiche dei principali sistemi di gestione ambientale riconosciuti a livello internazionale ossia lo standard ISO 14001 e il Regolamento EMAS. Le prescrizioni fissate dalla norma ISO 14001:2004 vengono descritte attraverso l’esame del caso della Continental Automotive Italy S.p.A. di Pisa. Dopo aver introdotto l’azienda e la sua attività; nello sviscerare il sistema di gestione ambientale adottato dall’organizzazione, si analizzano le principali procedure che ne definiscono il funzionamento. Infine si rivolge l’attenzione all’orientamento verso il miglioramento continuo su cui si fonda la gestione degli aspetti ambientali e sulle azioni di miglioramento poste in essere dall’organizzazione

Teaching Foresight and Futures Literacy and Its Integration into University Curriculum

Despite the accelerated dynamics of the environment, higher education institutions slowly update their curricula in entrepreneurship education according to global challenges and market needs. Moreover, knowledge and good practice exchanges between educators of futures studies, business representatives, and academics is limited. This article aims to present a methodology for prototyping an online course for individuals to become more future-oriented in their professional and personal settings. The main research problems tackled by the authors relate to: 1) the identification of competences that would help academics, entrepreneurs, and students to deal with uncertainty and to 2) convey the competences to the target groups through learning topics selected from futures studies and the entrepreneurship repertoire. The authors of the article undertook and coordinated theoretical and empirical research on foresight and Futures Literacy and its correspondence with entrepreneurship within the beFORE project funded under the Erasmus+ program’s Knowledge Alliance scheme. The research process resulted in the identification of 12 key competence items and the development of a free, approximately 34-hour-long online course consisting of seven self-standing modules, 25 lessons, and 79 learning topics corresponding to these competences. The originality of the paper is in its contribution to the discussion on the competences and online course content that efficiently increase the capacities of using the future(s) in professional, academic, and personal settings

Extracting and mapping industry 4.0 technologies using wikipedia

The explosion of the interest in the industry 4.0 generated a hype on both academia and business: the former is attracted for the opportunities given by the emergence of such a new field, the latter is pulled by incentives and national investment plans. The Industry 4.0 technological field is not new but it is highly heterogeneous (actually it is the aggregation point of more than 30 different fields of the technology). For this reason, many stakeholders feel uncomfortable since they do not master the whole set of technologies, they manifested a lack of knowledge and problems of communication with other domains. Actually such problem is twofold, on one side a common vocabulary that helps domain experts to have a mutual understanding is missing Riel et al. [1], on the other side, an overall standardization effort would be beneficial to integrate existing terminologies in a reference architecture for the Industry 4.0 paradigm Smit et al. [2]. One of the basics for solving this issue is the creation of shared semantic for industry 4.0. The paper has an intermediate goal and focuses on the development of an enriched dictionary of Industry 4.0 enabling technologies, with definitions and links between them in order to help the user in actively surfing the new domains by starting from known elements to reach the most far away from his/her background and knowledge

From Precision Agriculture to Industry 4.0: unveiling technological connections in the agricultural sector

The agricultural sector has been experiencing great changes in recent years for responding to a series of circumstances that are have a significant impact on it. In particular, environmental sustainability related to the increase of worldwide population, and market demand for agricultural products (with consumers more and more aware about cultivation and breeding techniques and interested in healthy and high quality products) represent two of the key challenges that agricultural sector is going to face in next years. In such a landscape, technological innovations that can support organizations and entrepreneurs to face these problems become increasingly important and Industry 4.0 is the most striking example. Indeed, the Industry 4.0 paradigm aims to integrate digital technologies into business processes to raise productivity levels and to develop new business models. Accordingly, digital technologies play a similar role in the Precision agriculture domain, and the present work tries to understand if the technologies at the basis of these two paradigms are the same or not. Although the foundations of these two revolutions appear to be based on distant concepts, similarities can be identified concerning the effects they can have on business models and processes. The present work investigates how the two domains of Industry 4.0 and Precision Agriculture are connected one-another by analyzing the most used technologies in both the fields in order to highlight common patterns and technological overlaps. To reach such goal, an approach combining manual and automated analysis was developed. The research work generated three main results: - A dictionary of Precision Agriculture Technologies including 324 terms; - A graph, describing the connections between the technologies composing the dictionary; - A representation of the main technological clusters identified. These show how the two domains under analysis are directly connected and describe the most important technologies to leverage when approaching digital transformation processes in the agricultural sector