Industrial symbiosis: anaerobic digestion of waste products as mitigation strategy

La simbiosi industriale è una strategia aziendale con la quale è possibile aumentare la sostenibilità dei processi produttivi. La partnership tra un’azienda vinicola e una società energetica ha consentito un’innovazione di processo che consente il riutilizzo dei rifiuti alimentari dalla produzione del vino. L’azienda vinicola produce 5.200.000 tonnellate di uva. Con un biodigestore è possibile reinserire nel ciclo produttivo circa 220.000 tonnellate di rifiuti alimentari, composti da: rifiuti vegetali, trucioli di legno e rifiuti da potatura. Il riutilizzo degli scarti di produzione genera 105.000 MWh di calore e 81.000 MWh di energia elettrica, con un risparmio di 35.000 tonnellate di CO2 . I risultati ottenuti possono essere ottenuti dalle aziende alimentari che richiedono un elevato fabbisogno energetico e che producono notevoli quantità di rifiuti organici.Industrial symbiosis is a business strategy through which it is possible increase the sustainability of production processes. The partnership between a winery and an energy company has enabled the implementation of a production innovation that allows the upgrading by food waste from wine production. The winery produces 5,200,000 tons of grapes. Through the creation of a biodigester it is possible to re-enter in the production cycle about 220,000 tons of food waste, consisting of: vegetable waste, wood chips and waste from pruning. The reuse of production waste can generate 105,000 MWh of heat and 81,000 MWh of electrical energy, allowing savings of 35,000 tons of CO2 . The results obtained could be reached by food manufacturers that require a high energy needs and that produce significant amounts of organic waste

European Union Litigation

This publication is with permission of the rights owner freely accessible due to an Alliance licence and a national licence (funded by the DFG, German Research Foundation) respectively.This article provides an overview of cases decided by the Court of Justice of the European Union concerning contract law. The present issue covers the period between the beginning of July 2019 and the end of December 2019.Peer Reviewe

Sustainability of technological innovation investiments. Photovoltaic panels case study

as photovoltaic panels. In the case study analysed are shown the benefits obtained from the investments of the central Italy after installing photovoltaic systems. The total expenditure for the electricity purchase is € 52.326, while the total benefit of the investment is € 18.789, equal in percentage to a 53% energy saving over a period of 20 years. The company expeniture in the absence of a photovoltaic system is equal to € 109.03, while in the presence of a plant, considering also all costs incurred for € 93.090, with a percentage of profit on the investment made equal to almost 15% in 20 years

CXCL16/CXCR6 axis drives microglia/macrophages phenotype in physiological conditions and plays a crucial role in glioma

Microglia are patrolling cells that sense changes in the brain microenvironment and respond acquiring distinct phenotypes that can be either beneficial or detrimental for brain homeostasis. Anti-inflammatory microglia release soluble factors that might promote brain repair; however, in glioma, anti-inflammatory microglia dampen immune response and promote a brain microenvironment that foster tumor growth and invasion. The chemokine CXCL16 is expressed in the brain, where it is neuroprotective against brain ischemia, and it has been found to be over-expressed in glioblastoma (GBM). Considering that CXCL16 specific receptor CXCR6 is diffusely expressed in the brain including in microglia cells, we wanted to investigate the role of CXCL16 in the modulation of microglia cell activity and phenotype, and in the progression of glioma. Here we report that CXCL16 drives microglia polarization toward an anti-inflammatory phenotype, also restraining microglia polarization toward an inflammatory phenotype upon LPS and IFN? stimulation. In the context of glioma, we demonstrate that CXCL16 released by tumor cells is determinant in promoting glioma associated microglia/macrophages (GAMs) modulation toward an anti-inflammatory/pro-tumor phenotype, and that cxcr6ko mice, orthotopically implanted into the brain with GL261 glioma cells,survive longer compared to wild-type mice. We also describe that CXCL16/CXCR6 signaling acts directly on mouse glioma cells, as well as human primary GBM cells, promoting tumor cell growth, migration and invasion. All together these data suggest that CXCL16 signaling could represent a good target to modulate microglia phenotype in order to restrain inflammation or to limit glioma progression

Unsupervised Recognition of Motion Verbs Metaphoricity in Atyical Political Dialogues

This thesis deals with the unsupervised recognition of the novel metaphorical use of lexical items in dialogical naturally-occurring political texts without the recourse to task-specific hand-crafted knowledge. The focus of metaphorical analysis is represented by the class of verbs of motion identified by Beth Levin. These lexical items are investigated in the atypical political genre of the White House Press Briefings due to their role in the communication strategies deployed in public and political discourse. The Computational White House press Briefings (CompWHoB) corpus, a large resource developed as one of the main objectives of the present work, is used for the extraction of the press briefings including the lexical items under analysis. The metaphor recognition of the motion verbs is addressed employing unsupervised techniques which theoretical foundations primarily lie in the Distributional Hypothesis theory, i.e. word embeddings and topic models. Three algorithms are developed for the task, combining the Word2Vec and the Latent Dirichlet Allocation models, and based on two approaches representing their foundational theoretical framework. The first one is defined as "local" and leverages the syntactic relations of the verb of motion with its direct object for the detection of metaphoricity. The second one, termed as "global", drifts away from the use of the syntactic knowledge as feature of the system hence only using the information inferred from the discourse context. The three systems and their corresponding approaches are evaluated against 1220 instances of verbs of motion annotated by human judges according to their metaphoricity. Results show that the global approach performs poorly compared to the other two models also implementing the local approach, leading to the conclusion that a syntax-agnostic system is still far from reaching a significant performance. The evaluation of the local approach yields instead promising results, proving the importance of endowing the machine with syntactic knowledge as also confirmed by a qualitative analysis on the influence of the linguistic properties of metaphorical utterances

Law and economics united in diversity : minimalism, fairness, and consumer welfare in EU antitrust and consumer law

Defence date: 17 September 2018Examining Board: Professor Stefan Grundmann, European University Institute (Supervisor); Professor Miguel Poiares Maduro, European University Institute; Professor Daniel Markovits, Yale Law School; Professor Simon Deakin, University of CambridgeThis dissertation proposes a form of collaboration between legal and economic research called Minimalist Law-and-Economics. This approach acknowledges the core commitments of both disciplines and promotes a division of labour based on their comparative advantages. While lawyers expect an analysis that is grounded in legal reasons and respectful of the fairness and wrongfulness theses, economists expect efficient market relations, analysed from an ‘ex-ante’ perspective respectful of epistemological and normative minimalism. The collaboration proposed in this dissertation improves the lawyers’ understanding of market relations and thus enhances their ability to regulate them effectively. Conversely, economists can strengthen the empirical foundations of their research by considering legal reasons as evidence. This is attractive for value choices especially, since their justification is not central to economists’ expertise. To support Minimalist Law-and-Economics, this dissertation warrants three claims: 1) the economic claim holds that consumer welfare is a maxim and used in market efficiency analysis in alternative to total welfare; 2) the translation claim holds that with consumer welfare rather than total welfare as the maxim and, it is possible to offer a plausible economic account of fair market relations; and 3) the doctrinal claim holds that the efficiency hypothesis, which has consumer welfare as maxim and, explains the reasons given in EU antitrust and consumer law better than the traditional efficiency hypothesis based on total welfare. The dissertation is divided into three parts. Part I clarifies the conditions for collaboration considered by Minimalist Law-and-Economics. Part II builds the theory that warrants the economic and translation claims. To do this, it gives an account of market relations that are compatible with the fairness and wrongfulness theses and the ‘ex-ante’ perspective. Part III narrows the focus to EU antitrust and consumer law in order to warrant the doctrinal claim and to show how the analysis of legal reasons can be epistemologically and normatively minimalist. United in diversity, economic and legal research may well have a brighter future

Complementarity between Quantum and Classical Mechanics in Chemical Modeling. The H + HeH+ → H2+ + He Reaction: A Rigourous Test for Reaction Dynamics Methods

In this work we present a dynamical study of the H + HeH+ → H2+ + He reaction in a collision energy range from 0.1 meV to 10 eV, suitable to be used in applicative models. The paper extends and complements a recent work [ Phys. Chem. Chem. Phys. 2014, 16, 11662 ] devoted to the characterization of the reactivity from the ultracold regime up to the three-body dissociation breakup. In particular, the accuracy of the quasi-classical trajectory method below the three-body dissociation threshold has been assessed by a detailed comparison with previous calculations performed with different reaction dynamics methods, whereas the reliability of the results in the high energy range has been checked by a direct comparison with the available experimental data. Integral cross sections for several HeH+ roto-vibrational states have been analyzed and used to understand the extent of quantum effects in the reaction dynamics. By using the quasi-classical trajectory method and quantum mechanical close coupling data, respectively, in the high and low collision energy ranges, we obtain highly accurate thermal rate costants until 15 000 K including all (178) the roto-vibrational bound and quasi-bound states of HeH+. The role of the collision-induced dissociation is also discussed and explicitly calculated for the ground roto-vibrational state of HeH+

Industrial symbiosis: a sustainable approach for territorial development through the reuse of biomass

The worldwide demand of raw materials is facing an exponential increase since the economic boom registered in the second post-war scenario. The energy and the manufacturing industries are strictly dependent on the employment of non-renewable resources in the transformation and production processes, by contributing to the improvement of greenhouse gas emissions in the atmosphere and to the loss of natural capital. With the aim of increasing the environmental preservation in terms of biodiversity and raw materials access, this study contributes to examine the benefits of the circular economy approach for the promotion of industrial symbiosis practices, based on the horizontal collaboration and cooperation. According to this approach, the waste of one company can become secondary raw materials for other companies operating in the same or even in different sectors, by implementing territorial integration and networks in the industrial system