Rhine-Alpine News
30.11.2023
Sustainable Circular Economy Handbook released
Symbolic picture by Hermann on Pixabay
The ground-breaking manual “The Routledge Handbook of Catalysts for a Sustainable Circular Economy” paves the road for a faster transition to a sustainable circular economy by proposing the notion of catalysts as a positive and improving driving force for sustainability.
Catalysts establish and maintain favourable circumstances for complex systemic sustainability transition changes, and a debate and knowledge of catalysts is essential to transition from a linear economy to a sustainable and circular economy. A catalyst is an emerging method that can help to accelerate CE transformations. Change-instigating, facilitating, and materialising transition processes while generating impetus for sustainable CE are all elements, mechanisms, and factors that can be classified as catalysts. Catalysts begin, generate, and sustain favourable conditions for complex systemic change in the transition to sustainability.
This volume, which includes contributions from leading experts from around the world, presents theoretical insights, contextualised case studies, and participatory methodologies that identify various catalysts such as technology, innovation, business models, management and organisation, regulation, sustainability policy, product design, and culture.
The authors then demonstrate how these drivers promote sustainable transformations. As a unique service to the reader, the book pulls together public policy and private sector viewpoints to address the circular economy as a systemic shift.
The entire 643 page book can be downloaded free of charge from the link below under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.
Ports of Genoa’s “Perspectives” at Confindustria
Symbolic picture by Couch-und-co on Pixabay
The public assembly of Confindustria Genoa was held this year at the operations centre of Phase Control Motion, one of the industrial realities that has been able to take root in the Genoa area thanks in part to the synergy between AdSP, public institutions, and companies.
Extraordinary Commissioner Paolo Piacenza opened his speech by saying “”Perspectives, the title chosen as the leitmotif of the Assembly of Confindustria 2023, is also the vision that accompanies the work of the AdSP: to work on today in order to be ready to seize the opportunities of the future. And if we look at the horizon, the Genoa and Savona-Vado port system will increasingly become a strategic node for the traffic that, passing through the Mediterranean, feeds the Italian and European production fabric through the Genoa-Rotterdam logistics corridor. Already today, 25 percent of global maritime traffic passes through the Mediterranean and this percentage is destined to increase, also in view of the development of countries in Africa and Asia.”
Among the topics discussed at the Confindustria Public Assembly, in the presence of institutions and business representatives, were new forms of partnership, in the public interest, between industrial players, SMEs and public administration.
Source(in Italian):
https://www.portsofgenoa.com/it/news-archivio/4510-prospettive-ports-of-genoa-confindustria.html
Rotterdam: Solving Maasvlakte rail bottlenecks
Picture by Danny Cornelissen
To solve the rail bottlenecks in Maasvlakte, a variety of infrastructure projects to improve train access are planned for the period up to 2040.
These initiatives are being implemented in stages. To begin, the Port Authority is expanding rail capacity at the Maasvlakte rail yards. In conjunction with ProRail, they are building the first phase of the Maasvlakte-Zuid railway yard. This will provide a reliable hinterland rail freight connection that will be operational by mid-2027.
Construction of a new Maasvlakte-Zuid railway yard of up to four bundles of six tracks each suited for 740-metre trains; electrification of the distribution triangle and outer contour; alterations to the C2 bend; and two through tracks comprise the whole development.
Source: