Michela Gallo

Glass Packaging Design and Life Cycle Assessment: Deep Review and Guideline for Future Developments

The function of packaging is to keep a product unaltered from the producer to the consumer. Glass is one of the most extensively used materials for packaging, thanks to its skills and proprieties. The environmental burdens of this packaging material have been broadly studied, and several scientific papers on this topic are retrievable on literature. The aim of this work is to categorize and subdivide the existing scientific literature about glass packaging focusing to issues related to sustainability. Thus, the review and interpretation of Life Cycle Assessment literature was subdivided in different categories depending to the main goal. The main outcomes from the research studies are discussed. A recommendation list is presented as a bullet point with the aim of summarizing the general outcomes of the manuscripts under review and of giving advices for future development.

University campus waste prevention and reduction: A circular-economy approach

One of the most important challenges to improve sustainability is the management of climate change and the reduction of green house gas emissions. In 2014 the University of Genoa and the Ministry of the Environment signed an agreement to assess the Carbon foot-print of the university, in order to promote the mitigation of climate change and to study possible innovative solutions to reduce the environmental burdens. Following the agreement, the university want to implement a project for the sustainable management of waste within it. A circular economy methodology has been used to implement a project that will help in diminish the pollutants impacts deriving from the waste management recovering and recycling high quality materials. In cooperation with municipal local companies for the management of waste, the project foresees to implement studies and research in the field of guidelines, attitudes and behaviour of the population towards the recovery, recycling and reuse, pushing for a transition to a circular economic approach. Considered the lack of an accounting model and monitoring of waste products it has been decided to implement it. Waste produced by the university have been estimated and calculated through experiments and on field analyses and its GHG potential have been evaluated through a LCA methodology. The general outcome of this research shows that it is possible to create a circular economy model applicable to other universities and medium-sized communities, even if future development are presented in order to improve future investigation.